#who does jc assume the other parent is??? i leave it up to interpretation

[loosingmoreletters]

Oooo for a prompt: Jiang Cheng raises a-Yuan thinking he’s actually Wei Wuxian’s biological child

Anon, you really said “I will cater to Letter’s interests” with this ask.

When Jiang Cheng finds the boy, he’s still grieving. He hasn’t stopped grieving since they received the first terrible news of Jin Zixuan’s demise. He grieves, he rages, he cries and carries on. A circle reminiscent of the schedule followed by a boy burned out by loss.

He grieves when he pulls a-Yuan from the ash. The child is barely breathing, malnourished too, wrapped in an adult’s cloak.

Wei Wuxian, he thinks, and presses the boy close to his neck, hides his face when he hurries down a troubled path where his most trusted disciples wait. They do not question him, they ask nothing at all but how quickly they need to return home.

Fast, is his reply. He’s seventeen again, running across the countryside on bloody feet to get his brother home. He saved Wei Wuxian then, he saves a-Yuan now.

The healer asks him how old the child is and Jiang Cheng has no answer for her. He’s so very small, sleeping off his fever under her care. She thinks he is around two, perhaps a little younger, but they have no way of knowing. Everyone who would, is dead.

Like the rest of Jiang Cheng’s family, all of them, but Jin Ling. His nephew is a healthy baby, chubby fat and dressed in only the softest of silks. He’s loud too, crying out for parents he doesn’t have anymore, in everything but this, the exact opposite of a-Yuan.

Jiang Cheng hadn’t questioned a-Yuan’s presence in the Burial Mounds the first time round, too caught up in all his other anger. Maybe he should’ve stopped fighting with his brother to ask. Why would Wei Wuxian give everything up for the Wen if the Wen wasn’t his?

The following weeks agree with him. A-Yuan grows into Wei Wuxian’s smile, no longer asks for the dead as his memories disappear. Jiang Cheng wonders if his brows resemble Wen Chao, Wen Qing or her brother, any of them. Jiang Cheng has no clear memory of them he cared to keep, but he knows Wei Wuxian, hears him in the way a-Yuan phrases his question.

He knows his brother’s child.

Perhaps the other parent doesn’t matter, maybe the story there is as sad and terrible as every other.

His sister and her husband are dead, his brother is gone, his nephews are orphans both.

Jiang Cheng is tired of losing family.

The clan registry burned when the Wen attacked them. Jiang Yanli painstakingly wrote a new one when they rebuilt. He stares at her handwriting as he adds a-Yuan’s name to it. No one will ever look at this document, see that his sister put Wei Wuxian down as their brother, see that Jiang Cheng never struck him from the books, that he adds his son.

The Yiling Patriarch is dead, his legacy is cruel and terrible and it perished in the Burial Mounds.

A-Yuan is here.

The maids call him Jiang-gongzi, Xiao Yuan, Yuan-er, and a hundred different little endearments they’re quick to adapt for Jin Ling too when Jiang Cheng is allowed to take him to Lotus Pier.

A-Yuan loves his little cousin, and maybe if Jiang Cheng raises them together like this from the start just right, they’ll never break apart.

Only a handful of disciples know just where Jiang Cheng picked his nephew up, everyone else believes him a deceased cousin’s son.

It is for the best.

There’s no place in the world for Wei Wuxian’s son after all, none at all, unless he remains Jiang Cheng’s nephew first.