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The spirit is angry. It’s not an anger that Lan Wangji usually sees, powerful and expanding even when lesser spirits would have already diminished to nothing under the sound of his guqin, been laid to rest under the whistle of Wei Ying’s flute. They’ve been fighting here for so long that Lan Wangji feels out of time. And still this anger builds on itself despite their efforts, until the spirit is screeching in a towering fury that makes the sound of Wei Ying’s flute stutter, just a little.

It wasn’t even supposed to be this difficult. It wasn’t really supposed to be anything at all. Lan Wangji had simply wanted to— escape, for a time. He had been able to feel Wei Ying’s energy getting a little too much to be contained by the quiet stillness of the Cloud Recesses. So he had arranged for his work to be covered for a couple of weeks and said, “Let’s leave, for a while,” and watched Wei Ying’s smile light up his face.

They’d heard talk of a restless spirit while they ate in an inn in a small town a few miles into Qinghe. A spirit haunting a forest nearby, one that sounded like a screaming child, according to the waiter that Wei Ying charmed into talking to them. It was not, the waiter said, the sort of scream that could ever be mistaken for a living being’s. Chilling to hear, it sent most people stumbling right back out of the forest.

So, naturally, they had found the forest in question and when the screaming started, they had followed the sound of it. It was true that the sound could not be mistaken simply for a lost babe in the woods, but Lan Wangji could still hear the humanity in it, the distress. It had, indeed, once been a child, living and breathing. Such spirits never failed to chill Lan Wangji to see, though the edges of it had been indistinct, as if it was already losing grip of whatever was keeping it here. It had stopped crying when it saw them and lost shape a little more. Lan Wangji had strummed the first notes to send it to rest, and the spirit had erupted at them in a fury so large it was utterly unexpected. And they’d had not a moment to pause since.

There are words in the spirit’s incessant screaming, in amongst the incoherent noise, but Lan Wangji can’t make them out. It puts Lan Wangji so in mind of Sizhui during one of his extremely rare fits that it’s almost painful.

Wei Ying is muttering something, too quiet for Lan Wangji to hear, and then he steps forward, lifting his flute back to his mouth. The sound is different now; when it plays, the writhing black spirits that always accompany it don’t appear. Instead, Lan Wangji recognises the sound as that of a lullaby, something he hasn’t heard in a long time.

The spirit seems to like that even less than the normal playing. The shriek it lets out almost sends Lan Wangji back a step, wincing with the sudden pain in his ears. Then it rushes at Wei Ying, in a mass of writhing grey-white.

“Wei Ying,” he shouts, and reaches out to pull Wei Ying out of the way, but he’s too slow. He sees the look of wide-eyed shock on Wei Ying’s face before the spirit crashes into him. Dirt explodes around them, and Lan Wangji finds himself thrown backwards, landing heavily against one of the trees ringing the clearing, hard enough to knock all the air from his lungs. He manages to keep his feet somehow, but it takes a long moment to blink the dust and soil from his eyes. The panic in those moments, when he doesn’t know what is coming, when he cannot see Wei Ying, is near overwhelming.

The dust settles. The spirit, when he can see again, is nowhere to be found. Neither is Wei Ying, and Lan Wangji’s heart lurches, a desperate thought of no no not again clattering through his mind before he registers the small lump of familiar black and red clothing on the ground, shifting like there’s something trapped beneath.

He stumbles forward, pulls the clothing aside, and finds himself looking at a very small child. Black hair down to the shoulders, big brown eyes, and a general air of scrawny underfedness. The child sits on the ground puddled in Wei Ying’s clothing, the robes falling off his tiny narrow shoulders. He looks very fragile but also not at all like Mo Xuanyu. No, Lan Wangji realises, that nose is entirely Wei Ying — the original Wei Ying.

The child looks up at Lan Wangji, who stares back at him entirely at a loss. He has never heard of a creature or spirit that could do something like this. There’s also just a part of him that is screaming, non-stop, deep down inside him, because Wei Ying really has gone, again, and now there’s just a naked child in his place.

The sinking horror inside him almost sends him to his knees. Some of that might show on his face because the child suddenly bursts into tears. For a moment, Lan Wangji flashes back to Yiling, another child sitting at his feet, crying hysterically. But then this child raises up his arms, reaching for Lan Wangji, hands grasping over and over at the air. In a second, Lan Wangji scoops him up, holding him in his arms. The child settles somewhat but he’s shivering; it’s cool tonight, a leftover from the winter just passed.

He pulls the child inside his outer robe, holding him against the warmth of his body. He can feel every one of the ribs through the pale skin. The child sniffles, pressing his face against Lan Wangji’s chest, resting there, and then goes quiet.

Lan Wangji stokes the child’s hair gently. The clearing is a churned up mess of soil and leaves now, and he can feel absolutely no indication that the spirit they had been fighting remains. Perhaps with this final curse it has passed on. Chenqing lays on the ground not far from them, covered in dirt at this point. He’s never been afraid of the flute but right now he doesn’t want to touch it. It takes a long minute, and the sensation of the child shivering against him one more time, before he scoops Chenqing up, tucks it into his sleeve, and then turns to leave the clearing.

——

He arrives back at the Cloud Recesses midway early the following afternoon. He flew through the night, the sleeping child tucked carefully against him. He stopped only once, to feed the child after the sun rose, and then started flying again. By the time he climbs the stairs to the Cloud Recesses, exhaustion dogs his bones and the child is getting a little fussy.

He requests to meet with his uncle almost as soon as he arrives, and the request is granted after a long enough delay to not seem rude, but long enough to reaffirm his uncle’s disagreement with the choices Lan Wangji has made in his life. At this point, Lan Wangji is used to it, and besides, this gives him time enough to dig out an old pair of Sizhui’s robes to clad the child in. They are a little big — the child really is a slip of a thing — but they will do. At least he is clothed, although he wasn’t happy about the process of it. Now that they’re inside, where it’s warm, the child does not want to wear any clothing. But public nudity is forbidden in the Cloud Recesses.

When the acknowledgement from his uncle arrives, Lan Wangji picks up the whining child and tucks him back inside his robes. The child goes quiet again, resting his head on Lan Wangji’s shoulder. He brings a thumb up to his mouth and starts to suck on it, a bad habit that Lan Wangji had not known Wei Ying had as a child.

His uncle waits for him in his private chamber, sitting at a table arrayed with a formal tea set. His uncle always does this now, arranges for the most traditional things in the family to greet Lan Wangji when he arrives, as if he wants to remind Lan Wangji of things his uncle fears he is forgetting — once, when his uncle was angry, he said that Lan Wangji was spitting in the face of tradition. But that had been a while ago. Now his uncle contents himself with shows of passive-aggression like this.

Lan Xichen is also there, sitting at the table, and when Lan Wangji walks in and sets the child down, both of them stare at him in utter shock. “Who is this?” Lan Xichen says, giving the child a small, welcoming smile. It is a very small smile, but it is something, after months of nothing.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says. The child starts, as if surprised to hear his own name. He has clung to Lan Wangji without question, seems to trust him inherently, but Lan Wangji would be surprised himself if the child used Lan Wangji’s name in turn; he would be surprised if the child knew who Lan Wangji was at all.

His uncle scowls, but Lan Xichen looks bemused. “What about Wei Wuxian,” he asks, looking around Lan Wangji as if expecting to see Wei Ying hovering.

Lan Wangji puts a hand against the child’s hair. “This,” he says, “is Wei Ying.”

His uncle looks down at the child and says, after several long moments of silence, “Wangji. No.”

Beside him, Lan Xichen looks like someone just knocked him over the head. The child, his robes somehow already in disarray, clutches at Lan Wangji’s leg, partially hiding his face against his thigh. Lan Wangji keeps his hand against his hair and says absolutely nothing more.

“Wangji,” his uncle says again. Lan Wangji looks back at him with blank passivity. If his uncle insists, then Lan Wangji will take the child and leave the Cloud Recesses and figure this out however he can, but the chances of that happening are slim to none. His uncle, for all his failings, loves children. It’s merely a case of waiting for that love to overpower his sheer disdain for Wei Ying.

“Wangji,” says Lan Xichen gently, encouragingly. “Why don’t you explain what happened?”

Lan Wangji tries his best. He doesn’t really understand what happened himself, and he’s never been very good with words. He’s become used to, over the past few months, letting Wei Ying explain things, nodding or agreeing whenever Wei Ying checks in on him. It’s a — pleasure, to watch Wei Ying’s smile whenever he says something that Lan Wangji agrees with, to have his extensive knowledge of the cultivation world reflected back by someone just as knowledgeable. But now Wei Ying stands by his side with his face against his thigh and even Lan Xichen, who usually understands what Lan Wangji is saying, looks confused by the statement of, “A spirit turned him into a child.”

“A spirit,” Lan Xichen says slowly, “turned Wei Wuxian into a child.”

“A very angry spirit,” Lan Wangji says. “It was also a child.” He knows it doesn’t help but it’s the only additional information that he has to give.

Lan Xichen looks gobsmacked. “Wangji, what on earth, how did this happen?”

“We were night hunting,” Lan Wangji says. “Something went— wrong. I’m not sure what happened, but after, Wei Ying was like— this.”

His uncle, to his credit, looks confused but also highly curious, stroking his beard as he peers at the child still clinging to Lan Wangji’s thigh. “That doesn’t seem possible,” he says. Lan Wangji waves a hand above the child’s head as if to say, that’s what happened, though. “I’ve never heard of anything like this,” he adds.

Something inside of Lan Wangji sinks at that. His relationship with his uncle is decidedly dysfunctional at this point, and was well before Wei Ying returned from the dead, but growing up with his uncle, believing wholeheartedly for his entire childhood that his uncle was the fount of all knowledge and principles, leaves its mark. He had hoped that his uncle would have heard of this, would know immediately how to fix it. Hearing that he does not is—

Lan Wangji looks desperately at his brother, who also shakes his head. “Wangji,” he says gently. “I also have never heard of this kind of thing happening. It is possible that some of the other sects have the knowledge but—”

He trails off. The end of the sentence could cover many things but the most likely endings are: one, most of the other sects don’t possess a library like the Lan library, so it’s unlikely they have anything so obscure, and two, most of the other sects would not want to help Lan Wangji fix Wei Ying. Most of them would probably prefer he remain a child if they were ever to find out.

“He cannot stay like this,” he says, looking at his uncle, who makes an expression like he mildly disagrees. Lan Xichen, however, nods decisively, looking, for a moment, like the Lan sect leader that he hasn’t been up to being the past year.

“You’re right, he can’t,” Lan Xichen says. “We’ll look into it, Wangji.”

——

The Jingshi is not the best place for a child, which Lan Wangji has always known; it’s why Sizhui always stayed in the disciple quarters even as a child, even after Lan Wangji was capable of looking after him. But he can’t bear to let this child out of his sight for a second, doesn’t want him running off and getting into who-knows-what kind of danger. He has no doubt that the child will get into danger: this is still Wei Ying, after all.

So he takes the child back to the Jingshi, for nothing better to do, and on the way catches a passing servant and asks them to bring some food over. “Rice and soup,” he says, “something good for a child.”

The servant looks at the child with confusion and then back at Lan Wangji. No doubt she’s dying to ask where the child came from, but such things aren’t allowed in the Cloud Recesses, so she just nods her head and scurries off. Gossip is also forbidden in the Cloud Recesses but Lan Wangji has no doubt that knowledge of the child will be all over by nightfall.

