Chapter Text
"Wei Wuxian is running himself ragged trying to find a cure, isn't he?"
Jiang Wanyin is sitting upright on his bed, feet touching the floor and face pale. He looks to the side towards her.
"Tell him not to try so hard. There's no point anyways."
Wen Qing has seen many cultivators who have lost their cores to Wen Zhuliu but none have given her the amount of worry the man in front of her does. Jiang Wanyin goes back to his staring blankly at the wall in front of him and pays her no attention as she sets down the bowl of congee on the low table.
"Jiang Wanyin." He does not even blink. "You should eat. You need to get your strength back."
Jiang Wanyin does blink at that and even lets out a laugh. It is as bitter as the medicines she has given him for the past few days and which he has refused to drink.
"For what? What strength could a mediocre person even get back? And what can I do with it? Isn't it better to just die?"
The utter lack of regard for himself hurts her more than she would admit to him and maybe that is why she slaps him. There is not much strength behind it; she's not much of a cultivator after all and Jiang Wanyin doesn't even move much from his previous position. He is, however, enraged.
"You-! What did you do that for?!"
The anger is enough for her to feel relief, it being the first time that his face has rearranged itself into anything apart from self-loathing or bitterness.
Wen Qing loosely grabs the collar of his robes to slightly drag him forwards. His eyes dart down to her hands, then up to her face, which she brings level to his, with only a few cun separating them.
"Do you think my brother and yours both risked their lives to save you just so you can die? Do you think I healed you just so that you can starve yourself to death? Listen up, Jiang Wanyin," she grabs tighter onto his robes, bringing him even closer, "if I get back here and see that you haven't finished this bowl of congee, I will go and tell your jiejie that you are determined to die. You can face her tears and worry afterwards. And then," Wen Qing lets go of him roughly, pushing him slightly backwards on the bed, "and then I will get my needles out."
Threat made complete, she leaves him to it, his dazed eyes following her as she walks out the door. She pretends she can't see it, the same way she pretended on Dafan Mountain.
When she comes back, the bowl isn't empty but there is a sizable dent to it and she considers it a victory.
Jiang Wanyin eats more and more over the next few days, and Wen Qing realises the limitless extent to which she can invoke Jiang Yanli as a threat to her two younger brothers. She does not feel guilty.
One particular night, Jiang Wanyin wanders into her study, looking slightly lost and more than a bit intrigued. Wen Qing is nursing both a headache from staring at reports too long and a cup of wine.
"Is it…." Jiang Wanyin hesitates as he stands by the threshold. Wen Qing waves him in, too tired to bother about propriety. He comes in to stand before her, looking unsure. "Is it normal…? To feel so...empty?" He looks away but Wen Qing does not move, and lets him speak.
"Sometimes...it feels like I have something in me after all, a strange sort of warmth whips past. And then- then there's pain, and it feels like- like when he-" He does not look at her while he speaks, and Wen Qing is getting up and crossing over to him and wiping the tears from his cheeks before she knows it. He pulls away from her abruptly, resolutely not looking her in the eye.
"I just- do you maybe have some sleeping tonic? Or something? Just for tonight. I can't, I can't- '' She does not know whether he's in pain or whether it's the emptiness within him, but the tears flow and he looks so lost and Wen Qing's heart hurts to look at him-
And then they're both sitting down on the small bed beside her table, his head bowed, her arms around him trying to be an anchor, to try quell the emptiness and grief with the warmth of her arms and the knowledge of another person being with him in this moment. The tears don't stop for a long time, and Wen Qing runs her hands through his hair, rubs circles on his back as he cries silently.
The next night, Jiang Wanyin comes into her study again, this time looking anxious. They had both fallen asleep curled up on the bed, him drowsy with the sheer exhaustion that tears bring when they fall in their hundreds and her with tiredness from the workload but Jiang Wanyin had slipped out of the room sometime before she woke in the morning.
