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Jin Ling freezes in the doorway, surprised to find that the shrine is not empty.
Wei Wuxian’s head jerks up, his face partially hidden by incense smoke, but it’s not enough to hide the tears on his cheeks.
For a long minute, they just stare at each other— Wei Wuxian on his knees in front of the plaque and Jin Ling in the doorway with his arms full of fruit and flowers.
Clearing his throat, Wei Wuxian finishes his interrupted sentence, wipes the wet trails from his cheeks, and then says, “A’Ling,” as if it’s a whole sentence.
Jin Ling kind of gets it. Hesitantly, he crosses into the family shrine. It, like most rooms in Jinlintai, is ostentatious and gilded, so different from the dark, glossy wood at Lotus Pier.
It’s been a long time since he was anything but alone in this room. Most people in Jinlintai only come for Qingming or Zhongyuan.
Wei Wuxian shifts slightly to the side to make room for him, but he doesn’t leave, and for that, Jin Ling is grateful.
There is a bowl of soup on the altar, and Jin Ling suddenly finds a lump in his throat as he adds the gifts in his arms.
His mother’s name stares back at him, and it hits him— in the way that grief sometimes does, that he doesn’t even know what she looked like. He barely has anything of his mother to hold on to. No memories of his own, just a handful of keepsakes.
Wei Wuxian, for as poor as his memory may be, remembers Jiang Yanli. He still loves her with the same fierce grief as Jiujiu. The same fierce love he directs at Jin Ling.
He shifts just slightly, and his thigh bumps into Wei Wuxian’s leg. He thinks they both take comfort in the contact, even if neither of them comment on it.
Jin Ling tells his parents about his last night hunt with his uncle at his side. He thinks his mother would have liked that.
He lights incense for his parents, grandparents, and for A-Song. Qin Su’s name stares back at him from the adjacent tablet. His shenshen had been the closest thing he had to a mother. He misses her fiercely. Jinlintai feels so much emptier without her warmth.
He has more incense in his hands, and he hesitates, stealing glance at Wei Wuxian.
His uncle looks back at him with a soft smile. “It’s okay, A’Ling. He was your family, too.”
Jin Ling swallows hard and sets out the last set of offerings and lights the last of the incense.
His Xiao-Shushu was a complicated man, but Jin Ling knows that the love he had given hadn’t been fake. Even when he’d held the garrote to Jin Ling’s throat, he’d known that his uncle didn’t truly want to harm him.
He had raised Jin Ling with Shenshen and Jiujiu. Had shielded him from his grandfather’s misdeeds and had done his best to keep the bullies at bay.
No matter what he had done, Jin Guangyao is still his family. Just as Wei Wuxian is.
Wei Wuxian nudges his shoulder. “He may have hurt a lot of people, but he really did love you.”
“I know,” Jin Ling whispers, voice hoarse from smoke and sentiment. He cannot hate either of his uncles.
His entire life, Jin Ling had been told that the man beside him had murdered his parents in cold blood. That he had slaughtered 3000 cultivators and Jiang Yanli at Nightless City.
He knows now that Wei Wuxian had been lured into a trap with Jin Ling himself as the bait. He knows that his father’s death is one of Wei Wuxian’s greatest regrets. He knows, too, that his mother had taken a sword meant for this wayward uncle of his. That even in mourning whites, even with her husband’s death on the shoulders of a doomed man, she had walked onto a battlefield to try and save him.
Jin Ling tries not to hold it against her, but sometimes he is too much like Jiujiu.
As he bows one last time to his ancestors, Jin Ling stands. Wei Wuxian is at his shoulder, eyes still red.
Jin Ling has had 14 years to mourn a woman he doesn’t remember.
Wei Wuxian had been dead for 13 of those years.
“Dajiu,” he starts, clearing his throat as they leave the family shrine behind and wander back toward the lotus garden his father had planted a lifetime ago, “will you tell me about my mother?”
Wei Wuxian’s eyes slide to his, his expression unreadable for a moment. On Mo Xuanyu’s face, it looks a lot like Xiao-Shushu, but then his mouth does a complicated little twist, and Jin Ling is reminded of whose brother Wei Wuxian is.
“Of course,” he replies, shaking out his sleeves and seeming to find his wide smile once again.
Jin Ling leads him to his mother’s pavilion, and a servant places a bowl of lotus pods on the table.
He reaches out and begins plucking the seeds from the pods, and Wei Wuxian chuckles.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Wei Wuxian says fondly. “Of course you’re a pro.”
Jin Ling puffs up. “Of course I am! I’m half Jiang.”
Wei Wuxian pokes his forehead, and Jin Ling plops back into his seat. “And all ego,” he teases.
His cheeks go hot, and he sulks, which only makes his uncle laugh harder.
As they peels the lotus seeds between them, Wei Wuxian begins telling Jin Ling all he can about Jiang Yanli.
From her favorite spot in the gardens in Yunmeng to the songs she played most on erhu. The way she scrunched her nose when cutting fish and the way she loved to lie under the stars with her brothers.
Sometimes, Wei Wuxian pauses, his love and loss choking him up. Jin Ling understands.
When the sun sinks beneath the horizon, the bowl of lotus seeds is long empty. As Jin Ling leads his uncle inside for dinner, both his stomach and his heart are already full.