When they get back to the Jingshi, the sun is high in the sky and the rooms are bright with light. The child was here earlier but didn’t get to see much and when Lan Wangji sets him down in the middle of the main room, he looks around curiously. Lan Wangji is very aware, of all a sudden, of all the precious, highly-breakable objects in this room.

He casts an eye across the vases and pretty trinkets that he will have to move out of reach of curious fingers. When he looks back down the child has his thumb in his mouth. Very gently, Lan Wangji removes it. “Do not,” he says. “It is dirty.”

The child looks carefully at his hand, turning it this way and that. “No, clean!” he insists and tries to continue sucking his thumb. Lan Wangji takes hold of it, and then picks the child up to carry him to the corner where a pitcher of water sits by a bowl and towel, for washing hands and faces. He washes the child’s hands, with great care because they are, somehow, sticky, and by the time he is finished, the servant has arrived with the food he requested.

She doesn’t stare openly but she definitely goggles at the child a little bit as she sets the food down on the table. When she looks up and catches Lan Wangji’s eye, she blushes to the roots of her hair, mumbles Hanguang-jun, and almost runs out of there. Lan Wangji watches her go, wondering, not for the first time, why the servants are quite this scared of him.

The door has barely shut behind her when there is another knock against it. Lan Wangji sits the child at the table and goes to open the door. Standing outside are Sizhui and Lan Jingyi, which is no surprise. They’ve clearly heard about the child because as Sizhui says, “Hello,” politely, Lan Jingyi peers unabashedly over his shoulder. “We heard you were back and came to give greetings.”

Lying is not allowed in the Cloud Recesses, Lan Wangji does not say, and instead just motions for them to come in. The child, sitting cross-legged on the floor, looks up at the newcomers and waves the spoon he is already clutching in one hand.

“Hello!” he says.

Neither Sizhui nor Lan Jingyi seem surprised to see the child, which further proves Lan Wangji’s suspicion that they knew about him already, but they do look extremely baffled. “Hello,” says Sizhui, ever well-mannered.

Lan Wangji sits down at the table and uncovers the food and pushes it gently towards the child. He needs no more encouragement; he starts eating with gusto, clearly hungry, although he hadn’t complained about it.

Sizhui looks at the child, then back at Lan Wangji’s face. He is very obviously choosing to ask the easier question when he asks, “Where is Senior Wei, he did not return with you?”

It’s not unusual for Lan Wangji to return to the Cloud Recesses by himself. Sometimes, after night hunts, Wei Ying chooses to wander for an extra day or so; sometimes he makes the journey to Lanling to, in his words, “find out how my darling nephew is doing.” But this, Lan Wangji has always suspected, is just an excuse to annoy Jin Ling. So Lan Wangji sometimes comes back alone because he has classes to teach or some function of his brother’s to perform while his brother is slowly coming out of seclusion.

But that is not the case here and so he shakes his head. “Wei Ying did return with me,” he says, and motions to the child.

Everyone looks at the child, who doesn’t notice the new attention and continues to spoon rice into his face with singular focus. It’s not a huge surprise that he’s a messy eater, Wei Ying has never been particularly neat, but the amount of rice on the table and on his clothes is… impressive.

Sizhui chews the inside of his mouth for a moment, a nervous habit left over from childhood that Lan Qiren had once told Lan Wangji to discourage and Lan Wangji had from that point on willfully ignored. “Is this child an orphan?” Sizhui asks. “Did Hanguang-jun find him somewhere?”

It really was too much to hope that he wouldn’t have to explain further, he supposes. Lan Wangji takes a moment to think of how to put it, after the disaster that was his meeting with his brother and uncle. But there’s really no explanation that makes any sense, and besides, Sizhui usually accepts most of what Lan Wangji tells him without really prying further. He has always been a good child like that. “An accident occurred while we were night-hunting,” he says. “This is the aftermath. Wei Ying was— turned into this.”

He motions to the child again. There’s a long stretch of silence. Sizhui looks between them, a small frown on his face. Lan Jingyi looks very confused, standing with his chin hooked over Sizhui’s shoulder so he can watch the child eat. “Are you saying that Senior Wei was— turned into a child?” Sizhui eventually says. The tone of his voice suggests that he thinks that someone somewhere is playing a joke but he would never suspect Lan Wangji of it.

Lan Wangji nods. Sizhui’s face pulls an expression that seems entirely involuntary, like he’s just bitten into a lemon that wasn’t as bitter as he expected; surprised, but more confused than anything else.

“You’re kidding me,” Lan Jingyi says.

“May I ask what happened?” Sizhui asks. “How did Senior Wei become like this?”

“We do not know,” Lan Wangji says. “An accident.”

Sizhui looks at the child and then back at Lan Wangji. “Poor Senior Wei,” he murmurs, but there’s something in his eyes which suggests that wasn’t quite what he wanted to say.

“You can’t call him Senior Wei,” Lan Jingyi says, folding cross-legged at the side of the table, apparently not caring that Lan Wangji has not invited him to sit. “He’s like, two or three now. He’s just a baby.”

“Then what are we supposed to call him?” Sizhui asks. He glances at Lan Wangji and then also sits, hands hovering like he wants to help the child eat, or even just clean some of the rice up.

“A-Ying,” Lan Wangji says quietly. The child looks up at the call of his name, reacting instinctively. Lan Wangji reaches across and gently wipes his face with a sleeve.

Sizhui and Lan Jingyi exchange glances that Lan Wangji very magnanimously chooses to ignore.

——

Lan Wangji knows how to look after a child. He did it for several years and was, against all odds, good at it. Sizhui is, everyone agrees, one of the best cultivators of his generation, someone even Lan Qiren had not, until recently, been able to take offence at. Since Wei Ying returned, and with him both Wen Qionglin and Sizhui’s memories of his past, Sizhui has been punished more than he had been the rest of his entire life. Lan Wangji doesn’t step in the way of the punishments — a rule broken is still a rule broken — but he sees it in Sizhui’s eyes, what he had taken so many years to learn: there are some rules that must be broken in order to live a life that is right, that is true to the soul.

Lan Wangji remains unsure of how much his parenting skills actually played a part in Sizhui’s being the kind of good, honest, kind person he is today, and how much of that was just A-Yuan, but the fact remains that he had some kind of effect and it was probably for good. His brother has always praised him as a parent, and Wei Ying had said more than once that Lan Wangji had done a good job with their son. So he knows something at least.

A-Ying is not Sizhui. He is younger, smaller, messier. He eats his food and waves goodbye to Sizhui and Lan Jingyi when they leave and then he sits and looks at Lan Wangji with an expectant expression. “Gege,” he says after a long silence. “Who are you?”

Lan Wangji’s stomach settles somewhere around his ankles. He’d suspected that the child didn’t know who he actually was, but the confirmation doesn’t feel good. He’s also not sure what to think of the fact that A-Ying just— let Lan Wangji cart him around without question. He’s not sure if it’s a case of Wei Ying instinctively trusting Lan Wangji no matter what, or if this is just a case of him being particularly trusting as a child. He’d listened to Wei Ying’s explanation of his being adopted by Jiang Fengmian and had never said it but certainly had had the thought of: you just went home with the first person who knew your name?

“I’m Lan Wangji,” says Lan Wangji. His mouth adds, “You can call me Zhan-gege,” in a moment of complete disconnect from his brain.

A-Ying nods, smiling all over his small face. “Zhan-gege!”

“Do you know who you are?” Lan Wangji asks in a very soft voice.

A-Ying nods. “Zhan-gege said,” he says. “I’m A-Ying.”

“Do you know how old you are?” Lan Wangji asks. It doesn’t particularly matter, and he isn’t even really curious, but he knows it’s a question others will have. People care about that kind of thing.

A-Ying thinks about it for a long second, then holds up two fingers, and says, “Three!”

Lan Wangji nods. Probably three, judging by the size of him. He looks at the child sitting opposite him, at the rice covering the table, the white robes already stained with food and, somehow, dirt. He’s so small. “You’re going to stay with me,” he says, very careful to keep his tone soft and reassuring and not like how he feels, which is extremely out of his depth. “For a while. Would you like that?”

A-Ying waves both hands into the air. “I like it!” he shouts.

——

Lan Xichen opens the door to the Hanshi and looks very surprised to see Lan Wangji standing there. A-Ying, clutching Lan Wangji’s hand, rocks back and forth on his heels. Already Lan Wangji is seeing just how much Wei Ying is in the child: he doesn’t like to be still, although he will make an effort if needed to. “Good morning,” Lan Xichen says, smiling first at Lan Wangji and then A-Ying.

“Good morning!” says A-Ying, waving one little hand.

Lan Xichen looks at Lan Wangji. “Would you like to come in?”

Lan Wangji nods tiredly. It has been a very trying morning; A-Ying, it turns out, does not like getting up early and seems to truly detest clothing. It had been a struggle of wills to get him to dress in the still slightly-too-large Lan robes that Lan Wangji had found for him. Lan Wangji had won probably simply because A-Ying got hungry and lost interest in the fight. By the end of breakfast, Lan Wangji had been tired like he hasn’t been in years, so he had done the only thing that could make him feel better in the absence of Wei Ying: he had gone to see his brother.

Lan Xichen had been reading at his desk, the book still open against the surface. A-Ying holds onto Lan Wangji’s hand as he looks around, taking in the quiet, unassuming environment. The Hanshi is peaceful like the Jingshi is — although the Jingshi has been slightly less peaceful in the last year, after Wei Ying moved in — but there was something stale about it, born from his brother’s long months of seclusion. He’s only been out of it for a month or so and the feeling lingers, the sense of something left to waste away in the corners.

Lan Xichen sits at his desk and Lan Wangji sits opposite him. A-Ying, with no apparent thought about it, sits himself in Lan Wangji’s lap. Lan Xichen doesn’t even blink, he simply begins pouring tea for the two of them. “He didn’t turn back,” he says, an observation rather than a question.

“No,” says Lan Wangji. It had been too much to hope, after all.

“Well then,” Lan Xichen says, “we shall figure it out,” in a tone that Lan Wangji hasn’t heard from him in a long time. The voice of someone who is trying to make a situation better through sheer force of belief. He heard it a lot in the initial months after Wei Ying died. It hurts more than he can express to hear it again now.

Lan Wangji nods once, shortly, and takes his tea. There’s a long silence, not unusual between the two of them, but today it feels tense. He takes one eventual sip of his tea and then Lan Xichen says, “How are you?”

Lan Wangji lifts one shoulder and then drops it. His uncle would go into qi deviation to see him make such a motion but his brother just smiles. “I imagine so. I know this cannot be easy for you, Wangji. But you do have me, and Uncle. And I’m sure Sizhui will be happy to help you if you ask.”

The problem, Lan Wangji reflects, is not that he lacks for available babysitters, but the fact that he needs babysitters in the first place. He does not particularly want to let A-Ying out of his sight— he knows he could leave A-Ying with his brother right now and go and do his sect business, and A-Ying will be fine. But he doesn’t want to. He wants to keep A-Ying right where he can see him, so that nothing else bad can happen to him.

“Zhan-gege,” says A-Ying, tipping his head to the side in a move very similar to Wei Ying, although Wei Ying usually only makes that expression when he’s being at his most actively obnoxious. “Who is this pretty gege?”

Lan Wangji hears the soft exhale of laughter from his brother. “This is my brother,” he tells A-Ying.

A-Ying points between the two of them. “Looks the same,” he says.

Lan Xichen leans a little across the table, smiling at A-Ying. “If we look the same,” he says to A-Ying, “does that mean your — what was it, Zhan-gege is also pretty?”

