It’s a really unfortunate thing, developing a crush on your husband. Wei Ying had assumed this would be easy. Lan Zhan had been so icy and unpleasant to him, it had never occurred to him that he might end up spending the next however many years with this dumb, burning feeling in his chest whenever he looks at him. “Okay,” says Wei Ying. “But tell me if I…if the pretending gets to be too hard, okay?” “It will not,” says Lan Zhan, quietly certain.

Essentially: LWJ's mom and WWX's mom ON THE RUN with THEIR KIDS. (...and also MY's mom. And any other goddamn moms who need help. Get in the fucking car, ladies, we're saving everybody) Because here's the thing: LWJ's mother was a cultivator who killed her future-husband's teacher. And I think we all have a pretty damn good idea what might have gone down to provoke that, and why the Lan menfolk never actually explain what precipitated this act of extreme violence, and thus we can probably take a stab at why a perhaps-newly-pregnant lady* might end up agreeing to a marriage of convenience with some guy she really wasn't into, who was determined to keep her locked up in a pleasant little prison in Gusu. And I'd like to say "aww, bless him, he saved his unrequited crush all selflessly like, even though they didn't then live together as husband and wife"....but he subsequently knocked her up with a second child. :/ The ladies in MDZS tend to have a pretty shitty time, so this fic is pulling a goddamn Fury Road and scooping them up and taking them off to form their own Ye Olde Themyscira-ish Rogue Sect of ladies looking out for other ladies. (*obvs this is my headcanon.)

When Lan Wangji ran away from the jingshi to look for himself, his back still raw, and on Yiling he found only a small child, feverish but still capable of a little bit of babbling, still able to tell the story of what had happened – when he found the traces of blood on the ground, Wei Wuxian’s from when his power had backlashed on him – when he saw the bodies in the blood pool, already rotting – For the first time in his life, Lan Wangji didn’t want to go home. (what if he had another option?)

Crumpled at the base of Koi Tower’s long stairs for the second time, Jin Guangyao presses his face into the stone, takes a deep breath despite re-broken ribs, and arranges his features as carefully as he knows how. Then he stands, moving carefully around the pain, and bows deep, arms held straight and true. The walk back up the steps to his father's side is painful enough to wipe the smile from his face; it is not painful enough to prevent him re-taking his place as seneschal, bowing again at the top of the steps. As he straightens, he prioritizes his plans for his father’s demise over all else.