Chapter Text
Wei Wuxian's house came to town, and settled by the sea.
As the house sat down on the cliffs near the beach, the question once again crossed his mind: "Will I stay this time?"
The question wasn’t unreasonable; he had left the last four places he’d been hoping to stay.
With no immediate answer available, he set himself to righting the many and varied items which toppled over during his travels.
The trick with being a refuge for lost creatures revolved around going where he was needed. In Qishan, Moling, and Baling, no matter how many hopeful nonhuman wanderers inevitably showed up at his door, they always eventually moved on. And, once the last of them left, so did his house. Ultimately, the house decided where they went, their one permanent resident carrying them to wherever they were meant to be, and each time he caught himself wondering if this was the place he was finally meant to settle.
He said as much to his sister when he called her to let her know the house had set down. It’d been a long haul this time; two full weeks of the sway of the home around him as they traipsed across the countryside.
"It took A-Xuan and I years to settle," Jiejie reminded him. He imagined her sitting in the overstuffed chair in A-Ling's room, her son colouring a picture at his desk as she cradled the phone to her ear. "Remember? Jin Ling was already walking by the time it stopped."
"Did you know?" he asked, his phone set on speaker as he salvaged what he could from his cupboards. He called her regularly for consultation, consolation, cooking tips and, occasionally, help with magic. Jiejie had started her magical education much later than he had, and her resulting collection of knowledge was eclectic and impossible to predict.
"That we were staying? No. But the house knew, A-Xian. The house always knows."
Eventually she had to say goodbye, A-Ling muttering a begrudging goodbye to Wei Wuxian’s cooing delight.
He spent the first day organizing the house; there were innumerable boxes to unpack, and everything he hadn't secured properly needed to be carefully put back in place. He straightened furniture and re-hung his eclectic collection of posters and paintings, and replaced all the books on the oversized shelves which cluttered every room. He returned numerous knickknacks to their rightful places and made sure his laptop was plugged in.
The problem with living in a moving house, of course, tended to be that unless you took extreme precautions things inevitably went astray in transit. He was still trying to find his favourite book, which had vanished in the move from Moling to Baling. Wei Wuxian felt fairly confident it had slid down behind the heavy armoire in the main sitting room, but didn't have the energy or motivation enough to try and shove it around by himself.
This time, the kitchen scissors had disappeared from his knife block.
Wei Wuxian spent longer than he should have rummaging through drawers and checking the nooks and crannies of his kitchen trying to find them, cursing silently under his breath every few minutes when a promising idea ended up coming to nothing.
He'd just wrestled the microwave away from the wall when a low chirp drew his attention to the window. An angry-looking frogmouth perched on his window box, glaring inside.
"I’m not ready yet," he said.
The little asshole's glare intensified and it pecked pointedly at the windowpane.
Wei Wuxian stared back, unimpressed. "If I let you in, I’ll need to let everyone in."
The bird drooped resentfully and shifted a bit to put a broken left wing on display. All at once, it went from angry to pitiful. Wei Wuxian sighed.
"Don't tell anyone," he insisted.
The bird offered no promises.
He broke the seal guarding the window and opened it just wide enough to let the bird hop through. It earned him a hard peck to his fingers and he flicked the frogmouth between the eyes in recompense.
The bird sat still as Wei Wuxian retrieved a sheaf of talisman paper, probably the one thing that he could reliably find anywhere in the house because he kept stacks of it in every room. He nipped his finger and used a few small drops of blood to draw a complicated design, a sense of rightness easing through his bones as he did. Despite the exhaustion of the move, he found himself grinning. Once he completed the talisman, he cupped his hands in the air above it and summoned the characters off the page before pressing his palms against the frogmouth's injured wing. The birk squawked in irritation and pecked his nearby thumb, but not hard enough to draw blood.
Black coiled up from his fingers, and the whole world took on the slightest tinge of red, as it always did when he channelled resentful energy through his spiritual pathways. Nie Huaisang, his oldest, dearest and flakiest friend, once described his eyes as "fucking creepy, what are you doing, put those away" before swatting at him with a fan and stalking off.
By the time the red faded from his vision, the bird's wing was fully healed, and it hopped around in place, eager to go.
"Tomorrow," he reminded it again. He shooed it out the window, earning himself another hard snap of beak.
He stuck the injured digit in his mouth and reset the protections around the window. Usually, such a small bit of magic didn't phase him, but when combined with the effort sucked up by the move the blood in his veins seemed to have been turned to concrete, and his eyelids weren't much better off.
Eventually, he passed out on the kitchen floor, a dustpan in hand.
He woke up the next morning with an ache in his back, and the promise he’d spoken the day before hanging in the air around him. He felt better after a full night’s sleep, despite the dubious comforts of ceramic tile, and he hopped up to go and retrieve The Sign; the one piece of his house he never feared being lost or damaged during the move. From the moment he’d painted the words, magic had suffused itself into the very grain of the wood. He could throw it from the balcony and watch it bounce off the cliffs below and into the surf, and he’d still find it unharmed at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for him.
He hefted it into his arms and hung it from the hooks outside the front door, clapping his hands and smiling once it settled into its proper place.
The whole house relaxed around him, as though relieved to have a purpose once more.
With The Sign up, a sense of deep satisfaction settled in Wei Wuxian’s bones. He made himself breakfast. He slurped back an enormous amount of coffee. He finished the basic tidying up.
And he waited.
He didn't have to wait long.
There was not a single thing connecting the giant brass bell above the door to the doorbells on the other side, but it obligingly clanged nonetheless when someone wanted to come in. The right sort of someone, anyway. It always remained tellingly quiet whenever the wrong type of someone came calling.
This time, it jangled loud and clear enough to be heard throughout the house. In Baling, he’d waited over a week between when he put up The Sign and his first guest arrived. He felt surprisingly optimistic that the sudden arrival so soon after the house settled meant good things.
A massive alligator crawled through the door, a dozen or so hatchlings perched in her open mouth, all of them pewing like a laser for attention.
“Welcome,” Wei Wuxian said. He bowed.
The alligator tilted her head in acknowledgement and Wei Wuxian knelt down in front of his new guest. Some creatures could talk, which made communicating their needs infinitely easier. In most circumstances, though, Wei Wuxian was left to discern their needs through his own power.
“May I?” he asked.
The alligator hissed permissively. He pressed two fingers to the top of her snout. She needed somewhere for her and her hatchlings to brumate through the winter and her burrow—a magnificent space she’d painstakingly carved out for herself in a nearby riverbank—had been filled in by an angry farmer looking to expand his fields right to the edge of the river. It was too late in the season for her to construct a new home.
“Follow me,” he said. “I’ll fill up the downstairs bathtub.”
Once the alligator was settled, and the house had adjusted the downstairs bathroom to provide the perfect environment for her to rest, Wei Wuxian headed to his crafting room.
Only a few minutes later, he tacked his creation to the bathroom door: Do Not Open Until Spring.
It felt promising; the alligator wouldn’t have been able to find him if the house planned to leave before her brumation was completed. He never brought any creatures with him; in fact, he always took it as a sign the house was about to leave when the last of his occupants walked, crawled, slithered or flew out the front door.
He had a good feeling about this place. The house felt steadier than it usually did after a long-distance move, tucked deep into the ground for its own well-deserved rest. Wei Wuxian would hop down to check on the foundation later. He didn’t know what would happen to it if the house decided to settle; he’d never spent long enough imagining such a thing to begin to speculate.