“Of course,” says A-Ying. He sounds — offended, that Lan Xichen would ever question it. “Zhan-gege is the prettiest.” Lan Wangji thinks his ears might be a little pink.

Lan Xichen sits back, eyes dancing. “And what’s your name then?”

“A-Ying,” says A-Ying brightly. He takes Lan Wangji’s teacup in his hands and tries to drink from it and manages to spill an amount on the table which seems impossible considering the size of the teacup. Lan Wangji steadies him and helps him drink. It is not tea made for a child, a typical bitter Lan brew, and A-Ying shouts, “Bah!” and spits it back into the cup and sets the cup down with a loud thump that Lan Wangji is pretty sure has never been heard in the Cloud Recesses before. If his uncle had heard, there’d be a new rule written on the wall: Thou shalt not bang teacups around.

Lan Xichen bursts into laughter. It is the most unrepressed sound that Lan Wangji has heard from him in months. Something deep inside Lan Wangji hurts a little at the soft, warm look in his brother’s eyes as he looks at the child. He’d heard his brother talk about having children once or twice when they were growing up, something Lan Xichen clearly thought about often. It had never seemed to be about providing an heir for the sect and more just — his own desire to be a father, to have children of his own, to, perhaps, right the wrongs done by their own father. Then they had grown older still and Lan Xichen had never even married.

“Nasty!” says A-Ying. “Bad tea.”

“Very bad tea,” Lan Xichen agrees, voice very serious, face bright with amusement.

A-Ying pushes his messy hair out of his eyes and says, “What is gege’s name?”

“My name is Xichen.”

“Xichen-ge,” says A-Ying. “Do you have any nice tea?”

“No,” says Xichen, “but I do have this.” He reaches into his sleeve and pulls out some carefully wrapped candy. Lan Wangji has no idea if his brother got the candy especially because there was a new child in the Cloud Recesses, or if it is something his brother simply carries around. The latter seems unlikely but Lan Wangji has no idea how Lan Xichen would have suddenly procured candy the previous evening; it would have been too late to go to Caiyi.

A-Ying, for his part, reacts with such joy at the sight of the candy that he almost goes scuttling across the top of the table to grab it from Lan Xichen. Lan Wangji grabs his waist and hauls him back into his lap. “Don’t grab,” he says quietly. “You should wait to be handed things.”

“But candy!” insists A-Ying. Lan Wangji patiently pulls his hair back from his face again, and takes a moment to retie the ribbon. It’s not likely to last, just like tidy hair had never lasted on Wei Ying, but it feels important. He’d used one of the many red ribbons that lay around the Jingshi, the colour stark against the white Lan robes.

“Yes,” he says, “but you should wait to be handed things. And you should ask if you can have some first.”

A-Ying wriggles twice and then says, “Xichen-ge, can I have some candy? Please?” he adds, quickly, like he’s been scolded before for not asking please.

“Of course,” says Lan Xichen, and he hands A-Ying the candy across the table.

A-Ying lets out a high-pitched noise of happiness and immediately tries to open one of the candies, fiddling with the wrapper. After a moment, Lan Wangji takes from him, ignoring the slightly distressed sound A-Ying makes, and opens it up. When he hands it back, A-Ying shoves it in his mouth with single-minded focus.

“Say thank you,” Lan Wangji murmurs. An attempt is made on A-Ying’s part. It’s hard to make out around the candy but Lan Wangji pats his head anyway.

Lan Xichen is watching them, still smiling softly, but it’s tinged bittersweet. “You were always a good father,” he says when he notices Lan Wangji looking. “Wangji. I’m sorry that you’re in this position but — you managed with Sizhui, you’ll manage now.”

Lan Wangji looks at his brother unwaveringly. The fact is that with Sizhui, he had never quite known what to do, simply going with what felt right. He had often thought: what would my uncle have done in this situation, and then done something different as a matter of course, and it had often come out as the right choice. It had never necessarily been the opposite choice — there had been things his uncle had gotten right, after all — but just something different.

You would have been a good father too, he doesn’t tell his brother. Add it to the list of things they don’t talk about: their parents, their childhood, those thirteen long years of pretending like Lan Wangji’s beloved wasn’t gone. Lan Wangji won’t ask his brother about it, although sometimes he wonders if he even needs to. His grief at Jin Guangyao’s death had been— familiar, in some sense. Lan Wangji knows what it is to not want to talk about such things.

Lan Xichen reaches across and covers Lan Wangji’s hand with his own. After a moment, A-Ying puts his hand over Lan Xichen’s, joining in. Lan Xichen smiles first at the child and then at Lan Wangji. “Wangji,” he says, and he sounds less now like he’s fooling himself and more like he actually believes it. “We’ll get him back.”

“Mn,” says Lan Wangji.

——

Caiyi is hell with a child. Lan Wangji remembers this well from when Sizhui was a child, but at least Sizhui was both older by that point and also not a child inclined towards running off. A-Ying, however, is the kind of child that is easily distracted by whatever shiny thing he sees, and Caiyi market is a veritable orgy of things that children find shiny. The moment they walked in, A-Ying had let go of Sizhui’s hand and immediately tried to run to a toy stall. Next it had been a stall selling warm pastries. When he had shouted RABBITS and tried to run to a stall selling stuffed rabbit dolls, Lan Wangji had simply scooped him up into the crook of his elbow and held him there.

“Zhan-gege, rabbits!” A-Ying insists, wriggling like a snake to get out. Lan Wangji holds him tighter — A-Ying might not realise how long a drop to the ground it is, but Lan Wangji definitely does.

“We can visit the rabbits when we go back home,” Sizhui says, reaching out a hand to ruffle A-Ying’s unruly hair. “We can’t look at the rabbits now.”

A-Ying pouts and looks up at Lan Wangji, a calculating look in his big eyes. “Zhan-gege, rabbits later?” he asks.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji says. With any hope, A-Ying will have forgotten that promise by the time they get back to the Cloud Recesses. His memory is as bad as a child as it ever was as an adult. A-Ying takes the promise in the spirit it is intended though and snuggles into Lan Wangji’s robes, happy now to sit and look out at the world. He keeps up a chattering list of everything he sees, though, as though afraid that Lan Wangji and Sizhui cannot also see what he sees.

They leave the marketplace behind and continue through the town until they come to the forest bordering the outskirts. A-Ying falls quiet here, although he doesn’t seem scared. Instead he seems a kind of curious that doesn’t need words. There’s a well-worn trail cut through the forest at this point, trod not only by the feet of Sizhui and Wei Ying but also the feet of the townsfolk nearby who seem to have adopted Wen Qionglin a little. The older folks in particular seem to like him — he is polite and quiet and also capable of lifting the heavy things that their aged bodies are no longer capable of carrying.

Lan Wangji rarely comes here. He knows that Wen Qionglin still feels awkward in the face of him, and Lan Wangji doesn’t want that to interrupt Wei Ying’s time with him. Wei Ying had always made fun of him for that — it’s not because of you, he’d laugh, sitting at Lan Wangji’s feet while Lan Wangji pulled his hair up in his ponytail for him, fastened it carefully with the red ribbon before Wei Ying left for the day. Wen Ning is awkward with everyone.

That wasn’t quite true, Lan Wangji knew, but it was close enough, and besides that wasn’t quite enough to convince Lan Wangji to visit. Lan Wangji is also awkward with everyone, and there was no need for that kind of energy to be too often in the same room.

Wen Qionglin’s house is little more than a hut tucked away in the forest, one small room that Wen Qionglin built with the help of Sizhui and Wei Ying. He doesn’t need much space, after all — he doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, so there had been no need for a bedroom or a kitchen. The hut is made of good, solid wood, the roof well protected from the rains that sometimes fall in Gusu. It doesn’t look like much but it is secure, at least. It’s better than the ramshackle hovels back in the Burial Mounds all those years ago.

Sizhui knocks on the door. “I did warn him,” he murmurs. “About — you know.”

Lan Wangji nods. A-Ying shifts in his arms. The door opens and reveals Wen Qionglin, hair long and loose across his colourless, expressionless face, his cloud-white eyes looking out at them with apparent placidness. This is another reason Lan Wangji does not particularly care to spend much time with Wen Qionglin: there’s something about the blankness forced on Wen Qionglin’s face by his death that hits a little too close to home to his own expressionless face for Lan Wangji, like he, too, has wandered through most of his life half-dead.

A-Ying says, “A monster!” He sounds delighted.

Wen Qionglin slumps. Sizhui audibly smothers a snort. “A-Ying,” he says, amusement bright in his eyes. “This is my uncle.”

“Uncle Monster!” says A-Ying.

Wen Qionglin slumps further. When he looks at Lan Wangji and mumbles, “Hanguang-jun,” he sounds positively miserable. This is not, Lan Wangji feels, quite the right mood for this situation. A-Ying is looking at Wen Qionglin like he has just been gifted a whole new toy.

Wen Qionglin lets them into his little house. The room contains a collection of floor pillows and one table and a bookshelf full of books that Wen Ning managed to procure from somewhere. In the corner is a little bedroll that Lan Wangji knows is for Sizhui when he stays out after curfew and can’t get back without punishment, which is something that Lan Wangji is careful to never bring up. He can’t punish his son for something he does not know anything about.

Lan Wangji puts A-Ying down on the floor. A-Ying immediately rushes at Wen Qionglin and wraps his arms around his knees. It is so reminiscent of A-Yuan that all three adults in the room stare at each other for a moment, wide-eyed. Then A-Ying says, “Uncle Monster plays with A-Ying?”

“See,” says Sizhui. “He likes you.”

A-Ying, it seems, likes everyone. This is not the same as Wei Ying, whose myriad of enemies were not necessarily born out of one-sided antagonism, but perhaps this was how Wei Ying was as a child: open and easy with his affection, physical with it, treating the world as if it were an entertainment all for him. Now that Lan Wangji thinks about it, that’s actually somewhat like the Wei Ying who came to study at the Cloud Recesses, simply tempered by age.

Lan Wangji sits at the table, feeling an awkwardness that he doesn’t let himself show. A-Ying is still clutching Wen Qionglin’s leg and when Wen Qionglin reaches down and then stiffly lifts the child into his arms, A-Ying squeals happily. Sizhui procures a teapot from somewhere in the room and sets about making tea, practically radiating delight. The awkwardness Lan Wangji feels right now is worth it, to see Sizhui so clearly pleased to have all his favourite people in one room. Put Lan Jingyi and Jin Ling in here too and Sizhui would probably melt with happiness, Lan Wangji thinks fondly. But that would never work because there isn’t enough room for two more people in here.

“Uncle Monster plays with A-Ying?” A-Ying says again, more hopefully this time, patting one of Wen Qionglin’s cheeks with a tiny hand. “A-Ying knows fun games.”

Sizhui says, “What game do you want to play, A-Ying?” He glances at Lan Wangji as he says it; so far A-Ying’s chosen games have proven to be loud, or messy, or a combination of the two. The messy part is upsetting because the child refuses to take baths unless physically forced to.

A-Ying thinks about it, still patting Wen Qionglin’s cheek. Wen Qionglinis just looking at him, steadily, and doesn’t seem to mind the patting. The look in his eyes is similar to how Lan Wangji has felt the past week: mostly confusion, but also sad. There’s a grief in Lan Wangji that he can’t put into words and there’s something very similar in the way Wen Qionglin looks at small A-Ying in his arms.

A-Ying says, “I want to climb a tree!”

