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It’s so soft.
There’s a liquid quality to the lightweight fabric, as if it were about to flow and slip through her fingers like the water at her favourite lakes in Lotus Pier. She wants to think the lilac and pink silks smell of Lotus Pier too, even though that’s not physically possible. They smelt of it one day, and that’s all that matters, though.
“Jin Ling?”
Jin Ling is sitting on the floor of the far-right corner of her rooms, knees to her chest, when she hears Lan Sizhui’s soft voice calling her name from the entrance. It snaps her out of her daze, where she has been sitting with her side against a solid beech wood chest for who knows how long.
“I’m in here! You can come in.”
Any other person who dared to enter her chambers like that would probably be arrested by the guards before even trying. Not Lan Sizhui, though.
“Jin-xiaojie, are you there?” And neither Lan Jingyi, as much as it pains her, especially when he goes around shouting like that.
“Shut up, you dimwit!” she retorts, already an instinctual answer to more than half of the words that Jingyi pronounces.
In the past few years, they have been visiting so often that the usual protocol of having an arrival announced to her only so they could come in to see her has become a hassle. By now, everyone in Koi Tower knows to allow the two Lans and Ouyang Zizhen free passage to her chambers, as well as to have their usual rooms ready for any of their impromptu visits. The only exception is whenever she is preoccupied by official sect matters or attending a meeting.
When she hears their steps coming closer, she rushes to stand up and put the robes back in the chest. She doesn’t want to risk hearing any of Jingyi’s teasing remarks. Jin Ling would eviscerate him on the spot if he were to mock her about this.
“What? You’d rather I’d call you guniang, instead?”
“Not when anyone can hear you!” she hisses, clenching her jaws while she concentrates on folding the robes and tries not to mourn the fact that she can’t touch them at all hours, the delicate sensation of the fabric helping to ground her the moment her fingers touch it. If she becomes the talk of all the jianghu, again, because of Jingyi she’ll kill him. Intersect relationships be damned.
“Come on, they all think it’s a joke! It’s not like everyone here hasn’t heard me calling you that a thous— Woah.”
The sound of their steps comes to a halt, and Jin Ling realises then that her friends were actually closer than she thought when she first heard them. She knows, without having to turn around, that they are now standing right behind her.
There is no way they haven’t seen the robes.
One of them is walking the few steps that sit between them. The soft thudding sound of his shoes on the floor tell her it’s Sizhui, as opposed to Jingyi’s more energetic gait. His voice feels balmy, like a warm embrace when he says, “Jin Ling, they’re beautiful.”
She opens her eyes as hesitant fingertips touch the back of her palm. She doesn’t remember closing them. Sizhui is standing close to her, but Jin Ling cannot look away from where she is clutching the wide sleeves of the lilac ru in her fists. When Sizhui’s hand envelopes hers, she releases her grip, not wanting to crease the fabric. Her chest feels tight when she turns her head to the right and sees the gentle, understanding look on Sizhui’s face.
He had looked at her like that after Jin Ling told the three of them in a night hunt that she liked it when Jingyi used feminine forms of address, even if she knew he did it to tease her. They had to pull the words out of her quivering mouth after she had broken down in a fit of tears that took all of them by surprise —Jin Ling included.
She had been frustrated by the fact and afraid of what it meant for so long. It made her angry. She didn’t understand why she liked it so much, why her stomach twisted and her heart thumped and her blood rushed as if she was doing something exciting that made her happy when she should be feeling irked about a slight meant to annoy. She had tried to ignore it every time, but something abruptly snapped that night and, somehow, they helped her figure it out in the same casual way that they had always put together clues for a night hunt.
Almost a year has passed since that night.
“Can I?” Sizhui’s other hand is hovering, not touching her or the fabric when she nods, jerkily.
She cannot bear to look at his face. His eyes make her feel like he’s seeing her whole, like she is bare for him to read plainly in the same way he would read any of his scrolls. That’s who Sizhui is, always the most perceptive among the lot of them. So her eyes land on the carvings on the small chest, tracing them as if they’re the most interesting thing in the room. They’re lotus flowers, floating on a lake that gradually transitions into a peony garden.
