Chapter Text
Jiang Wanyin was minding his own business in Lotus Pier, much as he had for over a decade, when he began to experience regular bouts of nausea. He initially assumed that the culprit was something he’d eaten: one too many street-hawker specials after gruelling all-night hunts. Jiang Wanyin had been known to indulge, though in accordance with the considerable physical demands attendant on leading an active cultivation clan, he generally kept his body fighting-fit. (It helped, of course, that he had few other hobbies to occupy his time.)
When being more careful about his diet didn’t resolve the problem, Jiang Wanyin wasted no time entering secluded cultivation. In a setting so tranquil and private it made his teeth itch Jiang Wanyin purged all foreign influences from his body, hoping to root out whatever contaminants might be in his system. He could feel something changing within himself as a result of his efforts, but the nausea continued unabated.
Jiang Wanyin knew very well that if she’d been alive to do it, Jiang Yanli would have teased him for childishly avoiding the clan doctor. She’d have been right, too—she usually had been. And so with ill grace and few remaining alternatives, Jiang Wanyin presented himself to Jiang’s senior physician. After examining him (while he awkwardly stood, as if he might bolt at any moment), she looked up at her sect leader’s face with bewildered panic. The poor old lady actually swallowed.
“Sit down,” she told Jiang Wanyin.
“What is it?” he barked. Fuck, had his body at last decided to reject his brother’s core? Why now? Or was it something else? The doctor looked—fuck, was he dying?
“Sit down,” she insisted. Chastened, Jiang Wanyin did as she asked. The doctor exhaled. “Jiang zongzhu. A male cultivator may find himself in your position, but it’s rare. And it is never, to my knowledge, accidental. Somehow, you are pregnant. Four months gone, in fact.”
As he listened, an eerie, nigh-preternatural knowledge swept over Jiang Wanyin.
“You said a male cultivator could conceive. Say a couple was trying, but one of their golden cores had been transplanted into a third party. Could that transfer interfere with the process?”
The doctor blinked at him. “That’s an exceptionally specific guess. It sounds—well, unheard of, but fairly probable?”
“Right,” Jiang Wanyin nodded. “Right.” He swung off the examination table she’d bullied him onto. “I’m going to fucking kill him.”
To Wei Wuxian’s credit—which was deeply in the red, so far as Jiang Wanyin was concerned—he did come home immediately upon receiving his brother’s letter (which had simply read, ‘you absolute fuckers got me pregnant’).
Jiang Wanyin met the Chief Cultivator and his husband on the docks of Lotus Pier, having strode out as soon as their swords were sighted in the sky. He didn’t expect a vast, red-splotchy, glowing Wei Wuxian to waddle up to him, wailing “we’re huge, Cheng Cheng!”
It was only then that Jiang Wanyin realised his brother was also pregnant, and that he himself was, indeed, significantly more girthy around the centre than once he had been. Further, apparently none of Jiang Clan’s brave disciples (save Wei Wuxian, who only counted on good days) had had the guts to say so to his face. Motivated by a furious sense of injustice, Jiang Wanyin wasted no time and no words. Moving with the slow, majestic decision of an ocean-going junk attempting a tight turn, Jiang Wanyin feebly tried to throw his brother into the lake. The gesture ended up taking the form of a determined waddling shuffle towards the edge of the pier. Hanguangjun easily arrested his husband’s would-be dampener with an extension of his arm.
“This will bond us!” enthused a teary Wei Wuxian. “Our children will be milk-brothers—”
“I,” Jiang Wanyin promised him, “am going to fucking kill you both.” And he would, too. Just as soon as he had the full range of movement back in his torso.
“Jiang zongzhu,” the Second Jade addressed him with cool formality. “I will take responsibility for the unfortunate by-blows of my prodigiously fertile loins.”
Jiang Wanyin gawked at him, just taking a moment to sit with that sentence.
“Like hell you will,” Jiang Wanyin eventually managed through clenched teeth. He lifted a shaking hand to point at the Chief Cultivator, who was, against all odds, proving as productive in this respect as Jin Guangshan before him.
“I refuse to recognise this man as my child’s father. I consider this an immaculate conception, and no one can tell me otherwise. Get off my property!”
“But you,” sobbed his hormonal, idiot brother, who was still limpet-clinging to him, “invited us here—” Wei Wuxian shook his head as if to sever this line of argument, then wiped off his tears with his sleeve and scrunched his nose in thought. “I might be the baby’s daddy? I’m not completely sure how the qi transfer works. No one is, in this situation. We really struggled with the first attempts—as you can tell.”
“What?” Jiang Wanyin recoiled. “You? No, absolutely not. You’re my brother. I’m not having any kind of technical-incest baby! This is Yunmeng, not Jinlintai.”
