"Where is the Pern AU in which WWX's sleek black dragon, outcast among his kind for his colour and intelligence, ends up the one to entwine LWJ's great golden queen in a mating flight so intense it's sung about Weyrwide for generations to come (never where small children can hear)?" ...and apparently teenage McCaffrey-fan me felt like this was an excellent idea, and worth interrupting the other WIPs I'm currently working on to have a quick scribble at. So, uh - yeah. Pern AU, basically, because dragons yay?

In which Jiang Yanli plots for her brothers’ happiness Or: the YunMeng siblings learn about self worth

So when I started interacting with the fandom and reading people’s fics, I got really confused by the way some folks were writing dialogue for Lan Wangji; he often sounded super awkward, spoke in fragments, and sometimes exclusively in third person. To be fair, all of those are elements of his speech at various times, but like, seeing it in English-language material felt like a really heavy-handed way of rendering it in translation?

Hi! Loving your meta on suibian :)) Just wondering what were your frustrations with cql, especially considered you've watched this in multiple mediums? (I've only watched cql)

Upbeat happy fanvid of Wang Yibo being ridiculous and lovely

The clans have secrets. Fire that does not burn. Light held back by a cloth. Spirits bound. Dreams of what is to come. Water that heals.

A guide to MDZS's confusing chronology that I unwrangle in my spare time.

Wen Ning has been receiving gifts. Wei Wuxian doesn't know who's sending them. Lan Wangji is accidentally keeping a secret.

It's inevitable that Wen Ning would be influenced by Wei Wuxian's stronger emotions, inevitable that he'd obey an accidental command. That must be what happened, thinks Wei Wuxian. Wen Ning has always been too timid to make a move on his own, so what else could this be?

The Untamed + I want a baby meme

The thing that most people who are not sect leaders fail to understand is that being a sect leader is hard. It’s not the countless duties and obligations, or the crushing weight of responsibility, or even the hours of meetings spent trying not to fall asleep as some stupid merchant who’s never experienced any hardship in his entire overly-fed life drones on and on about how Lanling Jin should compensate him because a stray fierce corpse scared him and made him spill his tea. Or something. It’s that sometimes, despite being a sect leader, there’s still nothing Jin Ling can do to help people. In which Jin Ling turns to masked vigilantism as a way to more effectively help people. Somehow it doesn't all end in disaster.

Lan Qiren wonders why all his students' guqin skills have improved recently.

basically i want 50k of lan xichen courting jiang cheng into being his jaeger co-pilot (and another 50k of them becoming boyfriends)

"I don't know if I should be proud of you or appalled."

Attempt the impossible

Applause for the multitalented Wang Yibo.

At Dafan Mountain, Wen Ning was not the first corpse that Wei Wuxian managed to summon. After thirteen years, fierce corpse Jiang Yanli finally reunites with her family.

Jiang Yanli and Jin Guangyao knew each other, during the year they both lived at Carp Tower.

A truly underutilized Huaisang plot is him killing time during his ten years of revenge plotting by being a minor thorn in Jin Guangyao’s side. He has had years of training in the art of being an obnoxious younger sibling and now he’s going to make this one man’s life hell.

What if: WWX doesn’t get there in time to intercept LWJ’s glass of wine?

Lan Xichen removes his ribbon.

sat down to write a lil vignette-sized cql fic but the fic is a fake excerpt from a made-up academic article about the work of a pretend poet who wants it

Sometimes Lan Qiren wondered why Nie Huaisang was so determined to hide his light under a stone. He would have long ago grown bored of playing weiqi against the foolish headshaker of legend or the vacant-eyed crybaby that perennially sobbed into his nephew’s sleeve, and yet they had been playing these games for years and years, all throughout the decade since Nie Huaisang had become Sect Leader. He didn’t ask, though, and he didn’t point it out to anyone. He’d find out the reason, one day.

modern au wen ning wears exclusively t shirts for metal bands with horrific names but he is so sweet and kind and quiet and accommodating that people forget to really think about this after a while, and then he’ll be listening to music looking peaceful and shy and someone will be like “what are you listening to” and he’ll be like oh :)! and extract an earbud to reveal loud, relentless screaming

I was re-reading some of my fav Rurouni Kenshin fics recently and since MDZS owns my soul, I immediately started thinking of Kenshin interacting with MDZS characters (Ignoring that they’re, what, at least 1000 years apart? xD). And I thought two gentle kind but badass swordsmen would make good friends :D

Every once in a while, not often, people who know them well will say that Nie Mingjue lets Nie Huaisang walk all over him. That isn't quite right.