“Jin Ling, these robes—”
“They were my mother’s robes,” she mutters, voice barely louder than a whisper. For some reason, she feels like she’s about to cry again, just like that night. She doesn’t know whether it’s shame, anger, or sadness what’s curling in her stomach, making her feel like there is a stone made of lead where her core should sit at her lower dantian. She hopes they don’t dare to pity her. She knows Sizhui won’t. Not when his own family history is as convoluted. Still, that doesn’t quench the fear. “It’s a qixiong ruqun. It was in this trunk we found four years ago. There’s a long pibo too, so I guess it's from before the wedding.”
Jin Ling tries not to think about how the trunk was in her shushu’s chambers together with a letter addressed to her. It explained how the servants had found it inside a storage room in such a bad state that the woodworkers had needed months to restore it and make sure it would open without breaking or damaging its contents. At the end of it, Jin Guangyao had said he hoped this was a suitable gift for her fourteenth birthday, and for that reason, she waited weeks before opening it.
She had always thought that Suihua was the only thing she had left from her parents. Then the man who had indirectly been responsible for their deaths managed to dig this trunk out of Heavens know where and bring her closer to them through their possessions. This trunk is as much a token of her parents love for her as it is of Jin Guangyao’s.
Jin Ling knows that the world would like her to be more bothered about that fact. She should hate him. She hated him for some time and still does in certain occasions. Most of the time she just misses him, and resents the fact that he should be here, guiding her as she prepares to take over the sect.
From time to time, she keeps finding new gifts that Jin Guangyao had hid around Koi Tower for her to stumble upon in a continuation of that infinite treasure hunt they began playing when she was an upset child needing distraction from her growing pains.
“Hey, I’m sorry for being late.” Zizhen’s voice as he stalks into the room doesn’t startle them but succeeds in making the three of them turn around. Jin Ling is just thankful that nobody can see her misty eyes as it is. “The air currents were stronger than usual for a good portion of the flight, and I had to slow down so— What?” he asks mid-sentence when he notices everyone is staring at him like he has grown a second head. Which, from the tousled shape of his hair, he very well could have if one were to look at him from afar. It’s standing unnaturally still where it has risen into a tangled mess that protrudes from the left side at the back of his head. Surprisingly enough, his guan is the only thing standing where it should.
Jingyi is the first one to break, letting out a snort that’s unbecoming by any and all Lan standards. It immediately spurrs her and Sizhui into a fit of giggles that rapidly devolves into a full-fledge ugly cackle for her, and a bright chortle that Sizhui isn’t even trying to cover as he usually does. When Zizhen’s confused expression only serves to highlight the state of disarray of his hair and eyebrows, they start wheezing. Jin Ling didn’t know it was possible for eyebrows to look like a toddler had decided to play with the hairs and make them stick out in every direction except the one they are supposed to have. It’s a strikingly hilarious image and Jin Ling wishes she was as good with painting as Lan-da-shushu was so she could capture this in a sketch later for posterity.
“Can somebody tell me please what’s going on?” he wails.
“Just— just— Oh, Gods,” Jingyi pants, curling in on himself as he lays his hands on his knees for support. “Have you seen yourself in a mirror?” He’s wiping a tear from the corner of his eye when he manages to stand upright. Jin Ling and Sizhui are still working up to be able to breathe again and failing spectacularly when Zizhen flails his arms to the sides, half-yelling in befuddlement, “Why would I look in a mirror?!”
They make wordless gestures towards the bronze mirror that stands just to their right, indicating that he should go and see for himself. Their laughter is finally dying down when Zizhen makes a beeline to stand in front of it. That is, of course, until he screeches from the shock at his own reflection, hands reaching to try and tame his wayward hairs as he turns to look at them with his face red as a beet.
“Half of Koi Tower has seen me walking around like this!” He eyes Jingyi before turning his pleading look at Jin Ling. “How could nobody warn me?” he cries, and she can only shrug in answer, shaking her head in amusement. “My chances at marrying a good Jin girl are now forever lost! Now they will always remember me as the Baling Ouyang weird kid.”