“No,” Lan Wangji and Sizhui say simultaneously..

Wen Qionglin can’t smile but that lost look in his eyes fades at little as he glances up. “How about,” he says quietly, “we plant A-Ying in the ground like a radish?”

Sizhui laughs as A-Ying throws his arms into the arm and starts chanting radish radish radish. Lan Wangji has heard this story now, sitting in the Jingshi as Wei Ying, loosened by the Emperor’s Smile that Lan Wangji had brought for him, told Sizhui stories from their time in the Burial Mounds. His memory of that time was as spotty as the rest of it, but there were bits, he’d said, that were clear as day, and most of them were to do with A-Yuan.

Lan Wangji sips his tea, and lets his son’s laughter wash over him.

——

Wei Ying has been a three year old child for nearly a week when some of the other sect leaders arrive for a meeting. They have, thus far, managed to keep A-Ying’s true identity more or less contained, with only those who truly know Wei Ying being told the truth. As far as anyone else is concerned, A-Ying is a child that Lan Wangji found, and Wei Ying is searching for the missing parents.

But the sect leaders of both the Jiang sect and Jin sect are arriving for this meeting and it will be much harder to keep the truth from them. Lan Wangji thinks very hard about taking A-Ying with him on a trip while the meeting is taking place, but he’s wary of leaving for too long when there are people here researching how to turn the child back to normal. His plan, therefore, is to keep A-Ying away from either of them and hope the cover story holds.

Of course, Jiang Wanyin arrives early and messes it all up, because when was he not a thorn in Lan Wangji’s side? Lan Wangji is walking with A-Ying through the central courtyard when Jiang Wanyin and his entourage appears at the top of the stairs, a Lan attendant leading him to the rooms he will share with the handful of people he brought for the meeting. He looks the same as he ever does, proud and angry, and Lan Wangji is right in the middle of the courtyard and cannot escape. He takes A-Ying’s hand gently and waits.

The Jiang sect members bow and murmur Hanguang-jun when they get near. Jiang Wanyin looks Lan Wangji up and down and says, “Lan Wangji.” He sounds like he was also hoping to not have to run into Lan Wangji.

Lan Wangji doesn’t say anything. He’s always tried to avoid talking to Jiang Wanyin, ignoring his very existence because to acknowledge it brought nothing but engulfing fury at everything Jiang Wanyin represented. Things have not improved since Wei Ying returned from the dead — in fact, it’s worse, because Lan Wangji has found that now he needs to both be in Jiang Wanyin’s presence more often and also be relatively civil. He at least has to show awareness that Jiang Wanyin exists. Lan Wangji will do it, for Wei Ying’s sake, but there is no part of him that will be able to forget all of Jiang Wanyin’s many flaws and past mistakes, and he will certainly never forgive.

A-Ying swings their hands together idly. They were on their way to see Lan Xichen, their usual after-breakfast routine now. Lan Qiren has scolded Lan Wangji half-heartedly once or twice, for distracting his brother from his duties as sect leader with the child, but Lan Xichen clearly enjoys the visits more than most things in his day-to-day life nowadays and Lan Wangji is well versed in ignoring his uncle’s edicts at this point. So he takes A-Ying to see his brother, and A-Ying adores Lan Xichen with a fervour to be expected from a three year old child who is given candy with every visit.

Jiang Wanyin looks down at the child and raises an eyebrow. “Who the hell is this?”

None of your business, Lan Wangji wants to say, but instead he just says quietly, “Excuse us,” and makes to brush past.

It’s too late, though; he sees the way Jiang Wanyin’s gaze sharpens, looking harder at A-Ying, who is swinging their hands harder. Lan Wangji holds his arm still and A-Ying makes a little grumpy noise but doesn’t complain. He’s looking up at Jiang Wanyin with his own curious look.

Jiang Wanyin’s face slowly takes on a kind of horrified expression that Lan Wangji would find funny if it wasn’t for the fact of the actual situation. He’s clearly noticing all the same things Lan Wangji did that first time: the same slope of nose, the light in the eyes, the messy mop of hair. Jiang Wanyin, after all, was far better acquainted with Wei Ying around this age than Lan Wangji was.

“Wait, wait,” Jiang Wanyin says, “how in— I heard there was a child here but why does this kid look so much like— don’t tell me that idiot reproduced.”

The part of Lan Wangji that is far too heavily influenced by Wei Ying wants very badly to tell Jiang Wanyin that yes, this is Wei Ying’s child. That he and Wei Ying reproduced, just like Jiang Wanyin says. He still remembers his own frisson of shock and irrational hurt at this child? I gave birth to it.

But before he can say anything, Jiang Wanyin says, “No, wait, this kid looks too old for that. Hanguang-jun, what the f—”

He stops himself, looking down at the child with an almost sheepish look. He always speaks too loudly for the Cloud Recesses, someone who is not used to regulating their speech or volume. A-Ying doesn’t look particularly bothered, rocking back and forth on his heels, but Jiang Wanyin clearly makes an effort to both lower his volume and avoid cursing when he says, “What happened?”

Lan Wangji is abruptly weary of explaining this. It’s not like it’s a new thing but the past couple of days he has really wanted to just retreat into that isolation of years ago and lick his wounds like an injured animal. He doesn’t want to have to deal with Wei Ying’s hotheaded brother.

“We were night-hunting,” he says, very carefully keeping all that tiredness from his voice. “Something went wrong. A spirit— did this.”

“Did what?” Jiang Wanyin says, sounding exasperated with Lan Wangji in turn, not bothering to hide it.

“Turned Wei Ying into a child,” Lan Wangji says. Even a week after the fact, it feels far too raw. It would feel better, he thinks, if they knew what the hell to do about it.

Jiang Wanyin stares at A-Ying some more. This time A-Ying notices and starts to squirm. He’s not a shy child but he is still a child, and not used to such scrutiny. He presses closer to Lan Wangji’s leg and whispers, “Zhan-gege, who is the angry man?”

Jiang Wanyin’s eyebrow twitches but he just says, “So Wei Wuxian didn’t have a child?”

“No,” Lan Wangji says. It is a stupid question. Like Jiang Wanyin says, this child is too old anyway, but who does Jiang Wanyin think Wei Ying could have had a child with anyway.

Jiang Wanyin says, “Good.”

Lan Wangji cannot hide the way his jaw clenches. It is not good. It is the opposite of good. Wei Ying has been turned into a child and there is nothing any of them can do about it. Lan Wangji has been left with a three-year-old version of the love of his life and no way of getting him back, and he is now looking at— what? Raising A-Ying forever? It’s too strange, makes something deep inside him flinch in horror.

Jiang Wanyin doesn’t seem to have noticed the tension thrumming through Lan Wangji’s body, but then he never does notice other people’s anger when it doesn’t take the same form as his own, loud and destructive. He looks down at A-Ying and says, “Do you know how to turn him back?”

Lan Wangji cannot help himself. “If I knew that, I would have done it already.”

Jiang Wanyin glances back at Lan Wangji and then down again. “Nothing in all those books of yours, huh,” he says, but he doesn’t sound judging; rather, he sounds considering. He keeps looking at A-Ying, squinting his eyes as if that will give him some greater understanding of the situation. “He’s a lot quieter than I expected him to be,” he says after a long stretch of A-Ying continuing to hide from the scrutiny. “I remember that idiot being real fu— really loud as a kid.”

“He is not,” says Lan Wangji.

Jiang Wanyin blinks at him. “He’s not?”

Lan Wangji suppresses a sigh. He keeps forgetting that Wei Ying isn’t here to interpret his clipped answers. Instead Lan Wangji is forced to explain what he means almost constantly and it is exhausting, truly. “He is not quiet.”

Jiang Wanyin’s mouth twitches this time. “Yeah, I bet.” He looks across his shoulders at the Jiang disciples standing behind him, all of them looking both confused and curious. When he looks back at Lan Wangji, his face is back to the usual expression: a look which suggests the entire world disappoints him. He nods once at Lan Wangji and then sweeps off in the direction his rooms must be in. The Lan disciple tasked with showing him the way hurries after him, looking flustered.

A-Ying watches them leave. “Who was the angry man?” he asks once they’re out of sight, tipping his way up to Lan Wangji.

Lan Wangji takes a perverse joy in saying, “Nobody special.” He tugs A-Ying’s hand a little. “Come.” And they make their way to Lan Xichen’s rooms, A-Ying chattering brightly all the way.

——

Jin Ling is used to being excluded from things but he’d expected that, since he became sect leader, that wouldn’t happen. Which makes it particularly galling to go all the way to Gusu for the sect meeting, only to be told by his uncle that he can’t attend most of the sessions.

“I’m the Jin sect leader!” Jin Ling had protested.

Uncle Jiang had given him the kind of look that served to remind Jin Ling that this man had spent years changing his diapers. “And meetings about the state of sect relations with the sects around Yunmeng aren’t the business of the Jin sect,” he’d said. “So go play with your weird friends for a bit until you’re needed.”

“They’re not weird,” Jin Ling had said, right before he stormed off.

Now he stomps into the side chamber some Lan disciple had directed him to and finds Sizhui and Jingyi sitting on the floor with a small kid whose hair is loose and messy across his face. The kid is dressed in white Lan robes that are honestly shockingly grimy, and he’s playing some kind of complicated clapping game with Jingyi, whose face is severe with concentration. Jin Ling has never seen Jingyi look so serious.

Jin Ling stops and blinks. Sizhui jumps up at his entrance and gives him a formal bow, the little shit. “Sect Leader Jin,” he says, voice solemn and serious. “Welcome to the Cloud Recesses.”

Jin Ling splutters for a moment. Sizhui looks up at him under his eyelashes and smiles, just a little. One day Jin Ling is going to expose him for being the world’s biggest secret brat, but today he just says, “STOP,” knowing he’s probably a little red. Lan Shizui’s smile gets warmer; Jingyi openly laughs at him. Jin Ling points desperately at the small child who has broken off the clapping game to goggle up at him. “Who is the kid?”

“This is A-Ying,” Sizhui says. He picks the kid up under the shoulders and sets him down on his feet carefully . The kid continues to stare at Jin Ling. “He’s Senior Wei.”

Jin Ling cocks his head to the side, trying to make sense of that sentence. He feels like, if Wei Wuxian had a kid, he would have heard about it. Besides, isn’t this kid too old? Wei Wuxian has only been back for about a year now. “Wei Wuxian had a kid?”

“No,” says Jingyi with a sigh like Jin Ling is the idiot here. “A-Ying is Wei Wuxian.”

Jin Ling looks down at A-Ying and says, with feeling, “What the fuck.”

“Fuck!” says A-Ying brightly.

Jin Ling goes pale. “Shit,” he says, trying to grab at A-Ying, “shit, no, don’t say that—”

A-Ying dances away from Jin Ling’s hands with evident glee. “FUCK,” he says. He turns and takes off out of the room and Jin Ling sees Sizhui’s eyes widen with horror right before he too runs off after him.

Jin Ling also gives chase. By the time he’s outside, though, with Jingyi close to his back, Sizhui is already disappearing around a corner, his cry of, “A-Ying, come back!” echoing through the courtyard. There’s definitely a rule about noise in the Cloud Recesses but far be it for Jin Ling to remind Sizhui about it at this point.

“FUCK!” he hears in response, and runs after them in a panic.

For such a small child, A-Ying is remarkably fast and the one time Sizhui manages to snatch the back of his robes, A-Ying just sheds them like a snake shedding skin and keeps running. Jin Ling has no idea where the kid is going but A-Ying seems to because he’s definitely leading them to some specific location, and it’s Jingyi who yells NOT THE MEETING— right before A-Ying bursts into a particularly nice building, Sizhui close behind him.