Now he stands where he stood yesterday, nervous but more put together. He still does not look at her.
"Lady Wen, I- I've come to apologise for...my conduct yesterday. It was rude of me to-"
"You idiot-" Like the last night, she is standing in front of him before she knows it, but unlike the last night, she grabs the front of his robes, pulls him down and kisses him square on the mouth. When she pulls back, he is looking straight at her, a bit dazed and in awe. She kisses him again.
They also end up on the bed this time too.
The nights repeat themselves like that, and Wen Qing finds herself looking forward to them so much that she has to take some moments to centre herself before going back to her reports so that she can be free early for the night.
And then, when the time comes, she is waiting, ready as Jiang Wanyin walks in through the door. She makes sure to wear the comb he has given her.
Wen Qing finds hope hidden in the crevices of Jiang Wanyin's neck, imagines warmth of a benevolent sun in his arms and wonders of a future where she could have this indefinitely- not as a secret or a shame, but a union with her head held high. In his arms, she can be A-Qing.
But outside of it, she is his enemy, a traitor to her clan but one who believes that every kindness must be returned.
The last night they spend together, Wen Qing tucks Jiang Wanyin's head into her shoulder and forgets what Wei Wuxian has asked of her. Wen Qing forgets to be Wen Qing for the last time.
Desperation can make even the most knowledgeable weak prey and Wen Qing knows what it is like to want to save a sibling, the last of your family. Tomorrow, they will depart- Jiang Yanli and Song Zichen to Lanling, and the rest to the mountainous wilderness of Yiling. Tomorrow, Wen Qing will be a healer and Jiang Wanyin will be a patient. Tomorrow, she will cut into him and his brother for a sacrifice born of love and necessity. Tomorrow, she will cover up the comb Jiang Wanyin gave her in cloth, and tuck it into the folds of his robes. Tomorrow, she will deceive and today's dream will end up in flames.
But for now, for this small moment, she closes her eyes and allows herself to hope, to believe, to dream a lie.
The lie ends up solidifying itself as the truth in her womb and Wen Qing is shocked at first to even think . Why did her medicines not work? She knew the consequences and even overlooking that, war was not kind; she had been diligent so how…?
(She would later remember the bottle of incorrectly brewed medicine her brother had haphazardly stashed in the wrong place when he received news of Lotus Pier.)
Nevertheless, it is an easy thing to get rid of. But a child...Wen Qing's hand comes to rest on her stomach. Her child. Jiang Wanyin's child. The hand comes away as if burned.
In the end, her brother finds her, walking into the storeroom where they keep the prepared medicines and tonics and salves just as she is about to pick up the bottle on the table after several moments of deliberation. She stares at him. He looks at her, then moves to take the bottle.
“Jiejie, this is…” Her brother stares at the small, nondescript bottle in his hand with furrowed brows. Wen Qing looks away from the sight.
“A-Ning-” She says, voice carrying no trace of its usual confidence and hands resting over each other over her stomach slightly lower than normal. “I can’t look after a child in the middle of a war.”
But in the end, it turns out that the bottle must be kept sealed. Using the contents would be more fatal than not using it, although the consequences and what is to come is even more concerning. Wen Ning does not ask much about the child. Considering the time, he can very well guess whose it is and although he doesn't look reproachfully at her, Wen Qing still feels sorry and not sorry; sorry that this had to happen now, in wartime, when she and Jiang Wanyin are on opposite sides of the war- but she will never regret what she did, what those precious moments meant to her. In this, she knows she is selfish.
(She had wondered, before she had decided to pick up the bottle, what this child would look like. Would they have Jiang Wanyin's facial features? Would they have his eyes?
She does not admit to herself that she is happy that she can find out now.)