Jingyi walks up to Zizhen as he’s getting out a jade comb and high quality hair oil from a qiankun pouch —like those are normal things to have around anywhere and at any given time instead of the standard wooden combs and miscellaneous oil that people bring with them to short trips— and pats him on the shoulder in mock consolation. He’s looking at their distressed friend on the mirror, poking him on the cheeks just to tease him for scrupulously oiling and brushing his hair.
Jin Ling can’t help huffing in disbelief at the sight. How come her sect is the only one faulted for being overconcerned with their looks? She turns to look at Sizhui hoping that he will agree with her on this, waving a hand in their direction in a wordless gesture that perfectly conveys what she thinks of the whole scenario. He only looks at her with smiley eyes and shrugs with one shoulder before Jingyi’s voice is drawing back their attention.
“Hey, don’t worry.” The impish tilt to Jingyi’s voice wars with the severe expression he’s sporting. She’s already bracing to hear whatever nonsense he’s about to spew. “It’s not as if there are any good Jin girls available for you to marry.”
“Watch it, Lan Jingyi!”
The punk has the gall of smirking, barely sparing her and her pointed finger a side-glance before shrugging. “Lying is prohibited, Jin-guniang.”
“I’m going to hit you so hard you’re going to regret having been born.”
“Yeah,” he snorts, “I’ll believe you when you can stand eye-level with me without being on your tippy toes.”
“Yeah, yeah, why don’t you children go play-fight on the other corner of the room?” Zizhen waves at them dismissively, tuning out their bickering and leaning further into the mirror as he tries to make his hair sit right. Something isn’t working with the strands and the guan, he notices, clicking his tongue against his teeth in annoyance. “Sizhui, please, come give me a hand. You’re better at this than I am.” After a quick glance to his friend, he has to double take, noticing for the first time the embroidered silk in his hands. “What’s with the ruqun? The embroidery is Yunmeng Jiang, right?” he asks, giving it a brief look before going back to look displeased at his own reflection.
Even though his tone was nonchalant and the light furrow in his brow revealed only mild curiosity, the air feels slightly heavier with the way that the other two halt their bickering. Zizhen scrunches his nose, giving up on taming his hair, and turns around to look at his friends. Jin Ling has gone all tense, he notices, and looks like she wants to disappear, which only helps to spike his curiosity. Jingyi is nervously looking between the three of them, and Sizhui’s eyes are now glinting with that excited spark he gets when an idea possesses him.
“Zhen-xiong, do your sisters still force you to carry rouge and hairpins around for them?”
He only needs to see the sunny smile in Sizhui’s face as he spares a brief glance in Jin Ling’s direction to understand what’s happening. If he opens his mouth in wondrous excitement when he connects the dots and hums a bit more cheerfully that one would expect, well. It’s not his fault that he wants to make his friend happy.
___________________________
“You swear you’re not making me look ridiculous?”
“Jin Ling,” Zizhen protests, drawing out the tones in her name without pausing the light padding motions of his fingertips on the outer corner of her under-eye. “Have some faith in your Zhen-ge, alright?”
She stares at him unimpressed, doing her best at channeling her most faithful impression of her jiujiu until he stops and moves his hand away from her face.
“I’m never calling you that,” she deadpans.
“Worth a try!” he shrugs, and she tries not to flinch when she feels the light touch of his finger under the other eye.
Her hands are fiddling with the inner fabric of the wide sleeves where they sit on her lap. They are longer and lighter than what she usually wears, used as she is to her arm braces that keep the typically long sleeves of Jin robes away. Jin Ling is sure she would make a fool of herself if she were to wear something like this in public or try something as simple as drink tea without flapping around in an uncoordinated manner.
She feels the air around her move when Sizhui lets his arms down where he is standing right behind her. The calm rise and fall of his chest with each breath and his presence have worked all along as a grounding reminder that she is safe when it’s just the four of them, that she has nothing to fear when she’s around them.
“I think I’m done with the hair. What do you think, Zizhen?”
