Chapter Text
Jiang Yanli is not a strong fighter. She remembers being young, and watching her mother, Yu Ziyuan, the Purple Spider, battle on the training field. She remembers watching Zidian flash, electricity tinging the air with the scent of ozone and oncoming storms, and thinking that could be me. Of course, as the years went on and it was found that her illness not only affected her body, but her cultivation too, she put the idea out of her head. Instead she perfected her arts and her sewing and her cooking. And later, when Wei Wuxian came to Lotus Pier, she perfected her sisterhood. She became the perfect daughter, the perfect sister, later she would become the perfect wife and perfect mother. And she had long since accepted her life as the perfect woman she would have to be.
But now, with her youngest brother staring at her beseechingly, his shoulders slumped with a burden beyond his years, she wishes she could fight. She wishes her cultivation was strong enough to lift the burdens of war and death and leadership from the boy in front of her. She wishes she had destroyed the people who had captured Wei Wuxian and stolen him for months and she wishes she could go back in time, and kill everyone who had ever hurt her family, before the idea even crossed their minds.
These thoughts are the kind that scare her, the kind that keep her up at night, the kind she would never voice to anyone, even her own brothers. But they are there and they are true and they burn when she sees bloated corpses dragged out of lakes and wonders did I know them or when she sees her youngest brother, her A-Cheng, passed out on his desk, his still boyish face laying over trade agreements they can barely afford, or when A-Xian smiles brightly and falsely over a bowl of soup that will go unfinished.
Jiang Yanli is not a violent woman, but for her brothers she would be.
“We need to find a way to corner him,” Jiang Yanli starts, “I have tried to be subtle and gentle while approaching him, but it isn’t working and I don’t think it's going to start working now. And the longer we wait, the harder it will be to get an answer out of him. I love A-Xian, but he’s as stubborn as a mule whe he believes he’s in the right.”
Jiang Cheng groans, and lets his head thump down onto the desk in front of him “Gods he is, it’s so frustrating. Doesn’t he know we just want to help?”
Jiang Yanli smiles helplessly, and pats her brother on the back. “Oh he knows we want to help, he just gets so worried about worrying us. You do the same and so do I.”
Jiang Cheng grunts, his face still resting on whatever important papers lay on his desk, “You are right of course, but you do not have to say it. It is much easier to harp on Wei Wuxian’s faults when I do not have to acknowledge that I share many of them”
“Perhaps,” Jiang Yanli muses, “we should hold a family dinner and simply lock the doors until he tells us what's wrong. That way we’re all stuck so he’s inconveniencing us more by not telling us rather than the other way around. Or we lock him in his room and don’t let him out until he tells us. Or we catch him off guard on a night hunt and tie him down until he confesses. Or-”
“A-Jie,” Jiang Cheng interrupts abruptly, “I know you are worried, but perhaps tying him down or locking him in a room, should come after we have exhausted all our options that don't make it sound like we’re trying to make him confess to a grievous crime.”
Jiang Yanli freezes, “Wait what if he did do a crime, A-Cheng what if he did a crime and is trying not to get arrested, maybe we need to make sure he knows we wouldn’t turn him in. What-”
“Okay A-Jie,” Jiang Cheng interrupts again, this time lifting his head and fixing her with a look of concern, “Take a breath, you’re starting to hyperventilate. Wei Wuxian’s only crime is being a monumental idiot and even if he did anything illegal it would’ve been during the war, and I don’t believe anyone would really care considering we won. Whatever he is hiding, it is not unfixable and it will not make us turn our backs on him, I don’t know if anything could make us do that.”
Then, Jiang Cheng stands up, and wraps his arms around Jiang Yanli. And in that moment, she is struck by how much taller than her he is and she misses the time when he was smaller than her and she could bundle him up in her arms and pretend like that would be enough to shelter him from the world.