“If we get home, you mean,” the Jin sect junior muttered. “Where even are we? And who’s the guy playing Chenqing?” Wei Wuxian was mildly offended. Who in the world knew enough to recognize Chenqing on sight but couldn’t recognize him? “I’m pretty sure that’s Senior Wei,” the shorter Lan sect junior said. “Just, you know, not…Senior Mo.”

In which Lan Xichen, nearly thirteen, visits Nie Mingjue, newly appointed Sect Leader - and decide to swap brothers for a day.

Jiang Cheng has seen his home violated time and time again. The Wen sect - the Jin sect - he'll do anything to stop it from happening again. Anything. (what Wei Wuxian doesn't know is...)

Lan Qiren had spent so long trying to save his nephews from his brother’s mistake – he would not now allow them to fall into their mother’s. (in which Lan Qiren notices that there's something wrong with Nie Mingjue...but no matter what it sounds like, he can't believe his nephew would poison his own lover)

I would like for you to consider that, of all the Yunmeng sibs, Jiang Yanli can curse both Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng under their table. It comes from frequenting the fish markets and the piers, and listening and observing carefully before proceeding to haggle her way through the week’s shopping. The first time bb!Wei Ying heard her switch into sailor speak he stared at her with huge huge eyes and said “can you teach me”

AU where Yanli and Zixuan survive, which means JGY doesn’t have a chance to go full Evil Gremlin because you know that if they’d had time Jin “lonely rich boy childhood” Zixuan and Jiang “overactive maternal instincts” Yanli would have absolutely had a huge brood of kids - so if he spends more than three hours at a time cooped up in his study, he gets utterly overrun by a small army of loud and obnoxious Jin babies (+ their puppies) yelling about how if he doesn’t come out for dinner mama’s gonna come in and drag him out herself, so help her.

If you’ve ever believed me in anything, believe I want what’s best for Jin Ling, the first line of the letter reads. Jiang Cheng has to stop and take a moment before he continues on to the next line: You must come to Carp Tower as soon as you can and lavish praise on the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen.

“Thank you all for coming,” Lan Xichen said, pouring tea for the other three people at the table. “I think you all know why I’ve asked you to gather here today.” “Sure,” Nie Mingjue said, accepting the cup. “Because our younger siblings have decided to join together to become a criminal gang.” “That seems like an unduly harsh way to put it,” Jiang Yanli murmured, inclining her head in thanks to Lan Xichen as she took her own. “After all, they’re helping people, aren’t they?” Wen Qing huffed. “Leverage,” she drawled. “If I ever find out who gave them that idea…!”

Nie Huai Sang (Ji Li/纪李) cute face expressions.

The healers said it was trauma. Perhaps he was too young, or too sensitive; perhaps it was only that it had happened in such a way, at such an impressionable time – in any event, Lan Wangji’s reactions to his mother’s death had gone well beyond the normal signs of grief and turned into something much more severe. After some intense discussion, it was agreed that he should be temporarily sent to live as a guest in another sect to see if he would benefit from the change of scenery. From not being around the place where he was drowning in the memories of his mother. They sent him to the Jiang Sect.

In which Jin Guangyao and Lan Xichen discover something very interesting about the Nie sect, and what exactly a "qi deviation" means when it comes to the main Nie clan. ...also, tigers.

Jiang Yanli tended to deal with stress in one of two ways: cooking and taking care of people. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, the Wen indoctrination camp provided many opportunities for both, although not with the people she might have expected. Wei Wuxian spent most of his days being valiant and light-hearted, trying to give them strength and courage, and Jiang Cheng followed his lead the way he always did, brave and serious and thoughtful and – well. It’s not that she didn’t appreciate both of them, because she did, but it was only that her own anxiety was more easily dealt with when she could distance herself from her current situation and focus entirely on someone else. She might have tried to take care of Jin Zixuan, but the Jin sect disciples closed ranks around him, glaring at her as if she were the one who broke off their engagement. Either way, she won’t go where she’s not wanted, and so she backed off and went elsewhere to look for someone that needed her. Luckily for her, Nie Huaisang was very loud and very vocal and very, very needy.