The doctor had assured Jiang Wanyin that his attempts to purge all foreign influences from his body had not damaged his magically-generated offspring, so far as she could tell. He’d managed to eliminate alien blood and qi, but not the life within him. This baby, Jiang Wanyin triumphantly informed the malefactors, was pure Jiang. (He did not point out that he’d worried about the whole ‘heir’ question for some years now. Wei Wuxian and his weird, largely-silent, glowering hype man did not need to know that they’d done Jiang Wanyin a good turn. Sort of. By horrible accident.)
“…so it’s a clone?” Wei Wuxian asked.
“No! ” Jiang Wanyin said with a sneer, as though he hadn’t asked that himself. “No, fuck you. It’s all my blood, but mixed differently.” He’d received an in-depth medical explanation on this point, which he’d pretended to fully understand. Apparently all the technique he’d used had managed to do was to give the foetuses a sort of ‘baby makeover’. Sad, really.
“It’s my baby.” Jiang Wanyin finished, because, that, at least, he knew for certain. This thing was in him, he was working on it, and he was asserting his full rights. Wei Wuxian’s intellectual property claim or whatever could go choke.
Something about Jiang Wanyin’s choice of words made Wei Wuxian look rather nervous (which was a hell of a thing, considering the baseline fuckery they were dealing with today).
“The thing is, Jiang Cheng,” Wei Wuxian said after a moment, “when we were trying to work out why the spell didn’t work—when we thought you were much too far away to be affected, because all the traditional writing about this ritual specifies that physical contact is absolutely necessary—the thing is, we might have tried—three times, before we switched the core-locating focus. So I think we should probably assume that actually, the spell worked every time, just—just not—”
Lan Wangji could not allow Jiang Wanyin to shove a pregnant Wei Wuxian into the lotus pond, even in response to such news as this. But, with a grave nod, Hanguangjun went willingly himself. His expression (as he trudged back to the bank, drenched) was a sort of elegantly resigned ‘that’s fair’.
It was surprisingly easy to guilt Wei Wuxian into staying in Lotus Pier for the duration of their shared term of pregnancy. Wei Wuxian was (very obviously) experiencing some of the more sensual side-effects of pregnancy hormones, but he was also gratifyingly ready to suck it up and devote himself entirely to his baby brother at this trying time. It was Lan Wangji who suggested to Jiang Wanyin (after three excruciating weeks as Jiang zongzhu’s houseguests) that he’d been hoping, and indeed expecting, that his husband would spend these precious months of pre-natal bonding (horny sex) with him, in Gusu. Jiang Wanyin snorted in the Chief Cultivator’s face. Ridiculous. Wei Wuxian kept craving a wide variety of Yunmeng food. What was Lan Wangji going to do, bring enough hawkers back home with him to start up a regional food court in Caiyi Town?
“Of course Wei Wuxian is free to leave whenever he likes,” Jiang Wanyin said blithely, when Lan Wangji raised a decidedly chilly eyebrow in response to his scoffing. Jiang Wanyin deliberately raised his voice to attract his brother’s attention. “He’s free to just abandon me, yet again. When I truly need him—me and my three babies—”
“Oh no,” Wei Wuxian scrambled to soothe his shidi, dropping the hideously malformed black baby booties he was sewing. “No, don’t be silly, Chengcheng! Of course I’m staying with you!”
“You absolute bastard,” Lan Wangji hissed to Jiang Wanyin, in a voice perfectly free of inflection.
“Shhhhh, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian said, pouting reproachfully. “The babies might hear!”
The Chief Cultivator spent the bulk of these weeks sitting mulishly in the corner of the room that Jiang zongzhu and his brother occupied—unless, of course, he found himself running all the way to the border for an exotic Gusu ‘cornetto’, to sate one of Wei Wuxian’s cravings. On such occasions Lan Wangji could only look on sadly as Wei Wuxian unwrapped the sweet’s careful layers of preservation talismans and licked it with shameless, ravenous hunger. A sort of ‘god I wish that were me’ lustre illuminated Lan Wangji’s sad eyes. But it was never him: due to a highly mysterious side effect of his pregnancy, Jiang Wanyin began to feel ‘under the weather’ every time Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian so much as looked at one another for too long. This, Jiang Wanyin reflected, was the most gruelling, satisfying vengeance he had ever taken in his life—and he knew from vengeance.
One afternoon, when Lan Wangji was looking exceptionally murderous (Wei Wuxian had asked the kitchens for tanghulu, and had really, really seemed to enjoy it), Jiang Wanyin took pity on him. “You may play one of your little songs,” he said magnanimously. “For the babies.”
Teeth grit, Lan Wangji managed a stilted, plinky-plonky lullaby on the guqin. Its very uncharacteristic terribleness was balm to Jiang Wanyin’s soul.
“You know Jiang Cheng,” Wei Wuxian mused, “whether or not the child and I are linked by blood and qi, your baby is still technically my baby.”
“Fuck off,” Jiang Wanyin replied.
"Really, any child of yours would be,” Wei Wuxian continued as though he’d not heard him. “Because my shidi's baby is like, twice my baby—”
The pillow that flew across the room to smack him upside the head did not seem to phase Wei Wuxian.