It is precisely because of the child and Wen Qing’s increasing paranoia that they are able to draw up a plan. They both know that the war will not end well for them either way. In Wen Ruohan’s hands, death is a thing to be anticipated every day; finding one of their family tortured and dead and then being forced to thank the Sect Leader for getting rid of traitors for the good of the Sect is a fear that they know intimately. Wen Ning and Wen Qing do not want it for the child. And they both know death would still not be the only thing awaiting a prisoner of war if the war is won by the Sunshot allies.
And so the planning begins in earnest- The location they have found and agreed upon with the more elder members of their clan is a place lying to the west of Nightless City, farther removed from the rest of the cultivation world and deep in the heart of the Qishan mountains. Here, the mountains and weather are as wild as the thick forest that covers the area and not even the QishanWen have dared to tame it.
The DafanWen leave their home on Dafan Mountain with the near certainty that they will not see it again in their lifetimes, but the knowledge that when the war ends, they will have no allies is a truth that spurns them to leave more easily. They are healers, not cultivators. They practice medicine, not killing and torturing. To live peacefully is not a luxury that has been freely given to them by Wen Ruohan. And so the DafanWen, of Dafan no more, and thinking more about whether they should leave their name behind too, disappear into the thick forests of the mountainous terrain to the west.
It is harder for Wen Qing and Wen Ning to leave, not because they are favoured by Wen Ruohan but because, before leaving, they have a mission to complete. The library in Nightless City contains a multitude of books collected and written by the DafanWen of years past- they will only be missed by the more attentive and dedicated healers still in service to Wen Ruohan, which is diminishing in numbers as the days go by and as the leader’s temper worsens even more than it already has. And more important than this- the Clan register bearing the names of the members of the DafanWen.
Wen Qing enters Nightless City with thick robes layered on. It is not the height of winter- in fact, it is nearing the end- and yet winters in Qishan are unbearably cold. Anyone who might wonder as to her attire would find that as a reasonable answer for their own thoughts. Although she had wished that Wen Ning would stay behind or go on ahead of her to their new home, she knew he would refuse if told to. And so, Wen Ning accompanies her, walking a step behind his elder sister. They had not been told to meet Wen Ruohan, to both of their relief and Wen Qing explains away the visit as one for research.
Getting to the library is simple and her presence is not a cause for surprise or concern given her identity as a high-ranking member of the Wen clan and highly capable healer. It is, however, much harder to get into the room within the library that houses the clan and sect records. Although not guarded, she knows there are several protective arrays that surround the books, and she had taken great care to learn how to dismantle all of them, except for one. She is still unsure as to the range of the array that allowed blood kin to access the records and is incredibly relieved when they all finally fall through.
With her hand reaching out for the book, she thinks she might be able to hope.
When they start to leave, qiankun pouches full of books from the library and the more important record sections concerning the DafanWen, they are greeted by Wen Ruohan’s new right hand, Meng Yao. The knot in Wen Qing’s stomach grows a little tighter. The man smiles at them, polite and slightly deferential in his greeting. They bow too, and Wen Qing knows that something else must also be done to ensure that Wen Ruohan does not come after them. It might be easy to convince him that the other DafanWens died during the war, especially since they are mostly non-cultivators of no particular interest to him. The same cannot be said for them.
Wen Qing and Wen Ning finally leave the Yiling Supervisory Office on a spring night with the call of flames and the whispers of the dead behind them. The war rages on, more and more Supervisory Offices have already been attacked and Wen Ning and Wen Qing become ghosts. In that one night, Wen Ruohan loses the prodigious healer of his clan, her brother and several highly-skilled cultivators, and the opposing forces are near enough to put the blame on.
Wen Qing wonders what they will think of her shy stutterer of a brother if they find out he set the fire with the simple loosening of a well-placed arrow.
She more determinedly does not think of how close the rumours say Jiang Wanyin is.