Zizhen stands up from where he was kneeling in front of her and circles her, studying the way that Sizhui has parted her hair in two halves and put each one in a bun, three Jiang braids on each side going up from her temples. She can feel him carefully pinching and pulling at the strands. Letting them treat her like a doll is making her impatient and insecure. She has been dressing herself for more than a decade. All this feels ridiculous and unnecessary and she’s starting to regret having agreed to it.
“What are you doing?”
“Shh, I’m making them look bigger. Fluffier if you will,” he chirps. Zizhen tinkers around a bit more before he hums satisfied, “okay, that’s more like it.”
Back to his kneeling position in front of Jin Ling, he soaks a brush before dipping it in some rouge that he has mixed with water, while Sizhui starts threading on her hair some of the gold adornments that she usually wears.
She manages to stay still for the time that Zizhen spends dragging the brush against her lips, which admittedly isn’t too long. Yet, the fact that Jin Ling follows his instructions when he tells her to smack her lips against a cloth and lets him stare at her for some more should be commendable with how restless she is getting.
“How much longer do you need? I’m supposed to meet with Jiujiu in a bit and—"
“Hey, calm down!” he interrupts. “Perfection needs time. Let the artist work.”
“Zizhen,” she protests, drawing out his name in what she knows is a petulant tone unfit for a 17-year-old. She doesn’t care right now. “I don’t want to be late.”
“Alright, alright! You’re already beautiful anyway,” he mumbles, rolling his eyes as he turns to clean up. “It’s not as if there’s much work to do.”
“Now you’re just mocking me.”
“I’m not. Stand up,” he orders, getting up with a swift motion and a pat to her shoulder. Jin Ling obeys begrudgingly, watching Zizhen step back a few paces and give her a once-over. A big grin curves his lips when he crosses his arms in a smug gesture. “Yep. You could go out there right now and have poems written about your beauty in no time.”
She turns to where Sizhui is putting her comb and hair oil back from where she stores them, lips pursed and a disbelieving frown. “You’ll agree with me if I kick him out, right?”
Sizhui walks back to them, standing between her and Zizhen as he chuckles and shakes his head in amusement. Right then, looking between them, she feels a strong pang of affection in the chest that makes her a little bit breathless. It always takes her by surprise how much she loves her friends. (Yes, even Jingyi. The idiot is annoying most of the time, but she knows he will have her back when it matters the most, literally and figuratively. Pairing with him in night hunts is always exhilarating and there’s no one she loves to spar with more than him. Except her jiujiu, but that’s different. Jingyi is her equal. Jiujiu is… jiujiu.)
“He’s right, meimei,” Sizhui says after a moment of brief consideration, and then bumps shoulders with her when he emphasizes, “you are beautiful.”
She scoffs and ducks her head down in embarrassment. She hopes that the heat she’s feeling in her face goes unnoticed with the rouge. This isn’t the kind of attention she’s used to. They haven’t really changed the way that they treat her so far, except for- Well. Acknowledging that, for some reason, being a man doesn’t sit right with her. Meaning that besides swapping the words they use to address in private, they also taunt her with the occasional joke here and there about ladylike behavior and propriety. But that's all.
Jin Ling sighs, resigned to admit defeat. But then, her ears catch Jingyi clearing his throat. She turns to look at him where he has been sitting at the low table to their left, squinting her eyes in suspicion. “You.” Jingyi widens his eyes at the acknowledgment and then zeroes in on the finger that Jin Ling is pointing at him. “You have been awfully quiet all this time. Come on, spit it. I look dumb, right?”
Jingyi only shuts up like this when his thoughts are so loud that he cannot speak without blurting them out in his classical foot-in-mouth syndrome. So, Jin Ling immediately arrives to the conclusion that he’s trying to not be an insensitive jerk by telling her what he thinks.
She can see Zizhen rolling his eyes from the corner of her eyes, throwing his hands in the air before addressing Jingyi with an exasperated groan. “Tell her!”
“You look…”
There’s an audible clinking sound as he puts the ceramic tea bowl on the table that only serves to emphasize his hesitation. Jin Ling can track the way that Jingyi’s eyes move between different points of her face and robes— her cheeks, her hair, her sleeves, the big lotus emblem on her chest—, and she doesn’t bother to hide how unimpressed she is. There’s a light pink tint on his cheeks, probably from holding in his laughter or something. Did Sizhui cast the silencing spell on him to stop him from discouraging her with his jokes?