“Ah, crap,” says Jingyi, and stops, but Jin Ling barrels on into the building and straight into Sizhui’s back. He’s stopped right inside the doorway, frozen with a stricken look on his face. Lan Xichen sits at the far end of the room on a raised platform, mouth open like he was in the middle of saying something, Hanguang-jun sitting a little to his side, already getting to his feet. Down the walls sit the other cultivators who gathered for this meeting that Jin Ling was locked out of — most of them Jin Ling doesn’t recognise yet, but Uncle Jiang is there, scowling like his life depends on it.

A-Ying stands in the middle of the room in his under-robes, which are somehow also dirty. “Fuck!” he announces, with his pudgy fists raised triumphantly in the air.

Sizhui moans and for a moment looks like he’s going to slump against Jin Ling, who puts a hand between his shoulders in fear. There is absolute silence for the longest moment of Jin Ling’s life, then one of the cultivators snorts with laughter.

Another one says, “Who is this child!” in a tone of absolute outrage.

A-Ying lowers his hands and looks around at them all, a little lost. “Fuck?” he asks; he sounds like he thought everyone would be impressed with his shiny new word.

“Stop saying that!” Jin Ling shrieks.

“A-Ying,” Hanguang-jun says, with absolutely no inflection in his voice whatsoever. A-Ying slumps and rubs at his nose, looking like he’s just been scolded, even though Hanguang-jun didn’t sound any different to how he normally sounds: flat and uninterested.

Hanguang-jun looks at Sizhui, who is clearly trying to edge behind Jin Ling as if to hide. Then he looks at his brother, who is clearly amused. Then before he can move to come and collect A-Ying, Uncle Jiang stands up, scoops the child under one of his arms, says, “Excuse me,” to the shocked looking cultivators still sitting there, and then strides towards the doors.

Jin Ling hurriedly gets out of his way, shoving Sizhui along with him. A-Ying clearly feels like this is a great new game, and cackles a little. Hanguang-jun makes a noise of protest from the platform that Uncle Jiang completely ignores in favor of simply leaving the room. Jin Ling follows after him, waiting until they’re outside before he calls, “Uncle, wait.”

Jingyi, still waiting outside, sees Uncle Jiang with A-Ying and looks stricken for a moment. “Ah,” he says, darting forward, looking like he wants to stop Uncle Jiang and not quite brave enough to try, “Sect Leader Jiang, please don’t—”

Uncle Jiang ignores him. He carries A-Ying until they’re a little distance away from the room and then sets him down on the ground. A-Ying is still giggling from being carried like a sack of potatoes. Uncle Jiang hunches down in front of him, looks at him for one long moment, and then holds out a hand and says, “Give me his robes.”

Sizhui, who Jin Ling hadn’t realised had also exited the meeting room, hands the robes over. Uncle Jiang forces A-Ying’s limbs back into them, not roughly but certainly firmly, not letting A-Ying protest or stop him. He ties them with finality and says, “Who taught you that word?”

A-Ying mashes a finger into the middle of his forehead and says, “Red dot gege.”

“I didn’t,” Jin Ling says immediately.

Uncle Jiang gives him a side-long glare that is just as potent as his usual glare; I’ll deal with you later, it seems to say, and Jin Ling fights against the urge to shrink away from it. Behind them there’s the sound of the meeting room doors opening again. Uncle Jiang puts a hand on the top of A-Ying’s head. “Don’t use that word,” he says. “It’s a very bad word. People will be very sad if you use that word.”

A-Ying pulls at his robes, fisting them over and over again, looking unsure. “Sad?”

“Yes,” Uncle Jiang says. There’s movement next to Jin Ling and he looks up to find Hanguang-jun watching the scene too, having left the meeting room. His face is blank except for the slight crease in his eyebrows. Uncle Jiang glances up and sees Hanguang-jun watching and adds, “Especially your Hanguang-jun, he’ll be very, very sad if you use that word.”

A-Ying gasps a little and looks up at Hanguang-jun with a wobbly look. “Zhan-gege is sad?” he asks.

Hanguang-jun hesitates a little. He looks between Uncle Jiang and A-Ying for a moment and then nods shortly. He also hunches down like Uncle Jiang — Jin Ling blinks at that, never expecting the great Hanguang-jun to get so close to the ground — and holds out his arms. A-Ying flings himself into them, arms going around his neck with practised ease. “Sorry, Zhan-gege,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make you sad!”

“Mn,” Hanguang-jun says, resting his chin on A-Ying’s head for a brief second.

A-Ying peers up at him and says, “If Zhan-gege is sad, we can visit the rabbits? Zhan-gege likes the rabbits.”

Hanguang-jun smiles. The last time Jin Ling saw him smile had been in Guanyin Temple and it is just as shocking now as it had been then. Judging by the way his uncle is also staring, he’s thinking much the same. When Hanguang-jun presses his mouth to A-Ying’s hair as he stands up, he’s definitely trying to hide the smile. “You must apologise to Xichen-ge first,” he says. “He was also sad.”

A-Ying looks devastated. “Oh no!” he says, and starts trying to wriggle out of Hanguang-jun’s hold desperately. “A-Ying will go now!”

Hanguang-jun hauls him back. “Xichen-ge is busy right now,” he says. “We can apologise after dinner.”

A-Ying considers that and then nods before resting his head on Hanguang-jun’s shoulder. Uncle Jiang also stands up, a little slowly. He’s looking at A-Ying carefully, who looks back at him and then, ever so slightly, pokes his tongue out at him.

Uncle Jiang says, “If you pull faces, one day your face will freeze like that.” A-Ying immediately pulls his tongue back in. Uncle Jiang sighs. “He’s easier to deal with like this,” he says to Hanguang-jun, who is watching him in turn with no facial expression. “But it’s weird, I don’t like it. I’ll see what I can dig up on my end. Probably there’s something to change him back.”

After a long moment, Hanguang-jun nods. Jin Ling is not fully up to date with all the going ons between his uncle and Hanguang-jun, but their mutual dislike of each other has been palpable through the years. Every meeting between them for as long as Jin Ling can remember has been nothing but barbed comments on Uncle Jiang’s part and pointed silence on Hanguang-jun’s part. Jin Ling had always assumed it was nothing more than mutual incompatibility; lord knows his uncle isn’t easy to get along with, and nobody could ever accuse Hanguang-jun of social warmth.

It’s only recently, with the context of Hanguang-jun’s feelings for Wei Wuxian, that Jin Ling has been able to put it together. The events surrounding Wei Wuxian’s death remain murky at best: his uncle won’t talk about it and Wei Wuxian claims to not fully remember, which Jin Ling isn’t sure is true but he thinks if he had an option, he would refuse to remember his own death too. But Uncle Jiang certainly had something to do with it. The fact that Wei Wuxian and Uncle Jiang have started to patch things up together does not, however, seem to have had any impact on Hanguang-jun’s relationship with Uncle Jiang. The two of them have mostly treated each other the same as before.

But now there’s something about the set of Hanguang-jun’s shoulders that doesn’t seem quite so aggressive. Uncle Jiang nods back at him and says, “I should go back to the meeting. I assume Hanguang-jun will stay with— the kid?”

“Mm,” says Hanguang-jun. Without waiting for anything else, he turns and starts to walk away, A-Ying still held in his arms. Uncle Jiang rolls his eyes and also heads back for the meeting room, which Jin Ling imagines is in a bit of a state. Jin Ling is left standing outside, Sizhui by his side watching Hanguang-jun walk away with a troubled look on his face.

“Okay,” Jin Ling says after a moment. “Can someone explain what the fuck is going on now?”

Jingyi sighs heavily. “It’s a really long story,” he says.

“I’ve got time,” Jin Ling says darkly.

—-

Lan Sizhui knocks on the door to the Jingshi feeling that same roiling anxiety he always feels when he’s done something wrong. It happens so rarely that it always feels like such a huge event, possibly a leftover from a childhood spent not wanting to make Lan Wangji disappointed in him.

It is weird, that anxiety, because the worst Lan Sizhui has ever had to do was write lines while standing upside down and that wasn’t Lan Wangji who punished him, it was Lan Qiren. Disappointing Lan Qiren doesn’t really feel the same way; he respects him as someone who was an uncle figure, if one kept at a considerable distance as he grew up, but disappointing Lan Qiren sometimes feels like an inevitable part of the universe. He is, Lan Sizhui has always felt, rather too unyielding, too rules focused. Lan Sizhui can quote the rules as well as the rest of them, better, in fact, but when some of those rules means that he can’t interact with Wei Wuxian or Wen Ning, well, sometimes you just have to selectively ignore them.

But Lan Wangji was more than just an inflexible pseudo-uncle, he was for the most part Lan Sizhui’s father. And what’s more, he is a good man who raised Lan Sizhui with kindness and his own version of affection. Lan Sizhui’s fear of disappointing him has always been less about the punishment and more about wanting Lan Wangji to feel proud of him. He wants to repay everything that Lan Wangji has given him, to be a Lan disciple that is worthy of being called Lan Wangji’s son — or, at least, protege.

The door opens. A-Ying stands there in new robes, tiny white things. Lan Sizhui isn’t sure why Lan Wangji keeps insisting on dressing him in white when it’s clearly a disaster, but the one time Lan Xichen suggested they get A-Ying some black robes, or at least something darker, Lan Wangji had said, “Hmm,” and then not done anything of the sort.

“It’s Sizhui-ge!” A-Ying says, sounding over the moon to see him, like they didn’t just part an hour earlier — like A-Ying didn’t lead him on a merry chase around the Cloud Recesses and give him a minor heart attack. He grabs Lan Sizhui’s hand. “Come and play with me!”

Lan Sizhui lets himself be tugged into the Jingshi but once he’s in there he untangles their hands. Lan Wangji is sitting at the low table, a teapot faintly steaming in front of him, two teacups set out. When he sees Lan Sizhui he reaches next to him and produces another teacup which he puts silently on the table. “Sizhui,” he says.

A-Ying is trying to grab Lan Sizhui’s hand again but Lan Sizhui smiles at him with a brightness that he doesn’t feel and says, “A-Ying, I’m not here to play, I need to talk to Hanguang-jun for a bit, okay?”

Lan Wangji looks up at that, his hands that were pouring the tea pausing. Lan Sizhui walks forward a few steps and then goes to his knees, falling into a deep bow, his hands pressed to the floor above his head. “Hanguang-jun,” he says into the floor, his heart thudding. “I submit myself for punishment.”

There is a breath of silence. “Punishment?” Lan Wangji says.

Then Lan Sizhui feels something climb on top of his back, small hands holding onto his hair. “A horse!” A-Ying pronounces happily. It’s a sign of Lan Sizhui’s good character, he thinks, that he doesn’t immediately throw the child off. Jingyi definitely would have.

“A-Ying, get off,” Lan Wangji says. “Sizhui, get up, please.”

A-Ying whines a little but does clamber back off Lan Sizhui’s back. Lan Sizhui straightens up and finds Lan Wangji watching him, his face mildly confused, which means he is probably completely baffled. Lan Sizhui has no idea why. Lan Wangji motions to the tea in front of him. “Come and sit here,” he says.

For lack of anything better to do, Lan Sizhui does so. Lan Wangji slides a cup of tea over to him, and then one to A-Ying when A-Ying joins them at the table, sitting primly in what is clearly an imitation of Lan Wangji. “Be careful,” Lan Wangji tells him. “It’s hot.”

