#or as xcziel delightfully put it 'homesteader porn'

[foxofninetales]

Image credit

Cabbages and Kings by fox_of_nine_tales

Fandom: DMBJ | The Grave Robber’s Chronicles and related fandoms

Pairing: Wu Xie / Zhang Qiling / Liu Sang / Wang Pangzi (reader can interpret as queerplatonic or romantic as desired)

Rating: Teen

Tags: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Modern With Magic, Found Family, Hurt Comfort (heavy on the comfort), Domesticity, fox!Liu Sang

Summary:

Wu Xie and Xiaoge are Pangzi's, in the same way that the cottage is theirs, and the cats, and the magic they share between them. 

That is not Pangzi's fox.  

Excerpt:

When he comes out of the bathroom, he pauses to look out the kitchen window. The moon is high and full, casting the kitchen yard into stark light and shadow.  It is not winter yet, but the nights are cool enough that the cats have changed their summertime independence for the comfort of a warm hearth.  There should be nothing living in the yard.  He watches for a moment, then goes into the sitting room and shakes Wu Xie's shoulder.  

It takes a moment for Wu Xie to wake, making a noise like a sleepy cat himself as he finally blinks his eyes open.   "Bedtime already?"  He looks and sounds distinctly muzzy-headed, dreamy and sluggish after eating.  

"In a minute," says Pangzi, keeping his voice low.  "The fox is in the yard, if you want to see it."

Read it on AO3

Bonus extra of pain: In the comments, @xantissa​ made the mistake of asking what Zhang Qiling is, and a minific happened.  I’m copying it below if anyone is in the mood to have their heart ripped out.  (Hurt-no-comfort warning, but *points in the direction of main fic* comfort happened eventually, right?)

It’s dark, and screaming, and everything is pain.

It moves without willing it; the body it is in coughs and gags and drags in a breath, and then another, and another.  There is a terrible sound coming from somewhere; a gasping, keening moan that goes on and on and on.  It’s only when it swallows the blood in its mouth and the sound stops that it realizes it is coming from the body it wears.  

Slowly, the pain eases – not gone, but fading enough that it can be aware of something other than its skin and its bones and the agonizing weight of its own organs.  It lies there, curled on its side in something the same temperature as its body, but slowly growing less so.  It thinks it is blind, until its shaking hands find hair slicked wet and sticky over its eyes and pushes it out of the way.  

Even then it is dark, but now there are shapes in the darkness.  It’s huddled in a mass of something soft and viscous – not purely liquid, but with things in it that squelch and shift or thread ropily through its fingers.  The light is poor, but there is enough for it to see.  Most of the lumpiness is red, and brown, but it sees a flash of white and scrabbles for it.  The thing it raises in its hand is another hand – a palm, five fingers – but hollow and flopping, as if the flesh has been poured out and only the skin remains.  It considers it for a moment, then lets it fall.  

There is nothing else of interest in the muck, but when it tries to move it collides with something it can’t see.  Fumbling, it streaks redness from its hands on something that is there, but not, until it finds a shattered hole in the not-stuff that slices at it so swiftly and neatly that it takes a moment before it realizes it is in pain.   “Glass”, something supplies, and that hurts in its head, worse than the cut on its hand.  

Something is wrong with this body; it trembles and shakes, and does not follow its commands well, the fingers stiff, the feet dragging.   Something is wrong with the air; it bites at its skin, and draws like daggers into its lungs.  Later, he will know that he was cold.  Right now it calls it pain, because pain is all it knows. Pain prickles through its raw, new skin, blinks in tears from its eyes, and makes it cover its ears against the high whine of the wind.  The glass writes pain into its flesh as it pulls itself over the edge of the platform and falls.

It can’t see well in the darkness, and it hurts itself more when it tries to explore.  It is in a space of stone that arches hollowly overhead; down one side, wind whistles through a jagged gap.  There are things everywhere – shattered, upended things – some broken, others whole but beyond its understanding.  There is more glass, and more blood, and more painful words: “book” and “chair” and “blade” and “array”.  Whiteness drifts in through the shattered hole and gathers on everything, only melting when it land on its skin.

It is ravenously empty inside.  It tries some of the sludgy mass still caked inside the shattered dome, but it is foul, and it spits it out.  There is water in a hollow against one wall, rimmed with something a little like glass; it drinks this frantically, until something goes wrong inside the body and the water comes back out of its mouth in an evil-smelling rush, clotted with darkness, and now it is emptier than ever.  It doesn’t want to drink the water anymore, but hollowness gnaws at the body it is in until it drinks again.  It drinks less this time, and the water settles in its stomach, numbing it.

In the darkness, its hands find something soft: not soft like the slimy things, but soft in a way that is opposite of pain, softness that is a large sheet of some heavy material that gathers in folds under its touch.  It knows this: knows to pull it around itself, to huddle into it until the pain begins to ease.  It still hurts to breathe, but its fingers begin to work better, and it can feel its feet again.  Looking up, it can see through the gap in the stone; overhead there are tiny lights that twinkle, and a bigger light, curved and white.  The lights are the opposite of pain, too, and it watches them.  It falls asleep like that, balled up in the softness, and when it wakes the world is bright.  

It moves again, and there is pain again.  The old pains have eased, or it has gotten accustomed to them, but as it begins to crawl across the floor there is new pain waiting for it.  It learns quickly to avoid the sparkling fragments of glass, but that is hard, when there are so many of them.  The soft material gets in its way, but it is unwilling to let it go and eventually finds a way to wrap it around itself that no longer trips it.  It wants to have the soft material on its feet, too, and its knees, where the stone of the floor is seeping that numb pain into them again, but it can’t figure out how.  

 It finds nothing else to eat or drink, or to tell it what it is or what it should do.  

It sits, wrapped in the soft thing, until the brightness goes away and the darkness comes, and then until the brightness comes again.  

Nobody comes.

The gnawing emptiness returns, and water does less and less to fill it.  The slimy stuff that cakes its skin turns brown and flaky, falling off; underneath, the body’s skin is white.  

It waits, but nobody comes.

It’s that emptiness in the body’s belly that finally drives it as it walks - drags, climbs, stumbles, crawls – to the jagged gap in the wall where the brightness is coming from and clambers out into the light.