Getting fed up with his abrupt decision to be silent for once, she raises a brow at him and gestures impatiently with her head and hands for Jingyi to finish his sentence already. She can’t look so bad that even Jingyi is worrying about saying the right thing. Can she?
“You look good in purple,” he finally says before darting his gaze to the side.
“Yeah, right,” she huffs, face morphing into a scowl as she sighs. She tries to ignore the way that Jingyi clicks his tongue against his teeth behind his tea bowl, even if she can feel her eyebrow twitch in annoyance. This was a bad idea.
“Why don’t you turn around and see by yourself?” Sizhui says grabbing her by the shoulders as he motions her to turn around and face the mirror.
She’s huffing and rolling her eyes, but the second she sees her reflection, the sarcastic retort she was about to make dies on her lips. There she is, eyes wide-open and face softened by the rouge tactfully applied below her eyes and on the top of her cheeks.
It’s like there’s a stranger looking back at her and not her own reflection. She thought she would look like a caricature, a copy of what Wei Wuxian looked like right after waking up in Mo Xuanyu’s body (admittedly, the blood relation between them meant that she does bore a certain resemblance, and that will never stop being a weird aspect of her relationship with Wei-qianbei). Instead, she looks, good? Pretty? She doesn’t know.
She finds herself unable of putting together coherent sounds to make words because she doesn’t recognize herself, but simultaneously, she feels like this is how she was always supposed to look like. She can only describe this feeling like being relieved after a life of an itch that she couldn’t quite locate, making her mildly uncomfortable for as long as she could remember, and finally finding the cure to it after trying a bunch of different remedies. It’s like discovering she had never been able to breathe to the full capacity of her lungs and taking a deep breath for the first time in her life.
To be honest, Jin Ling never felt like there was anything wrong with her body or the way that she looked, which is why she never tried to change a thing about her appearance. It felt more like the problem was her as a whole. She always thought it had to do with being an orphan and with her having a hard time socializing. Always too harsh, too on the nose, too prickly, too demanding, too spoiled, too much. But a part of her hoped that it would get better with time. Xiao Shushu did told her once that it was normal for teenagers to feel weird as they grew into their new body, that developing a golden core wasn’t always comfortable or easy. And so, she tried to push that discomfort to the back of her head.
None of that matters now. She feels right. This feels right. More ‘right’ than anything she has ever done and the fact that it’s her mother’s robes that she’s wearing makes something in her chest constrict with emotions she can’t name. Jin Ling never thought she would live to have a moment where she would feel this close to her.
“Here,” says Zizhen as he drapes the thin silver pibo over her shoulders, voice soft with affection as their eyes meet.
The long, translucent silk that he is loosely twisting around her arms so the ends cascade down her forearms is the same shade of silver as the clarity bell that marks her a Jiang in the same manner the cinnabar dot that Sizhui is now painting between her brows marks her a Jin. She’s watching on the mirror the way that Zizhen grins at their friend as he steps back to look at their combined reflections. Jingyi has stopped sulking and is smiling at them as well, finally decided to get up and walk up to them.
“You look every bit the Sect Heir that you are, Jin-guniang.”
“Shut up.”
Her own voice sounds small to her, lacking in any of her usual heat when she tries to tell Jingyi off for his teasing remarks. She can’t believe that she is the young woman staring back at her on the mirror, it feels unreal, and now she finds herself wanting to look like this every day of her life. Jin Ling knows that she will never be able to thank her friends enough for pushing her to do this.
“A-Ling, the servants told me you were in here I—”
Jiujiu.
They were all too entranced in the moment to hear his footsteps in until it was too late. Jin Ling can feel her friends going as tense as she feels her own body doing in this instant, fearing for her jiujiu’s reaction when they hear him gasp and trail off. The few seconds that come to pass before Jiang Cheng speaks seem to stretch out for an eon, enough time for her throat to constrict and for her to fall short of breath. None of the dozens scenarios that her head concocted in those seconds could have prepared her for reality when she finally heard her jiujiu’s quiet, trembling voice.
