Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Lan Zhan is not a baby, he is six, even if saying so makes uncle go as purple as the strange, nasty man's robes and makes Brother - who is big which Lan Zhan does not understand at all, but it is Brother - gaze at him, and then at Uncle and the others with that look on his face that Lan Zhan knows is some sort of trouble. But Lan Zhan is not a baby, he also knows that he hasn't broken any rules, and his arms tighten around the bundle he is carrying.

"Mine, my Wei Ying," he says, ignoring the way the nasty man goes even more purple than uncle, and meeting the real baby's big, grey, trusting eyes with a promise in his own, "and no one will take him away."

Lan Sizhui is anything but skilled with a needle, but he is determined to complete the toy, however clumsy and badly sewn; he had seen the look in his father's - his magically tiny, magically infant father's - eyes when Uncle Xichen had produced the battered, clearly much-loved blue rabbit from wherever it had been carefully stored all these years.

Little Lan Zhan had reached out with one eager hand, his eyes huge and longing... and then faltered, and dropped his arm. "Give it to Wei Ying," he'd mumbled, his other hand still clutching the even tinier one of Lan Sizhui's other father (and how this had happened, that one had shrunk to a six-year-old but the other appeared not yet two, not even Great-Uncle or the Elders could say). "He is baby, he should have it."

Wei Ying giggled and grabbed and hugged it, and then hugged Lan Zhan for good measure, and Lan Zhan's tentative hug back had made even Great-Uncle tear up a little, deny it as he would, and did.

So Sizhui is determined to make his little father another rabbit, a different shade of blue maybe and not so expertly made, but with its own matching white headribbon and love in every pricked finger and lumpy stitch... and he knows, from the number of people who have requested blue fabric and thread from the seamstresses, that he is not the only one, and Lan Zhan and Wei Ying will have a whole menagerie of odd-shaped rabbits before the week is out.

Lan Zhan is not crying, he doesn't want to cry (or not very much), but he huddles closer to Brother and tries to block out the shouting and arguing and anger and all the big people's noise that would have frightened him had he been younger, and is starting to frighten Wei Ying, who after all is a baby. Those big grey eyes are beginning to tear up, the little smiley lips are wobbling, and the faintest traces of black smoke - "re-senful cutti-vation", Uncle had called it - are just starting to show around him.

"B-brother," Lan Zhan whispers, he doesn't want the shouting, arguing, angry, noisy people to notice the smoke, he knows they will think it is bad, that Wei Ying is bad. He doesn't know what to do, Wei Ying is just a baby and can't be bad, but some of the big people said... and no, Lan Zhan is not going to cry when he thinks about what they said. "B-brother, I-I... Wei Ying doesn't want to be here."

Brother's arms comes round him, round them both, picks them up and carries them away to somewhere quiet and safe, where Sizhui and Jingyi and not really cross, just pretending to be, Jin Ling will look after them while the adults finish being noisy.

Brother - and Uncle, and Sizhui, and Jingyi and Jin Ling - will protect Wei Ying from the "re-senful cutti-vation" and the angry people; Brother has promised.

Jin Ling is not going to apologise for sending for his other uncle and the Sect Leader for the region, no matter how big a mistake it has turned out to be and how much the others are never going to let him forget it.

And it had been a mistake; Jiang Cheng had lasted all of twelve minutes before losing his temper and yelling at two children, the six year old Hanguang-Jun and the baby Yiling Patriarch, he had lashed out - as he did, he always did - at the latter for what, saving the young disciplines from being hit by the curse? Being the ones to answer the call about the curse in the first place? Being close enough to Yunmeng to hear about the curse? What?

Who knows?

He probably didn't even mean what he'd yelled, but the tiny Yiling Patriarch had cried and the adorably bristling little Hanguang-Jun had bitten a Sect Leader, whacked him on the knee with a sword Jin Ling hadn't even thought he could lift, and now stands, trembling but determined, and fiercely hugging the sobbing baby to his small chest as he glares at his supposed brother-in-law.

Jin Ling's brilliant idea of taking the afflicted couple to Lotus Pier - never one that would pass muster with the Lan disciples but damn it, it is closer than Gusu! - dies the minute Lan Zhan proves that cursed or not, child or not, he is as protective of his Wei Ying as ever...

Xichen might have been forced to doubt himself and his judgement, but he knows what he saw, in the faint wisps of darkness that curled around the tiny body cuddled in his brother's arms; Wei Wuxian may have turned into a baby but the resentful energy is still there inside him, and if others realise that...

But no, both children are safely asleep now and he will watch over, protect and shield, and comfort them as best he can until the curse can be lifted and they return to themselves. What else can a big brother do?