The escape to the mountains is not easy even with the horses and supplies they have kept for the journey. One night under the moonless sky, Wen Qing opens the DafanWen records and traces her finger down to her own name, taking note of the words that links her to her brother and the rest of her family and, with more of a tremble, to the faint words, barely even there, of child of Wen Qing. The hand with that finger trails down to cup her slightly rounded stomach. Names have to be manually entered but the relations to each other are written down automatically by the ancient spells cast on the book. The records for this section are not well-kept and she knows even the names most recently entered are the work of some diligent Wen elder, at a time before Wen Ruohan either killed or dismissed them.
The words remain and Wen Qing finds a slight solace in the fact that only blood children are linked with words that describe their relation to the closest named Wen relative. The other parents of the child have to be entered in by hand as well. Wen Qing traces the faint words again and hopes that the Jiang clan records have already been destroyed during the attack on Lotus Pier.
The other members of her family have survived the harsh winter here in this place, seeking refuge within the dark caves etched naturally into the sides of the mountain. By the time Wen Qing and Wen Ning arrive in the spring, they have cleared land for houses near enough to a stream deep into the forest and backed by the towering cliffs that house the caves. It reminds Wen Qing of Dafan. She thinks she could be happy here.
At the end of summer, when it would still be sweltering in places like Yiling, but is still cool here in the western mountains, Wen Qing's hair is damp with sweat as she grits her teeth and pushes. The pain is unbearable, muscle and tissue and skin stretching and ripping as she gasps for air and respite from pain. It hurts but Wen Qing finally brings her son into the world.
A-Yuan, she whispers as she cradles him and looks at his closed fist gripping her sweat-soaked robes. A garden, a park- greenery and trees and flowers- like the place which he has been born in, like the place his mother came from. Blame, lament- like the treachery of an unfilial daughter, like the father that he would never get to know.
Like the lotuses that grow in mud and Yunmeng lakes, and not in wild mountain parks.
And yet, a small dark flower blooms at the edge of his tiny shoulder, only visible if one were to look for it. It looks too much like a nine-petaled lotus, hiding underneath a dock or under the hull of a boat. Wen Qing's eyes linger on it more than they should.
A-Yuan is a bit on the small side, even though Popo had been adamant that Wen Qing have second helpings at every meal and not strain herself. They had not asked either- no probing questions, no reproachful looks-, welcoming the new addition with smiles and excitement. Wen Qing is thankful that she gets to have this. They are not the dreams of Yiling but they are close and she is thankful nonetheless.
Their little settlement had flourished over the spring and summer, but there still isn't enough food for all of them when the time comes for harvest. When the first leaves fall for autumn, Wen Qing asks the elders about the nearest village or town. So far, none of them have ventured out into the world they left behind and none of them know what sort of world they will return to. The strongest of the men that are not cultivators leave and Wen Ning leaves with them. Wen Qing holds her son in her arms and rocks him. The settlement trembles with trepidation and worry, until they come back with hens and a donkey and a cart and-
The village nearby is named Yuliang Village and had required several healers for the large number of displaced arriving to the fringes of Qishan to escape the war. The village had been overwhelmed and the healers that suddenly arrived were of an immense help that they were paid in the only way they could be.
By the next year, with the war still going strong and healers needed, the Wen find themselves described as the reclusive healers that live deep in the forest and can bring a person back to life even from the brink of death. The village people are a nice bunch, Wen Qing thinks as she walks along the main road with her son in her arms, but even though she has seen the amount of things they gave as payment for services, she is still worried. Rumours of a mysterious group of people who are extremely gifted healers are not what would help them keep a low profile.
But Wen Qing's fears do not come to pass. The war rages on, the years pass and A-Yuan grows bigger. The DafanWen heal the sick and more and more people get used to seeing healer Qing, her brother Ning and her son Yuan, from the healer settlement that's being called Dì Huáng Fields.
One day, a rider comes into the village on horseback, the hooves thundering out an impending news- a call to listen.
"The war is over!"