“I didn’t know Mistress Jiang’s expertise extended to medicine,” Lan Xichen commented, a little breathless from the pain of his injury. Jiang Yanli smiled up at him – kind and gentle and just a little mischievous – and suddenly he was a little more breathless than before. How had he never spent time with this remarkable woman before?

The last year before Jin Zixuan figures out that his father will only ever love him as an accessory to his power is also the year that he meets Luo Qingyang. For a long time, he thinks of it as the last truly happy year of his life. The Luos are a long-time family of the Jin sect. Most of them live in Lanling City, although there are a few cousins living farther out in the more rural areas. It is to these cousins that Jin Zixuan will go to learn to ride horses the year he turns eleven.

"I will live in thy heart sleeve, (never) die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes, and moreover, I will go with thee to the extremely boring cultivation conference." –The Yiling Laozu, probably. Wei Wuxian needs a new workshop. Lan Wangji has room in his qiankun sleeves.

By everyone’s agreement (except his own), Wen Ning was the sect leader. Of course, practically speaking, Nie Mingjue actually ran everything; he was the one with the experience in it, after all, and he claimed he was no good at teaching, which was the other thing they generally did. Other than, you know, the whole...fierce corpse thing.

It had always been something of a behind-closed-doors debate – a chicken-and-the-egg problem, what came first, what was the cause and what was the symptom. Was the Nie sect’s atypical cultivation method the reason behind the notorious Nie temper? Or were they born with the temper, and the cultivation method merely built upon that? Which one was the reason for their clan’s tendency towards early qi deviations? Nie Huaisang usually threw his money on the “blame the cultivation style”, almost entirely for the sake of pissing off his brother. He was starting to think, though, that he’d been wrong.

HOLY FUCK IS THAT A BABY?! The howling anguish of the Burial Mounds goes silent. Wei Wuxian has returned, and he has brought other people with him, and one of those people is, indeed, a baby. The little caravan of weary living people (who have a fucking baby with them) works its way up what might generously be called a path, deeper into the cursed hills, and they have the full attention of many, many ghosts. Resentful energy burns away, boiling into nothing under the utter shock of the situation. Who the fuck brings a baby to the Burial Mounds? Or: People think Wei Wuxian somehow cleansed the resentment of the Burial Mounds for the Wen survivors, but actually, the ghosts did it as babyproofing.

There has always been a divide between the sect and the clan. The clan flows through the male line, heritage and paternity, but it is the wife who comes from outside that rules the sect - a measure, Lan Xichen thought, put in place to prevent war between the sects. Who would want to risk antagonizing someone who might end up running your sect some day? And then Nie Mingjue's father died.

Meng Yao goes to Qinghe on the advice of Lan Xichen, a man two years older than him - and meets Nie Mingjue, who is very notably younger. That changes things, somehow.

“Tell me I’m beautiful, Lan er-gege!” “You are well aware you are beautiful,” Lan Wangji says. Wei Wuxian trips over Jiang Wanyin and sends both of them to the ground in a tangle of limbs and bruises.

A week later, Jiang Cheng gets a chance to talk to someone he trusts about the revelations during and preceding the confrontation at Guanyin Temple. Part of the Therapy for the Sunshot Generation Agenda

“What,” Nie Mingjue said, even as Jin Zixuan got up with a set expression on his face to accept a bow from his servant, “are you doing?” Jin Zixuan paused, looking puzzled – and no surprise, since Nie Mingjue hadn’t said anything beyond the most mundane greetings when he first arrived. “Sect Leader Nie..?” Nie Mingjue rose to his feet, his brother’s hand falling off of his arm as if he’d shaken him off like a dog. “What are you doing?” he demanded, louder this time. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Depending on how one looked at it, Nie Mingjue either should have gotten married years ago or didn’t need to marry at all. Especially not to Jiang Yanli. Still, when, after the war, she made the suggestion, however circumspectly, Nie Mingjue did not refuse immediately, but agreed to consider the matter.