“Jiejie?”
Lavender and silver silks, Jiang braids adorned with Jin gold, and a slight frame make for a sight that Jiang Cheng thought he would never get to see again. It feels like he is watching a ghost from his past, except it’s so real. He can smell the lotus perfume among the sparks amidst snow fragrance in the room and the image is so vivid that he forgets for the first time in years that his sister has been dead for almost two decades now.
The figure —this apparition that’s making his fingers twitch and his head spin— quivers the moment the name slips from his mouth, and this woman that looks so much like his sister but in no possible way can be her turns around, the clarity bell on her waist chiming to break the silence. If they were similar from behind, they are even more so now that Jiang Cheng can see her face. For a moment, he feels lost, on the verge of believing that this is another cruel prank that the universe is playing on him because it seems he will never be able to escape from his past. Then, he hears her speak.
“Jiujiu,” she calls him, eyes shining with unshed tears and trembling lips making his name an almost-whimper.
It’s almost comical how much it takes him to realize that it’s A-Ling wearing his jiejie’s robes and the traditional Jiang braids. He can’t stop staring open-mouthed at her because she truly is a vision. His body takes the decision for him of cutting short the space between and engulfing his neph—niece?— in his arms, pressing the side of her head against the outermost part of his shoulder to avoid ruining her makeup.
“You look exactly like her”, he mutters into her hair, carefully burying his face in it like he used to do during all those awful months where they only had each other. It helps him ignore the stray tears that fall down his own face, even though he knows his niece must be able to feel them.
Without the initial shock, and now that he’s up-close, the differences between A-Ling and his jiejie are noticeable. Her hair smells different. Sweeter. It lacks the citrus notes that jie used to favour. A-Ling’s shoulders are also a tad broader, and her frame doesn’t feel as frail as jiejie’s used to. Feeling the urge to have another look at her so that he can engrave this image of his niece, Jiang Cheng grabs her by the shoulders.
A-Ling is glowing. When was the last time they hugged?
The nose and the brows aren’t quite the same either, a fact emphasized by the red dot that sits between them. But the smile… The way that her lips curve up and her eyes crinkle, rounding her cheeks with the hiccupping half-sob-half-laugh that A-Ling lets out is all Jiang Yanli.
It has always been.
Jin Ling swears her heart is about to burst with emotion. When she felt her jiujiuu’s strong arms engulfing her like they hadn’t in years, she was already trying very hard not to cry because Zizhen had looked very proud of his work, and she would’ve hated to ruin it with her stupid emotions. She thought she had misheard him at first, after all, he had spoken so quietly. There is no way Jiujiu had thought he was seeing A-Niang instead of her. Now he’s saying that she looks like her. She really hopes the boys aren’t seeing this because she won’t hear the end of it if they see her cry one more time.
That though reminds her that the three people that were around her a moment ago have vanished. She finds them with their backs turned to them, practically at the door already. Her soft, wet laugh makes Jingyi look back with a curiosity that immediately turns into panic. Jiang Cheng has noticed them too, and by the look of it, he has decided that he needs to acknowledge them before they get out.
(Sandu Sengshou is scary, okay? Jingyi doesn’t want to risk what seeing him getting emotional can mean, and neither does Zizhen. Sizhui, the bastard, excels at looking prim and proper, even though they all know that he’s laughing at them behind that innocent smile. Traitor.)
Jin Ling uses this brief moment where her friends are too busy trying to look like the composed young sect heirs they are to discretely pat her tears away.
“You were all aware of this?” Jiang Cheng asks once he’s sure his voice won’t waver. He’s having difficulties looking away from A-Ling as he silently wonders, how? How didn’t he notice before?
“Yes, Jiang-zongzhu,” answers the Ouyang boy.
The trio have suddenly remembered their manners, finally bowing down to salute him properly. Thinking back just now of how nervous the four of them looked when he walked in a few moments ago, he lets it pass. Of course they knew, they’re all joined at the hip.
“And I gather you were all here encouraging my shengnu?”
