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If you asked Wei Wuxian, the worst thing about being a parent was the nightmares.
Specifically, the fact that A-Yuan never woke him.
It wasn’t that Wei Wuxian liked being woken up in the middle of the night – who did? But more often than not, Wei Wuxian only found out about the nightmares in the morning. Sometimes, it was A-Yuan’s grogginess and grumpiness that gave him away, but more often Wei Wuxian would find his son wedged into the corner of his room in a little ball, sleeping uneasily with tear-tracks still tacky on his cheeks.
More recently, he’d almost broken his neck twice coming out of his room to find A-Yuan slumped across the floor like a draft blocker. When he was feeling hopeful, Wei Wuxian took it as a good sign – at least A-Yuan was getting a little closer to asking for help.
But it was hard to think of that as a victory. Wei Wuxian had tried everything he could think of to help A-Yuan with his nightmares, but nothing had worked, and he couldn’t understand it. During the day, if anything scared or upset A-Yuan he would run to Wei Wuxian with a speed to rival a race car, but at night…
At night, no matter how crippling the nightmare, A-Yuan would never wake him. Wei Wuxian had lost count of the number of times he’d assured A-Yuan it was alright, or the number of times he’d explicitly told him to come to Baba’s bedroom if he was upset. He’d even installed a small doorbell beside A-Yuan’s nightstand, setting it up to ring in Wei Wuxian’s bedroom so A-Yuan could wake him without even leaving his own bed.
A-Yuan had absolutely no problem ringing the bell incessantly on a Saturday morning when he thought it was time for Baba to get up.
But if he had a nightmare…
If he had a nightmare, A-Yuan became as silent as a ghost.
Tonight, Wei Wuxian only knew something was wrong because he himself woke up in desperate need of the bathroom. He’d almost missed it anyway, rolling over and burying his head in the pillow, wondering if he could get away with going back to sleep. In the end, though, he’d begrudgingly accepted defeat, slumping out of bed and shuffling into the tiny en suite without even bothering to open his eyes.
Business attended to, he flopped back down onto bed, burrowing under the blankets –
And then he heard it.
The tiniest, muffled little sniffle, right outside his door.
With a soft sigh, Wei Wuxian sat up in bed, flicking on the bedside lamp. “A-Yuan?” he called softly, rubbing his eyes. “Is that you, little radish?”
Predictably, another hushed sob was the only reply.
Wei Wuxian rolled back out of bed, padding across the bedroom floor and opening the door. Sure enough, sitting on the floor outside Wei Wuxian’s door with his knees hugged tightly to his chest was his five-year-old son. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he cried quietly, but the moment he saw Wei Wuxian he raised his arms up, gazing tragically at him.
“Oh, little radish,” Wei Wuxian murmured, scooping him up and hugging him close. “What’s the matter, hm? Did you have a bad dream?”
A-Yuan gave a little sob, nodding into Wei Wuxian’s shoulder. Humming softly, Wei Wuxian rubbed his son’s back, rocking him back and forth slightly.
“It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’s alright, now, A-Yuan, it’s okay. You don’t need to be scared anymore, Baba’s here.”
But A-Yuan keened wordlessly, shaking his head and clinging closer.
“Oh?” Wei Wuxian asked teasingly. “Am I not here? Aiya, A-Yuan, if I’m not here, where am I?”
To his dismay, A-Yuan only keened again, grabbing at Wei Wuxian’s arms so desperately his little hands pinched him. “Baba!” he sobbed. “Baba, my Baba!” The words were mangled by sobs and muffled by Wei Wuxian’s pyjamas, but there was a desperation to them that broke Wei Wuxian’s heart.
“Baba is here,” he promised, stroking A-Yuan’s hair. “Baba is here, Baba has you. You’re safe, A-Yuan. I promise. Baba’s here.” A-Yuan whimpered, shaking his head, and Wei Wuxian paused. “…did you have a dream that Baba was gone?”
Sobbing, A-Yuan nodded, garbling out another couple of mangled words into Wei Wuxian’s pyjamas.
“Ah…” Wei Wuxian swallowed, pressing a kiss to the stop of his son’s hair. “Did it scare you?”
“Scared,” A-Yuan sobbed, his little hands tangling in Wei Wuxian’s hair. “Scared and sad and scared, Baba!”
“I’m sorry,” Wei Wuxian murmured, carrying A-Yuan into the master bedroom and sitting down on his bed. “But you don’t need to be scared, or to be sad. I’m here. Baba’s here.” He settled A-Yuan in his lap, cuddling him close. “Do you want to talk about it?” A-Yuan shook his head violently, and Wei Wuxian kissed his hair. “You don’t have to. You don’t have to. But Baba is here now. Baba’s here, with A-Yuan. Baba won’t leave you.” He hummed, rocking A-Yuan back and forth as a lump rose in his throat.