To Lan Sizhui he says, “Tell me why you need to be punished.”

Sometimes Lan Qiren does this — before the punishment, he makes you articulate exactly why you deserve the punishment. “I allowed A-Ying to disturb a sect leader meeting,” Lan Sizhui says, “and I allowed him to make a spectacle of himself. I brought shame to the Lan clan. I accept punishment.”

Lan Wangji looks less baffled by the end of the speech and instead simply looks resigned. He doesn’t speak for a few minutes, during which A-Ying blows noisily over his tea in an attempt to cool it down. “Sizhui,” he says. “You will not be punished. You did nothing wrong.”

“But—”

Lan Wangji holds up a hand and Lan Sizhui falls silent immediately. “Sizhui,” he says again. His voice is firm but gentle, a particular intent tone of voice that he only seems to use with Lan Sizhui — and now, sometimes, with A-Ying. Jingyi heard it once and called it Lan Wangji’s dad voice, which Lan Sizhui hadn’t appreciated at the time but now is beginning to realise is true. “You did nothing wrong. You looked after A-Ying to the best of your ability like I requested, and what happened is not your fault. There is no shame brought on the family through the actions of a child. You will not be punished.”

Lan Sizhui blinks at him and then slumps in his seat. If Lan Wangji says he won’t be punished, then he won’t be punished, even if Lan Qiren does hear about the incident. Lan Wangji reaches across the table and pats him once on the head, like he often did when Lan Sizhui was a child. Something inside him goes warm at that affection.

“Drink your tea,” Lan Wangji says. Lan Sizhui isn’t sure whether he’s talking to him or A-Ying but he picks up his cup and sips at it anyway.

They sit in silence for a long time. Lan Wangji and Lan Sizhui used to do this a lot when he was younger, Lan Sizhui remembers. Sometimes they would play together. These quiet times came less often as he got older, and they’ve almost stopped in the past year since Wei Wuxian came back. Most of the time, if Lan Sizhui is with Lan Wangji, he’s with Wei Wuxian also; they’re so rarely out of each other’s company.

The silence is broken when A-Ying picks up his cup and starts banging it against the table. Lan Sizhui winces, then winces harder when A-Ying starts singing a song to go along with the banging, making up words as he goes. It’s complete nonsense, but A-Ying seems proud of himself. Lan Wangji sits and sips at his tea.

Lan Sizhui has a few more memories now of his childhood, but he doesn’t remember much of when he was as small as A-Ying. He wasn’t even at the Cloud Recesses, then, he thinks, probably still at the Burial Mounds. Of his early time in the Cloud Recesses, mostly Lan Sizhui remembers the rabbits, and a few broken snatches of sitting outside listening to what he now knows to be Inquiry, Lan Wangji plucking out the notes in the quiet nighttime. He had been trying to communicate with a spirit that couldn’t be found. Lan Sizhui is a little touched, thinking back, that Lan Wangji kept him with him during those times.

What he does remember of being the same age as A-Ying was not as loud as this is. There’s a lot to be discussed about nature versus nurture in Lan Sizhui but he definitely thinks that he was never the type to sit around banging cups off tables. Or scream-sing songs. He thinks so, at least. He’s never actually interacted with many children; maybe they’re all like this.

Lan Wangji watches over the scene with an indulgent look in his eyes. Even someone who didn’t know him would be able to read that expression on his face. He doesn’t even seem to mind that A-Ying is spilling tea all over his white Lan robes.

“Was I like this when I was a child?” Lan Sizhui asks, unable to stop himself.

Lan Wangji looks at him, and sets his tea cup back on the table. “No,” he murmurs. “You were very quiet, content to play alone if no companion could be found. You liked to listen to music, or practice your reading in the library. You were an angel, no trouble at all.”

It is the most Lan Wangji has ever said about his childhood. Lan Sizhui absorbs every bit of it in silence, hoarding it away. Lan Wangji looks at A-Ying then, the fondness on his face palpable. Lan Sizhui wonders what he’s actually thinking, if it’s hard to see Wei Wuxian like this. To have — someone so important to him, suddenly reverted to a child. It keeps Lan Sizhui awake at night, thinking that they might never turn him back, that Wei Wuxian might have to grow up all over again.

But if Lan Wangji feels any of that fear, none of it shows as he says, “A-Ying is a demon,” and reaches over to gently remove the cup from A-Ying’s hand. A-Ying’s song cuts off immediately and he looks at Lan Wangji in betrayal. “No excess noise is allowed in the Cloud Recesses,” Lan Wangji says gently.

“He already made all the noise,” Lan Sizhui points out, and is in turn pointedly ignored. Truthfully, A-Ying does nothing but make noise. Part of Lan Sizhui is surprised that Lan Qiren has not made A-Ying’s entire existence against the rules.

With his entertainment taken away, A-Ying huffs and then climbs into Lan Sizhui’s lap. He is a small child that is all elbows and bony knees and he manages to stick both of them into Lan Sizhui’s stomach in the process. He holds Lan Sizhui’s hands between his own and makes them clap a couple of times. “Sizhui-ge!” he says. “Play with A-Ying!”

Lan Wangji is watching them both with a small smile, that kind that even Lan Sizhui so rarely sees. It is a smile that doesn’t seem to be just for A-Ying, but instead encompasses the both of them. Lan Sizhui ducks his own face, weirdly shy in the face of that smile. “Okay,” he says.

——

Jin Ling, it turns out, had looked a gift horse in the mouth when he’d complained about being excluded from that first meeting of the conference. He’s required at most of the rest and it isn’t a surprise that they’re boring, but it is a surprise just how boring.

Days of sitting and listening to Sect Leader Yao pontificate, his one arm constantly pointing at nothing in the air as if he thinks it gives him gravitas. Days of watching Sect Leader Ouyang agree with everything the other man says, and wishing that Ouyang Zizhen was at least there. Days of listening to people talk about things that don’t matter, or dismissing things that do matter, just because Jin Ling brought them up, or listening to people from minor sects clamour for attention from the bigger more powerful sects. Nobody asks out loud where Wei Wuxian is but they keep watching the door as if they expect him to saunter in eventually.

Jin Ling almost falls asleep five times; he’s kept count.

So it’s a relief, honestly, to be excused from a full afternoon of meetings late on in the conference, meetings that apparently don’t concern the Jin clan. They don’t concern the Jiang clan either, seemingly, because after lunch Uncle Jiang mutters, “I need a fucking drink,” and walks off in the direction of the front gates to the Cloud Recesses.

At a slight loss, Jin Ling wanders aimlessly for a few minutes until he hears the happy shriek of a child’s voice coming from around a nearby building. A second later, Sizhui and Jingyi walk into the courtyard Jin Ling is standing in, each of them holding one of A-Ying’s hands. Sizhui is holding a covered basket in his spare hand, Jingyi holding both their swords in his. A-Ying is swinging his hands slightly, talking cheerful nonsense. He breaks off when he sees Jin Ling and says, “Red dot gege!”

“No,” says Jin Ling feelingly.

Jingyi starts laughing. Sizhui says, “A-Ying, this is Sect Leader Jin. Can you say that?”

A-Ying makes a valiant effort, but it ends in something more like he’s blowing a raspberry. Then he looks at Jin Ling and shakes his messy hair from his face. “Dot gege,” he says. “Are you going to see the rabbits too?”

“Just call me gege,” Jin Ling says tiredly. “And what rabbits? There are rabbits here?”

“Lots of rabbits!” A-Ying says. He drops Sizhui and Jingyi’s hands and grabs Jin Ling’s hand instead. “Come and see rabbits!”

Jin Ling ignores A-Ying tugging insistently on his hand and says, “This isn’t one of those weird secret Lan things.”

“No,” Sizhui says, smiling. “If you don’t have anything more important to do, then you may join us.”

“If he had anything important to do, he wouldn’t be standing in the middle of this courtyard,” Jingyi says, and he grabs Jin Ling’s other hand and starts walking in the direction they’d originally been heading in. Jin Ling lets himself be tugged, and it takes too long to remember to pull his hand out of Jingyi’s. Sizhui follows after, holding the basket in front of him. A-Ying starts chattering again; turns out he was making up a story about the rabbits and also an elephant.

At some point, A-Ying sticks his thumb in his mouth, which somehow doesn’t actually stop him talking. Lan Sizhui removes the thumb immediately and says, “A-Ying, no, it’s dirty, remember?”

A-Ying looks at the thumb in question with great concentration and then sighs, so heavily that it’s like an old man has possessed him for a moment. “No,” he says loudly, sticking the thumb in the air. “CLEAN.”

“It’s only clean because you sucked all the dirt off it,” Jin Ling snaps. A-Ying sticks his tongue out at him and ignores Jin Ling the rest of the way.

The rabbits are in a part of the Cloud Recesses that Jin Ling has never been in. He doesn’t think it’s off-limits, necessarily, it’s simply an area that visitors wouldn’t want to go to, a considerable distance from the guest quarters and the meeting and dining halls. When they reach the clearing where the rabbits are, Jin Ling kind of stutters to a halt and A-Ying walks right into his leg and says, “Gege, ow.”

“That’s a lot of rabbits,” Jin Ling says.

It is a frankly disconcerting amount of rabbits. They are hopping happily around a clearing enclosed by a small fence, dozens of them, all manner of colours but in typical Lan fashion, mostly white. When they spot the newcomers most of them hop over enthusiastically; they are clearly used to at least these humans, if not all humans. They press up against the small fence in an excited heap.

“Rabbits!” A-Ying shouts and rushes towards the fence and sticks his arm through the gaps in the wood. A lot of the rabbits scatter at that.

Jingyi opens the gate to the enclosure and holds it that way for Sizhui. A-Ying tries to run through the gate but Jingyi catches him by the back of his robes and says, “What did Hanguang-jun say?”

“Be careful,” A-Ying says, in a very solemn tone. It’s a frighteningly good impression of Hanguang-jun. Then A-Ying’s voice falls back into the excited tone that Jin Ling is beginning to suspect is his usual. “But Jingyi-gege, rabbits!”

“I can see them, brat,” Jingyi says. He scoops A-Ying up in his arms and then looks at Jin Ling expectantly. “Are you coming?”

“This place is so weird,” Jin Ling says. He split his childhood between Lotus Pier and Koi Towerower, and nothing like this would be allowed at either of those places. It’s baffling to find it in the Cloud Recesses, as he’s never been allowed to bring Fairy here because there’s a rule against having pets. There’s so much in the Cloud Recesses that’s either tucked away out of sight or outright a secret and it actually makes him a little uncomfortable to be allowed to see it.

But he lets himself into the clearing anyway and closes the gate before the rabbits that have come to sniff curiously at his feet think to escape. Most of them are crowded around Sizhui, probably because he’s holding the basket that contains their food. He says, “Jingyi,” and switches the basket for A-Ying. Then he puts A-Ying carefully in the middle of the crowding rabbits. A-Ying giggles incessantly as the rabbits butt up against him, poking at him with their noses and clambering on top of his little body. “There,” Sizhui says, some strange satisfaction colouring his voice. “There we go.”

“He does that every time,” Jingyi says in an audible undertone to Jin Ling. Sizhui smiles slightly but doesn’t say anything. A-Ying puts one hand up and Sizhui reaches into the basket and pulls out a handful of green vegetation. Jin Ling has no idea what they are, he doesn’t recognise them, but then that’s not surprising, since the Cloud Recesses apparently has all manner of green leafy things that don’t exist in Koi Tower, judging by the food he’s been served since he arrived here.