The two Lan boys exchange a pointed look where they stand slightly behind Ouyang. Their faces brighten with his words, and their shoulders relax just enough to not be interpreted as rude. He has assumed right then. This is his niece.
“Yes, Jiang-zongzhu.”
"Thank you."
Jin Ling’s heart stops for an instant, only to start beating faster right after. Niece. Jiujiu had one look at her and he just knew. As easy as that. She knows that her jiujiu must be sending her friends off right now, but she doesn’t hear a word. Her mind is too busy reproducing on repeat her jiujiu’s last utterance. Shengnu. Shengnu. Shengnu. It sounds so incredibly good she wants to cry again.
Shit, this isn’t fair. Jingyi couldn’t be right all those times he called her a cry-baby. Clearly, this is foul play because she’s going through too many strong emotions all at once. Yes, it’s impossible for Jingyi to be right, illegal actually.
“Do you mean it?” she asks, and she hates how shaky her voice sounds.
“I thought I raised you to be able to form full sentences.”
Ah, there it is, all harsh words but no bite. That’s her jiujiu, raising an eyebrow at her. She won’t say a thing about the light red tinge around his eyes, Jin Ling thinks, feeling again that weird contraction-expansion sensation in her chest, as if it was trying to hold more air that it can possibly do. She won’t question his choice of words. She has always been bad at expressing emotions and the only reason she was able to explain this to her friends was Sizhui and Zizhen’s way with words. That’s not the case here, so she chooses to ask instead about the next best thing, taking a deep breath.
“Do I really look like A-Niang?”
The vulnerability in A-Ling’s face in the way that she worries her lip and furrows his brow makes Jiang Cheng think again of Jiang Yanli. The brow might be Jin but this gesture is hers, and he can’t believe he’s finding new traces of his sister in his niece’s mannerisms after seventeen years. New, because A-Ling has always been full of small quirks that reminded him of his jiejie, a fact that surprised him and made him incredibly sad for the first few years. There was no way that A-Ling could remember her mother making this exact same face that she’s doing right now, or the way that her mother looked when smiling with pure elation like she did before. Neither can she recognize Jiang Yanli’s eyes in the way that her own soften whenever Fairy cuddles up to her, nor that loud, unrestrained laugh that jie only let out at their antics when it was just the three of them in the way that A-Ling herself laughs gleefully when she’s at Lotus Pier.
For years, Jiang Cheng felt like he was deluded for seeing those similarities when all everyone could remark were the Jin traits, as if A-Ling wasn’t just as much a Jiang as she was a Jin. Seeing her like this, looking like Jiang Yanli’s spitting image, makes him the proudest he has ever been, because it means his jie can live on in somewhere other than his own memories. He needs to make sure that A-Ling knows she’s her mother’s daughter too.
“Come here,” he beckons her, hugging her in a firm embrace that isn’t as tight as the last one. That one was Jiang Cheng desperately grasping at the memory of his sister with all his strength. This one is him welcoming his niece.
Jin Ling can’t remember when the last time she got so many hugs in a row from her jiujiu was. It feels extraordinary, like something she needs to cherish. It also does wonders soothing her, helping her to calm down from the emotionally taxing trip that she has undergone in the last shichen.
“Of course you look like her, you’re her daughter,” he croons in an uncharacteristically mellow voice, laying his chin on the top of her head, and Jin Ling feels like crying once more. Jiang Cheng is making the most of this opportunity, knowing that A-Ling could still have yet another growth spurt that would make this kind of hug impossible in the future. “Lanling Jin already hogs you enough from us,” he scoffs, “it’s only fair you looked like a Jiang.”
Jiang Cheng can feel her body softly shaking with laughter for a short moment before she lifts head just so she can shake it. Pulling apart and stepping back, he hopes Jin Ling sees how proud of her he is. With his left arm still lingering around her shoulders, another realization dawns on him.
Jin Ling can’t help the brief sentiment of alarm that seizes her when she sees the way Jiujiu’s face turns serious all of a sudden. Is she about to get scolded for forgetting anything?
“You can't keep meeting them unchaperoned.”
“Jiujiu!”