Wei Wuxian wished that he could soothe away A-Yuan’s fears with a promise to stay with him forever, but A-Yuan had already lost his parents once. He already knew that sometimes, the grownups who love you are taken away. That sometimes, they can’t come back.
Wei Wuxian had learnt that at an early age, too.
As A-Yuan’s sobs slowly subsided, Wei Wuxian eased him back gently, just far enough to meet his eyes. “A-Yuan, do you remember our promise?” he asked, wiping the tears grom his son’s cheek with his thumb. Sniffling, A-Yuan met his eye, and Wei Wuxian smiled. “What’s our promise?”
A-Yuan’s lip wobbled. “N-no matter wh-what, Baba w-will always t-try to find me.”
“That’s right,” Wei Wuxian said, poking his nose. “No matter what happens, no matter what I have to do, I will always, always do everything I can to get back to A-Yuan. If I have to swim through the biggest, coldest ocean, or if I have to fight my way through the nastiest monsters, or even if I have to climb over the highest mountain in the world with stilts on, I will do anything to make sure I will stay with A-Yuan.”
A weak little smile tugged at the corners of A-Yuan’s mouth, and he snuggled closer, gazing up at Wei Wuxian. “What if… what if you have to fight a hundred dogs?”
Wei Wuxian gave an exaggerated shudder. “I’m going to have words with your shushu,” he scolded, and A-Yuan giggled. Smiling wryly, Wei Wuxian kissed the end of his nose. “For A-Yuan, I would fight a thousand dogs.”
“Really?” A-Yuan whispered, and Wei Wuxian nodded seriously.
“Really. We’re a family, A-Yuan. I’m your Baba, and you’re my A-Yuan, and there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Even fight dogs.”
A-Yuan’s lip wobbled again, and he put a hand on Wei Wuxian’s cheek. “I would fight the dogs for you, too, Baba.”
Wei Wuxian smiled, kissing A-Yuan’s palm. “Thank you, little radish. But really, I don’t think anyone will need to fight any dogs. That’s Shushu’s job.”
Sniffing, A-Yuan nestled against Wei Wuxian’s chest. He was quiet for a moment, but then he let out a low, shuddering breath.
“Baba?” he mumbled, voice so quiet Wei Wuxian hardly heard it.
“Mn?”
“How… how big do I have to be before they stop?”
Wei Wuxian frowned. “Before what stop?”
“…the nightmares,” A-Yuan whispered. “I – I know big boys don’t, don’t have them, but – how big do I have to be?”
Wei Wuxian’s frown deepened. “Big boys do have nightmares sometimes, A-Yuan. Everyone has nightmares.”
An expression of abject horror flooded A-Yuan’s face. “Wh-what?! They don’t go away, they don’t ever?!”
Wei Wuxian grimaced, the guilt of breaking what had clearly been a long-held hope of his son’s stinging sharply in his chest. “I’m sorry to have tell you this, little radish, but even grownups get nightmares. They won’t always happen so often, and the bad dreams you’re having now will go away eventually, but everyone gets bad dreams sometimes.”
A-Yuan’s eyes filled with tears, and Wei Wuxian’s heart ached. “Really?”
“Really,” Wei Wuxian admitted. A thought struck him, aching between his ribs. A-Yuan had been going through a phase of very adamantly insisting he was a big boy... “A-Yuan… is that why you don’t want to wake me up at night? Because you think big boys don’t get nightmares?”
“No,” A-Yuan protested, his voice embarrassed enough to indicate that was part of it, and indignant enough to show that wasn’t the whole problem.
“Having nightmares doesn’t mean you’re not a big boy,” Wei Wuxian promised, kissing A-Yuan’s forehead. “It just means you’re a human after all.” He sighed dramatically. “And here I thought you were just my little radish.”
Ignoring the teasing, A-Yuan pouted. “Do… do you have nightmares, Baba?”
“Sometimes,” Wei Wuxian admitted, and A-Yuan gazed up at him.
“What about?”
“Well… it depends,” Wei Wuxian admitted, his mind flicking through a mental rolodex of nightmares he would never admit aloud to a single soul, let alone his five year old son. The last thing they needed was A-Yuan having nightmares about his father’s nightmares. “Sometimes my bad dreams seem really silly when I wake up – once I dreamt that I was being attacked by an army of teenie-tiny elephants,” he held his hands a few inches apart, “and when I woke up that didn’t seem scary at all. But while I was asleep…” he gave a dramatic shudder, and A-Yuan giggled. A moment later, however, his smile died.
