Work Text:
Family.
Li Changge wasn’t the sort of person to assume that someone could be considered family just because they were related to you. After all, it was her uncle, Li Shimin, who she had sworn revenge on after the deaths of her father, mother, and brothers. That she had chosen a different path, of seeking peace and stability for the Tang rather than revenge against Li Shimin, had not been because he was her uncle but because she’d learned the importance of the common people’s livelihoods.
She’d come to the Uyghurs looking for her mother’s people, but she hadn’t expected to run into them in the way that she had. She hadn’t expected the family that her mother had never told her about to have been of such a high rank in their society. The thought rattled Changge.
She’d sworn not to become her mother, but the more time she’d spent away from her life in the palace, the more she’d realized she’d never truly understood her mother. Why should she have? Her frame of reference had been so different.
Things had seemed so clear to her, before all of this, when she’d first left Chang’an. Before she’d met Mimi. Before she’d lost her to betrayal. Changge had known who she was, and she’d known what her purpose was. She’d known what her duty to her family demanded of her. Now everything was far more complicated, even as her path had become more clear to her.
What she’d found in these strangers, these strangers that could be family, were people who loved and missed her mother as much as she did. People who knew things about her mother that she never could have guessed herself.
But even now as she speaks with her mother’s brother, listens to the stories of her mother’s mother, she keeps her own identity tight inside her and refuses to let it peak out. She is Qin Lili, the niece of a manager of a trade caravan. She is not the daughter of the woman she knew as Li Jin. She is not the daughter of the missing princess of the Uyghurs. She is not the Yongning Princess of the Tang Dynasty. She is not Li Changge, the young strategist serving under Ashina Sun.
She is just a girl who was never taught to embroider flowers like other young women, who had been too busy learning to fight instead. A girl who remembered a mother who had loved her dearly when she was young, but who wouldn’t look at her anymore when she was older.
She knew that it was a risk to spend so much time with the woman who must be her grandmother, to ask her questions and soak up the answers. The Elteber especially was incredibly suspicious of her to start with. Even if he wasn’t, she knew how suspicious it was that she’d been unable to keep from crying when her grandmother had spoken of her lost daughter. But for all of Changge’s strategies and calculations, she couldn’t help herself when it came to this. She had lost all of her objectivity the moment that the Elteber–her uncle–had reacted so strongly to the mole under her eye.
“It isn’t even your family’s affairs,” her grandmother had said to her, and she couldn’t even correct her.
Was this the kind of feeling that had driven Ashina Sun to seek out the truth of his identity among the Khitan? She couldn’t ask him, and even if she could, she wasn’t sure that she’d be able to put the feeling into words.
But for the time being, she’d keep her thoughts within her, and she’d make the most of the time she had with her grandmother, doing her best to get thread to turn into flowers. She didn’t know how long she’d have the opportunity before the next upheaval in her life.