A-Yuan is four. The Sunshot Campaign has lasted 5 years. Wen Ruohan is dead. Wei Wuxian is a demonic cultivator. Jiang Wanyin is Sandu Shengshou.
Healer Qing looks down at her young son, his hand grasped tightly in hers, as he plays with a grass butterfly while waiting for his jiujiu to come back with the vegetables. No, she decides, this is all she needs.
***
A year later, Healer Qing looks at the mangled body of a child, face torn apart beyond recognition by a beast's teeth, white bone of the skull glinting in the low light of the candle- and cries for the first time in a long while.
In the child's hand, there are the tattered remains of a blood-covered grass butterfly.
***
Healer Qing carries on with life gritting her teeth and feeling the ache in her jaw, hands sure, eyes sharp and mind focused on healing and research- The small grave that sits near a small pond is kept out of mind. This is the closest touch she can give of a father who lives by the rivers and lotuses.
There are no lotuses in the pond.
A-Yuan- Garden, park.
Lament.
She named her son well.
Wei Wuxian descends on the village in a flurry of seeping dark red and black, flute gripped tightly in his hand and surprisingly, on a donkey. He asks for the healers politely, despite the fact that he should be dead within an hour of obtaining his injury.
He looks at Healer Qing, face weathered by sorrow but still looking as she did when she should have died. He does not ask- he's seen the horrors of Wen Ruohan up close- and spends his time amicably chatting both her and Wen Ning's ears off.
When he is all bandaged up, blood cleaned off and in new, clean robes, he leans back on the bed, and looks with a seriousness at Healer Qing. The look takes her back to Yiling. Wen Qing wants to throw up.
She does not explain everything, but she shows him the grave lying in between fluttering green leaves and cold mountain wind, leads him to the pond without any lotuses, and thinks that her child at least deserves to know his bobo.
Wei Wuxian does not gape at the grave- too small to house anything but a child's remains- he's seen too much war and bloodshed for that to be the case any longer but his face contorts in sadness.
He asks this time.
"A relative I was looking after," she says, and not 'my child' because Wei Wuxian is not unintelligent.
Later, when he gets better, the donkey that he called Lil Apple tucked into a shed and fed on apples, Wei Wuxian accepts a cup of tea from her hands and tells her about the past, about Jiang Wanyin, about the Burial Mounds and the Sunshot Campaign. He tells her about leaving.
Wen Qing wants to tell him to go back, but his new cultivation makes him a target, makes YunmengJiang a target, and she knows how it is to want to shelter a younger sibling, so she tells him about the fire- how the Yiling Supervisory Office burned under Wen flames, about the records, about her life for the past few years and the name her family has left behind.
(She does not ask him more about Jiang Wanyin than Wei Wuxian has himself told already. She does not need to know how he is doing, if he still has the same nightmares, if he has a wife-)
Wei Wuxian tells her how he was injured- how it was not a beast, but humans that hunted him.
"Jiejie, I want to go with him."
Healer Qing puts back the pot of salve in its correct place on the dark wooden shelf and whips around to face her brother. She realises she has to tilt her head up, not down, to look at him.
"Wei-gongzi got injured- that's the only reason he came here in the first place and it's been years since QishanWen has fallen."
Healer Qing purses her lips. QishanWen, and not DafanWen, and even then, not DafanWen either. They have not been any Wen for a long time.
"Come back and lie low for a while," she tells Wei Wuxian as he sets off, laden with food and money, a hand on his donkey's back as he raises his other in the air in lieu of a wave. He does not look back. But the man beside him shifts the quiver of arrows slung across his back and turns to gift his sister with a smile. He does wave and Wen Qing thinks of the small child that used to hide behind another, tugging on her skirts.
In the end, she knew he had only been telling her, not asking for her permission.
In the end, even small seeds shoot up to become plants, and Healer Qing waves goodbye to her brother.
The Sunshot Campaign has ended, she is Healer Qing and the Wens are all dead.