“Sometimes my dreams are silly,” A-Yuan said, his voice small. “But sometimes… sometimes it’s just scary, and sad, and it feels so real… does Baba have dreams like that?”
“Mn. I do.”
“What about?”
Wei Wuxian sighed, hugging his son close. “Well… sometimes, I dream about the day I lost you at the supermarket,” he admitted. “But in my dream, I can’t find you at all, and that makes me very, very sad, and very, very scared.”
A-Yuan looked up at him in amazement. “Baba… Baba dreams about losing A-Yuan?”
Wei Wuxian nodded, kissing his son’s forehead. “But even though those nightmares feel real, they’re silly too. Because I’m not going anywhere – and neither are you.”
“No,” A-Yuan agreed, nestling closer. “I stay with Baba.”
“That’s right.”
“Baba… what do you do when you have a bad dream?”
Wei Wuxian considered for a moment. “When I was little, I used to go and find your Gugu. She always made me feel better – I would tell her all about the scary dream, and then she would tell me nice things. She’d talk about bunnies and butterflies and chilli peppers until I fell asleep.”
“But not now? You don’t go to Gugu now?”
“Well, Gugu doesn’t live here anymore, and she has A-Ling and Uncle Peacock to look after, doesn’t she? But with Gugu’s help, I practised thinking about nice things, and I can do it on my own now, too. Do you want me to help you practise, A-Yuan?”
To his surprise, A-Yuan hesitated, looking deep in thought. Then he reached up, putting a little hand on Wei Wuxian’s cheek. “Baba can come to me.”
Wei Wuxian blinked. “What?”
“When you have a bad dream,” A-Yuan said earnestly. “Gugu has to look over A-Ling and Gufu, but A-Yuan is here. I, I can tell you nice things, about bunnies and butterflies and everything. It’s too sad to be sad and scared on your own.”
Wei Wuxian’s eyes began to sting. How – how was his son this good? It had to be Jiejie’s influence. There was no other explanation. He hugged A-Yuan close. “That’s right, A-Yuan. It’s too sad to be sad and scared on your own. Baba doesn’t like it when A-Yuan is sad and scared on his own.”
A-Yuan glanced up at him. “…it makes Baba sad?”
Wei Wuxian nodded, stroking A-Yuan’s hair. “Just like it makes you sad to think of Baba being upset on his own.”
“Oh…” said A-Yuan in a tiny voice, lowering his head. “I’m sorry, Baba.”
“No,” Wei Wuxian said immediately, cuddling him closer. “You don’t need to be sorry, A-Yuan.”
“I don’t want you to be sad.”
“And I don’t want you to be sad, so we’ll just have to be happy together.” Wei Wuxian pulled a face. “How horrible.” A-Yuan giggled. “We’ll stick together, okay A-Yuan? You and me. When I have a bad dream, I can find you, and when you have a bad dream…”
“Find Baba,” A-Yuan said quietly. It was too soon to know if it was a breakthrough, or if A-Yuan would forget his words the next time a nightmare landed, but for now it was more than enough. Especially when he added, “I promise.” As sincere they were, A-Yuan’s words were swallowed by a yawn.
Wei Wuxian glanced at the clocks, and then winced. “Ah… we probably should try and get you back to sleep, shouldn’t we? Otherwise we’ll turn into pumpkins.”
“Pumpkins?”
“That’s right. If you don’t get enough sleep, you turn into a giant pumpkin, and then I’ll have to put you in a wheelbarrow to take you to school-”
“How will you do the wheelbarrow if you’re a pumpkin too?”
“…fair point. We should both go to sleep then.” Wei Wuxian stroked A-Yuan’s hair back. “Do you want to sleep in here with Baba, or in your own bed?”
“Here.”
“Okay. We’ll stay here tonight.” He tucked A-Yuan up under the covers, and then clambered back in himself. Instantly, A-Yuan cuddled up to his side, and Wei Wuxian put an arm around him. “Do you want me to keep the light on?” A-Yuan considered this for a moment, then shook his head. Wei Wuxian turned off the lamp and began to stroke his son’s hair. He lowered his voice, trying to mimic the slow, soothing tone that he remembered Jiejie using. “Okay, A-Yuan. Do you remember that meadow we found, up in the woods near the playground?”
“Where we got lost?”
“Exactly,” Wei Wuxian. “I want you to close your eyes, and think about that meadow. There’s a bunny rabbit there, and its fur is the snowiest white you’ve ever seen! It has big, golden eyes, and a serious face…”
Slowly, the gentle words lulled A-Yuan to sleep, and Wei Wuxian drifted off mere moments later. When morning came, it found them curled up together beneath the covers, warm and rested and safe.
Their dreams forgotten, and their promises remembered.