A-Ying, for all his enthusiasm when they first arrived, calms considerably when he’s feeding the rabbits. He holds each green leafy thing in his hand, face creased in concentration as if it is taking all his mental strength to stay very still. The rabbits nibble at the plants and don’t seem particularly bothered by the people in their enclosure. One of them hops up to Jin Ling and tries to climb the hem of his robes. He stares at it. He doesn’t want to shake it off. It looks too fragile for that.

“Get off,” he says.

Sizhui picks the rabbit up and holds it in his arms, apparently not caring that it’s probably dirty. Jingyi hunches down to help A-Ying feed the rabbits. There are so many of them, but it feels— peaceful here, in a way that Jin Ling has never felt in the rest of the Cloud Recesses. He knows that the whole vibe of the place was supposed to be peaceful but he’s always on edge when he’s here. All those damn rules make him feel like he’s always one wrong move from Lan Qiren materialising out of the shadows to yell at him.

“How long have these been here?” he asks Sizhui.

“As long as I’ve been here,” Sizhui says. “Hanguang-jun has looked after them since before I remember.”

Jin Ling blinks at that. “These rabbits belong to Hanguang-jun?”

“No, pets are not allowed in Cloud Recesses,” says Sizhui, smiling his small smile that he wears at his most shit-eating. “But Hanguang-jun looks after them.”

Jin Ling looks between him and the multitude of rabbits, and tries to imagine Hanguang-jun feeding rabbits like this. It gives him a bit of a headache. He sighs and goes to help A-Ying avoid being buried under some of the more enthusiastic ones.

——

A-Ying plants his feet firmly on the ground and folds his arms across his chest. For all he comes up to Jin Ling’s knee, he’s weirdly intimidating. “No!” he says loudly. “Won’t!”

It’s a little galling, Jin Ling thinks, to realise that he has absolutely no patience for children. There have never really been all that many around Koi Tower, and what few there were had tended to be kept out of the way. It’s not like Jin Ling has much patience anyway — he’s self-aware enough to know that — but he assumed it would be more, with children. Easier, somehow, to forgive them their foibles.

Or perhaps it’s just that A-Ying really is being a fucking pain in the ass. Judging by the way even Sizhui looks frazzled, it’s possibly that.

“A-Ying,” says Sizhui helplessly. “Look at you, you must take a bath. You’re all dirty.”

A-Ying rubs at his face, like he’s trying to wipe away the evidence of any dirt, like it’s not caked on his hands too. He has leaves in his hair and what looks like an errant twig too. They’re just lucky that they brushed him off before they brought him inside because the thought of all that dirt on the floor of Hanguang-jun’s very clean house makes Jin Ling feel a little faint.

“No!” A-Ying shouts, stamping his foot a little. “No bath! Won’t! No!”

“For god’s sake,” Jingyi mutters, and makes to simply grab A-Ying. A-Ying evades him, which, of course he does; Jin Ling wasn’t aware that Wei Wuxian was a contortionist in a previous life but that’s clearly the only reason for how A-Ying manages to slide out of Jingyi’s grasp with an inch to spare. He runs to the other side of the room, farthest away from the steaming bathtub, and presses his back up against the wall like he wants to stick to it.

Jin Ling stomps over to him and looms over him purposely, hands on his hips. “I’ve never met as big a brat as you,” he tells A-Ying.

“Pot and kettle over here,” Jingyi says.

A-Ying considers this. He puts his own hands on his hips, his bottom lip sticking out petulantly. Then, after a moment, he sticks his tongue out at Jin Ling.

Jin Ling snaps. “Listen here, you little shit,” he hisses, “you better go take a bath right now, or else I’ll get my dog Fairy to eat you.”

There is a beat of silence. Then A-Ying’s bottom lip trembles. That’s the only warning Jin Ling gets before the kid suddenly bursts into tears.

Jin Ling blinks. “Oh no,” Sizhui gasps, and then he shoves Jin Ling away so he can gather the screaming child into his arms. A-Ying is almost hysterical, the force of his crying making his whole body shudder. The tears mix with the dirt on his face and creates a disgustingly brown paste that is currently being smeared all over Sizhui’s white robes. Sizhui does not seem to notice as he rocks A-Ying back and forth saying in a soothing voice, “It’s okay, A-Ying, this gege didn’t mean that, he won’t really feed you to his dog, please stop crying—”

“Oh, we’re going to die,” Jingyi moans. He crumples to the floor like he’s just been stabbed, sprawling out against the floorboards in a dramatic pose. “Hanguang-jun is going to kill us, Jin Ling, how could you do this to us?”

Jin Ling doesn’t know what to say. A-Ying shows no signs of being soothed by Sizhui and Jin Ling feels — shocked, and underneath it, incredibly guilty. He remembers his uncle threatening to feed him to the dogs when he was a kid and it never upset him quite like this. “What—”

“He’s scared of dogs,” Jingyi says, lifting himself up onto his elbows so he can glare at Jin Ling. “Did you seriously forget that?”

Jin Ling had, a little. “I’m sorry,” he says, mostly to A-Ying, but also to Sizhui, who, in between rubbing A-Ying’s back and stroking his hair, is giving Jin Ling the dirtiest look he’s capable of. On anyone else, the look wouldn’t be all that potent, but on Sizhui’s face, it is— highly effective. Jin Ling wants the ground to swallow him whole.

A-Ying is crying so hard that his breathing is starting to hitch in a worrying way. Jin Ling goes down to his knees next to Sizhui and tries to also stroke A-Ying’s hair. A-Ying flinches away from him and Jin Ling almost starts crying himself.

“I’m sorry, A-Ying,” he says again. “I’m sorry, no dogs, okay? I was wrong, no dogs.”

A-Ying still does not stop crying; he’s going to make himself sick soon, and Sizhui looks as if he’s having the same thought, judging from the concerned tone in his voice as he coos at A-Ying. Jingyi lays his face back down on the floor and groans, “I’m too young to die. Sizhui is too pretty to die. I can’t even come back and haunt Jin Ling because he’s also going to die.”

“You could come and help,” Jin Ling snaps.

“How?” Jingyi shouts straight into the wooden floor.

From the door, a deep and horribly familiar voice says, “A-Ying.”

Everyone in the room freezes apart from A-Ying, who wrenches himself out of Sizhui’s hold and hurtles to the door. Hanguang-jun bends to intercept him and lifts him easily into his arms, where A-Ying presses his face into his neck and finally, finally, begins to stop crying.

Jin Ling and Sizhui stare at Hanguang-jun, who looks placidly back at them. Jingyi looks like he’s trying to become one with the floor and pass on from this life. Hanguang-jun runs a hand down A-Ying’s back and eventually says, “What happened?”

Jingyi sits up and says, “Jin Ling told him that if he didn’t take a bath, his dog would eat him.”

Jin Ling’s going to let Fairy eat Jingyi. He should have known Jingyi would snitch, the bastard. Jin Ling gives him the meanest glare he can manage and then looks at Hanguang-jun, who has shown no reaction whatsoever. Jin Ling has spent most of his life being intimidated by this man and a year of actually knowing him has not diminished that at all. Even Sizhui, who was raised by Hanguang-jun, looks like he’s moments away from throwing himself to the ground in supplication.

“I wasn’t,” he manages, after Hanguang-jun does nothing but just look at them for almost a full minute, “actually going to— you know—”

A-Ying is still crying, but they’re just little hitches of breath into Hanguang-jun’s neck. His robes too are a little dirty, and probably gross with little kid tears and snot too, now. “No dogs,” A-Ying mumbles tearfully, clutching at Hanguang-jun’s collar with his little fingers. “Zhan-gege, no dogs.”

“A-Ying,” Hanguang-jun says. “There is no dog here. There never will be dogs here.”

Sizhui stands and goes tentatively over to Hanguang-jun, who allows it. There is something, Jin Ling feels, to approaching Hanguang-jun-holding-A-Ying that feels like approaching a tiger protecting a cub. There’s an art to it, a way of doing it that ensures that you won’t end up losing an arm. Sizhui seems to be an expert because he gets close enough to pat A-Ying’s hair and says, “Jin Ling was just joking, A-Ying. He just wanted you to be a good boy and take a bath.”

“Hate baths,” A-Ying mumbles.

For a split second, Hanguang-jun looks eternally long-suffering. His expression clears so fast that Jin Ling almost misses it, but he definitely saw it. He wonders, a little nastily, if Hanguang-jun planned his evening appointment simply so that he could miss bathtime for once.

“We know, A-Ying,” says Sizhui. “But good boys must take their baths before they can sleep. You’re a good boy, aren’t you? Won’t you take a bath and then Jingyi will make up a story for you?”

“Hey,” Jingyi says, and Jin Ling kicks him in the fucking ribs.

A-Ying has his thumb in his mouth now, looking at Sizhui through his hair, his eyes red and swollen. His face is tear-stained and he looks very young and also very tired. Jin Ling feels even more guilty; A-Ying is just a kid. Jin Ling is fifteen now and even he sometimes feels like crying when he’s tired. No wonder A-Ying was being such a brat.

He, too, approaches Hanguang-jun, who definitely watches him warily. Jin Ling ignores him very determinately and says, “I’m really sorry, A-Ying. Let’s take a bath, okay?”

After a moment, A-Ying nods. Like his older counterpart, he doesn’t seem to really hold grudges. He’s still clutching at Hanguang-jun’s robes but when Sizhui tries to take him, he goes easily enough. Hanguang-jun’s robes really are ruined though. Jin Ling doesn’t really feel bad about that — that’s what you get for wearing white robes around a three-year-old.

Hanguang-jun stays to supervise bathtime, sitting at his low table, a book open on the surface that he doesn’t seem to be reading. Sizhui manages to strip A-Ying down and gets him into the tub before the water goes too cold. Once he’s in the tub, A-Ying seems to be perfectly happy to splash around. He alternates between singing nonsense songs and splashing Jingyi who has his face propped up against the edge of the tub and splashes back, as Sizhui gently washes the dirt from A-Ying’s hair.

Jin Ling sits on the floor and watches Hanguang-jun out of the corner of his eye, trying to not make it obvious although he imagines Hanguang-jun has noticed. Watching Hanguang-jun with A-Ying has been a — revelation, Jin Ling supposes. Jin Ling is, he is starting to realise with some level of discomfort, very much like Uncle Jiang — his anger is quick and his affection is hidden. He’s not sure exactly what he got from Jin Guangyao, which had been something of a relief to realise, even though on some level he thinks his Little Uncle did genuinely care for him, as much as he had been able to care for anyone.

But the point was that Uncle Jiang’s affection may be hidden but Jin Ling has always been assured of it; Uncle Jiang may threaten him at every opportunity, but he has never once hurt Jin Ling. With Uncle Jiang, Jin Ling knows exactly where he stands. Jin Ling can look at his uncle and see exactly how his uncle influenced his upbringing.

Jin Ling looks at Sizhui, who is gentle and kind, soft-spoken but warm in what he does say, clearly good-hearted, and has often wondered how such a person was raised by Hanguang-jun, cold and severe. Hanguang-jun, who has always intimidated Jin Ling in a way that Uncle Jiang never managed, quiet and stoic and self-assured in a way that seems to verge on arrogance at points. The more Jin Ling got to know Sizhui, the more his confusion grew. It was hard to imagine anyone raised by Hanguang-jun growing with such openness, growing without becoming cramped and small, especially under the weight of the Lan clan rules and regulations.

Jin Ling has spent more time around Hanguang-jun over the past year than he probably did the rest of his life previously, but even that level of exposure has not been enough to fix it. But now, he thinks maybe he gets it. Hanguang-jun is not cold, maybe. His affection is not even hidden — it is all there in the ways he strokes A-Ying’s hair, or holds him close. Even now, he is a calm, steady presence in the room, listening to A-Ying’s singing with his usual unruffled expression.

Sizhui lifts A-Ying out of the tub and wraps him in a big white towel. It is so big that A-Ying almost completely disappears underneath it. He laughs, delighted, and then laughs harder when Jingyi goes, “Ah!” and pulls the edges closer together so that A-Ying vanishes.

“Oh no,” says Sizhui with a grin. “Where did A-Ying go?”

“I’m here!” A-Ying protests. He tries to fight his way out but Jingyi pulls A-Ying into his arms and holds him there so that A-Ying remains covered up.

“He disappeared!” Jingyi says, using his legs to hold A-Ying when the child tries his contortionist act again. “Jin Ling, what should we do?”

“Well, if he’s disappeared, I suppose he doesn’t need a bedtime story,” Jin Ling says.

“I want a bedtime story!” A-Ying says in muffled outrage. When Jingyi loosens his hold, A-Ying emerges with ruffled hair and a look of betrayal on his face. He points at Sizhui accusingly. “You said I get a bedtime story!”

Sizhui says, “A-Ying, of course you’ll get a story.” He holds up a tiny pair of white pants. “But you have to put on some clothes first.”

This takes longer than Jin Ling would have expected and by the time they’ve wrestled A-Ying into the pants and a matching white sleeping shirt, he’s so weary he lays back and sprawls out on the floor. Jingyi flops his head down onto Jin Ling’s stomach, mumbling something tiredly. A-Ying says, hopefully, “Story?”

Hanguang-jun stands, then. He walks to where they are and reaches down and lifts A-Ying into his arms. “I will read to him,” he says in his usual measured voice. A-Ying cheers and tugs a little on Hanguang-jun’s hair. “You may go rest.”

They don’t, it turns out, need to be told twice; they practically run out of there. A-Ying waves cheerfully goodbye at them as the door slides shut behind them. Outside, the air is cool, the breeze only slight, and the sky is clear, the stars stark against the darkness. Sizhui leads them from the Jingshi with practised ease, even in the darkness. He knows exactly where to put his feet, and so does Jingyi. Only Jin Ling follows at a relatively more cautious pace.

They’re a good distance from the Jingshi, far enough that nobody is going to overhear, when Jingyi says, “Hanguang-jun really hates bath time doesn’t he.”

“I do not blame him,” Jin Ling says, as Sizhui’s laughter rings out.

——

The conference wraps up the next day and the other clans leave, taking with them the kind of bustle and energy that is usually missing from the Cloud Recesses. Jiang Wanyin leaves without saying goodbye, and without apparently having found out anything useful that could actually help. Lan Wangji is not at all surprised, but it does make him feel more secure in his choice to keep A-Ying from the man as much as possible over the past few days.

Later, in the evening, after they have eaten and the usual quiet stillness has settled over them, Lan Wangji leaves A-Ying drawing at a table in the Jingshi and, in a move that is horribly reminiscent of those long, sad years of his seclusion, and the lonely times after, retreats outside with his guqin to play.

It’s true that he’s grown used to having a small child around him again, like using a muscle that he hadn’t quite realised had gone weak. A-Ying is nothing like what Sizhui was like as a child, but it’s similar enough. But even as he gets used to it, Lan Wangji can’t bring himself to like it, for obvious reasons. Sometimes he just needs to lick his metaphorical wounds, and he has always done that through playing music. He sits on the outside balcony overlooking the pond, green with life in the late spring evening. Curfew is not for a while yet, but even if it was, the Jingshi is set far enough back that his playing rarely disturbs the quiet. Besides, even his uncle stopped bothering him about playing after hours at some point down the line.

He doesn’t play Inquiry like he did for years, sitting outside like this. There is, after all, no point. But he does sit straight-backed and stiff and pluck out the notes for Wangxian, over and over again, starting again when he reaches the end. He keeps half-expecting to hear the sound of a flute joining in, but there is nothing, not even the sound of A-Ying talking to himself like he usually does as he plays.

He’s not sure how long he sits there playing. The weather is warm enough for it, the night still enough, and his mood is just low enough that he feels himself sink into the kind of fugue state that he once craved like nothing else. To be nothing more than a body playing music, not a human being at all with feelings and emotions that run so deep and true that he drowns in them, no matter how much people degrade him as cold as ice.

Time passes in a haze of longing notes, and the sky is full dark before he feels a slight tug at his sleeve. He stills the string with one hand, the sound of the music echoing in the still air, and turns to see A-Ying looking at him with solemn eyes. “Yes?” Lan Wangji says softly.

“Zhan-gege is sad?” A-Ying asks. It is the most serious Lan Wangji has seen the child be. He treats most things in life with the same irreverence Wei Ying does, a trait that is admittedly more understandable in a small child. But just like Wei Ying knows when to be serious, so must A-Ying.

“Yes,” Lan Wangji says after a moment of silence. Sad is not quite the right word but he supposes that is part of it.

A-Ying clambers into his lap, apparently not expecting that he should wait for permission or that Lan Wangji will turf him out; he seems to view this as his place to be. He would not be incorrect. Lan Wangji moves the guqin out of the way before A-Ying can kick it. A-Ying takes one of Lan Wangji’s hands and holds his fingers in his own small ones. “Why is Zhan-gege sad?” he asks.

Now, isn’t that a question. It feels strange to have to tell the reason he’s sad why he’s sad. He struggles, for a long few seconds, to think of what to say. A-Ying just plays with his hand, waiting with a patience that he doesn’t usually show. It’s so reminiscent of Wei Ying that Lan Wangji actually feels a worrying sting of tears.

“Someone I love is gone,” he says eventually, barely more than a whisper. “And I don’t know how I can get him back.”

A-Ying takes that in. “Oh,” he says. “Where did he go?”

“Far away,” Lan Wangji says, putting a hand against A-Ying’s hair and stroking gently. “Very far.”

“Oh,” says A-Ying again. Then he adds, a little brighter, “If you’re sad your friend left, you should eat candy. Red dot gege left today, and that made me sad, so I ate candy. Then I was happy again.”

Lan Wangji finds himself smiling, just a little, hiding it behind his hair as he leans forward to press his mouth to the top of A-Ying’s head. If only he could have a child’s simplicity. “Candy,” he echoes.

“Yes, candy!” A-Ying struggles out of his hold, wriggling like a worm. He possesses an unnerving ability to go seemingly boneless when he’s escaping but Lan Wangji lets him go easily. A-Ying stands up and says, “Zhan-gege should eat some candy.”

Lan Wangji raises an eyebrow at him. He suspects that this conversation is going to end up with him giving A-Ying a lot of candy and having none for himself. He also knows candy is not, in fact, going to fix this.

Undeterred, A-Ying turns on his tail and runs out of the room, the sound of his bare feet loud as they slap against the wood flooring. Lan Wangji blinks after him, then turns to set the guqin away. It is getting closer to bedtime, for both him and A-Ying, and there is the ordeal of bath time to go through first. Always, always the ordeal of bathtime.

A-Ying returns before Lan Wangji has climbed to his feet. He’s holding something in his fist that he drops with great ceremony into Lan Wangji’s lap. It’s two pieces of candy, one of them half-unwrapped, sticky with who only knew what.

“Xichen-ge gave me these,” A-Ying says, unnecessarily, for Lan Wangji was there for it, “but Zhan-gege can have them.”

Lan Wangji looks down at the pieces of candy, which are no doubt getting his pristine white robes dirty and sticky, and this time the sting of tears is overwhelming. He feels one slip down his cheek before he can stop himself. He hasn’t allowed himself to cry over this yet. There is something final about tears, something that feels a little like giving up. He desperately does not want to give up.

“Zhan-gege?” A-Ying sounds distressed, and Lan Wangji can’t help but duck his head, trying to hide his face almost by instinct at this point. He has never really allowed anyone to see him cry. Wei Ying has seen it only because there can be no hiding from each other, but Lan Wangji really doesn’t like it all the same. Tears feel indulgent in a way that Lan Wangji has never allowed himself to be.

A-Ying reaches up and Lan Wangji thinks, for a moment, that A-Ying is going to wipe at his tears. Instead he hooks his arms around Lan Wangji’s neck and pulls him into a clumsy hug. Lan Wangji has no idea where such a small child could have picked up something like this, this haphazard attempt at comfort. Lan Wangji lets out a sob, heartfelt and accidental, and then reigns himself in.

He pulls A-Ying back into his lap and hugs him close, feeling the warmth of the little body, the way A-Ying can’t keep himself from wriggling, just a little, even as he keeps hugging around Lan Wangji’s neck. This is different to before, he reminds himself firmly. This, he at least knows, is temporary; this time there are people willing to help him get Wei Ying back. It is no longer a quiet world of grief and bone-deep sadness. He has something to hold onto this time.

“There, there,” A-Ying says, patting the top of his head clumsily. “There, there.”

They sit for a long time. He expects A-Ying to eventually struggle away but A-Ying doesn’t. He keeps hugging Lan Wangji until Lan Wangji feels his tiny head droop against Lan Wangji’s shoulder. When he looks, A-Ying is almost asleep. The sky is fully dark and it’s probably past time to sleep. There is something inside him that feels— easier, maybe. It still all feels like a nightmare but nightmares, he remembers, always end.

He stands, smoothing a hand across A-Ying’s hair as he walks back into the Jingshi. “Come,” he says, as A-Ying mumbles sleepily at him. “We shall sleep.”

——

Lan Wangji wakes suddenly. When he opens his eyes it is still dark out. Not the darkness of early morning, before the sun has truly begun to climb over the horizon, but truly dark, the darkness of the middle of the night. He stares at the ceiling letting his eyes adjust. He’s not accustomed to waking in the middle of the night. Wei Ying has often joked that Lan Wangji sleeping is like that of a corpse, years of dedicated routine lending itself to a kind of sleep that stretches the whole night through. But something has woken him tonight.

There’s another body in the bed beside him. That hasn’t been unusual the past week. He often wakes in the morning to find that at some point in the night, A-Ying has left his own small bed that was set up for him and crawled into Lan Wangji’s bed, to sprawl out against him. It takes Lan Wangji longer than it should to realise that what he’s feeling isn’t a knee against his side or an elbow pressing into his chest. Instead, he is feeling an adult body against him, a body whose weight and heft feels familiar.

He looks down, and sees Wei Ying’s face, or the one that at least houses Wei Ying now: the delicate nose, the pointed chin, the eyes closed in sleep. The dark hair an unbound mess. Not the child anymore, but instead the living breathing Wei Ying, naked and sleeping against him.

He must make some kind of noise because Wei Ying stirs, just a little, and blinks his eyes open. He squints at Lan Wangji and then lets out an oof as Lan Wangji gathers him up and practically crushes him to his chest. Lan Wangji’s blood rushes in his ears. He thinks, for one long, terrifying second, that he might start to cry again, after everything.

“Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying wraps one arm around Lan Wangji’s back and with the other pets his hair, lightly. He sounds confused and concerned in equal measures, and also like he’s still mostly asleep. “Lan Zhan,” he says, his breath brushing against Lan Wangji’s ear. “Lan Zhan, I had the weirdest dream.”