#I guess you all get an A-Fu before you get PtL

[guqin-and-flute]

3zun dads au hc where there's a perpetual game of "ask your dad." Jingyi quickly figures out that the best way to get a clear answer is to ask an uncle or aunt.

(Oh, I love this idea and a scene popped into my head--there may not be many times where they are all in the same place not paying attention to each other, but the times where they are would be highly annoying to Jingyi.)

A-Fu thought that it was pretty ridiculous that he was told all the time that he had to stop trying to do everything by himself, but when he actually asked for help, no one wanted to do anything about it! He was 6 and a half years old and the grown ups wouldn’t let him do things like chop his own vegetables or fly his own sword but when his headband--that he had been told for so long was so very important to keep on and clean and everything--fell off his head in the play room at Koi Tower, he couldn’t get anyone to help him tie it back on!

The Jin nanny said she couldn’t touch it, even after he assured her that he wouldn’t tell anyone if she didn’t. Jin Ling and his younger brother A-Qiang didn’t know how to tie knots any better than A-Fu did and he wasn’t going to ask stupid bully Jin Chan and his friends to help. It was annoying to hold it and his palm kept getting all sweaty and creasing it and he was jumping around too much to tuck it into his sash. So when the nanny went to go comfort A-Qiang after he started crying over something dumb like not liking the melon they had for snack, A-Fu snuck out the door and trotted down to where he knew Yellow-Father’s office was. 

Plastering himself against the door, he pushed it open and slid down dramatically like he was dead, making sure to keep his headband off the floor. When Yellow-Father didn’t say anything, just kept staring at the papers he was sorting through and marking, he took a huge breath and whined, “Dieeeee.”

Yellow-Father blinked like he had been startled and glanced over at him. “Where is your nanny?”

“She wouldn’t help me tie my headband back on and she said it wasn’t that important and that I should wait and I didn’t wanna so I came here cause she wouldn’t help.”

“You can’t--” Yellow-Father gave a blustery sigh and shook his head, rubbing his temples. “I can’t focus right now, Fufu. Please go ask your die. And you’re making your robes all dirty, please get up.”

Grumpily, A-Fu rolled to his tummy and clambered up. “Which one?”

Yellow-Father closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly before he picked the papers back up. “Gray.”

And so A-Fu did. He had to wander a bit and he kept switching his headband between his hands, wiping the other palm on his robes to dry the sweat but he eventually found his gray father in a room with other grownups, talking over a table full of cups--it had taken him poking his head into a lot of other rooms of startled people first, though. His Gray-Father saw him, blinked, and pressed his lips together like he was biting back a half-annoyed smile before saying, “Excuse me a moment,” to the other men there.

Then, he came over and shooed A-Fu out the door, saying, “You can’t be in here, boy-child. Go back to your nanny, we can play later.”

“But--!”

“A-Fu,” his voice was telling him it was Pay Attention Time, but if he would just listen for actually just one single second, he could just do it for him! 

He thrust his headband up at Gray-Father, all indignant and his gray father shook his head and jerked his head down the hall, slowly sliding the door between their faces. “You’ll have to go ask one of your other dies.”

“Which one?!”

He opened the door just a little bit to let out his face to whisper back,  “Child, I don’t know! Pick one!” like he sort of thought it was secretly funny but wasn’t really going to budge at all before he closed it all the way.

A-Fu stamped his foot and growled back in annoyance like he knew he wasn’t allowed to, but Gray-Father still didn’t come back out. Stomping down the hall, he went in search of Blue-Father. Luckily, he heard someone say, “Zewu-jun” from inside the big banquet hall after a while, which felt like a lucky clue. He sidled up to the doorway with his back pressed to the wall and slowly peeked around it like he was a spy. After a bit of searching, he spotted Blue-Father across the hall, listening with a polite face to a man in black and gold robes talk about something that had to do with dead people or something. Sticking his headband out, A-Fu waggled his arm around until he saw father’s eyes flicker over and widen just a little, though his face didn’t really move. 

Blue-Father met his eyes around the side of the boring guy talking and slowly shook his head just a little with a small smile. Then, when his gaze went back to the man speaking, he pointed his chin at the door. When A-Fu smushed both hands to his cheeks and pulled his whole face down into an ugly face of frustration, Blue-Father raised his eyebrows, still looking at the man talking, and tilted his head like he did when he was asking if A-Fu thought he was doing the right thing. Another jerk of his chin said, without words, Go ask your other fathers. A-Fu wanted to scream, But I’m all out of those! He didn’t, though. 

Instead, he gave a loud, huffy breath and ran down the hall and out the door just to break a rule because he was so annoyed at all the grownups for being unhelpful and not listening, so it would serve them right if he tripped on something and knocked out a tooth or was rude or whatever was so bad about running that they made it a rule to not break in the first place. At top speed, he weaved around the legs of a few servants on the walkways and skidded right through the doorway into Uncle Zixuan and Aunt Yanli’s rooms, where Uncle Zixuan was playing with the twins. They were rolling over already, which was apparently a big deal for babies but didn’t really make them much more interesting, in A-Fu’s eyes, ‘cause they still couldn’t even talk or throw a ball. Uncle Zixuan looked up with surprise as he nearly tripped over the edge of the carpet slowing down from his run.

“Oh, A-Fu. Aren’t you supposed to be with Zi Tian?”

 A-Fu heaved a huge sigh and slumped his shoulders because he was so tired of having to explain. Grownups could ask the same questions again and again. “She wouldn’t help me so I snuck out. Will you help me?”

Frowning, Uncle Zixuan tucked A-Mei back into her little pillow fort that helped her sit up and picked up A-Zan, tucking him against his shoulder as he stood up. “With what? Is something wrong?”

Finally! Someone who understood how important this was. Holding up his headband he said, “It fell off. I don’t know knots.”

Uncle Zixuan froze, staring down at it, hand patting A-Zan’s back. “Uh...I...can’t help with that.”

A-Fu stared at him. What was it about grownups that made them follow every single rule all the time. “But it’s annoying. I won’t tell anyone.”

“A-Fu...your father is the Clan Leader. I’m...that’s a very important rule to the Lan.”

“Die wouldn’t start a war over a headband. He’s very nice,” A-Fu assured him, reasonably, and Uncle Zixuan did that thing people did when they bit their lips to hide a smile. 

“I’m so glad. But that’s...not what I meant.”

A-Fu was about to start some serious whining--grownups hated whining and he knew that Uncle Zixuan got kind of flustered if you acted like you were going to cry--but Aunt Yanli’s voice came from their bedroom, calling him in. So he hmphed and shot Uncle Zixuan his best ‘you didn’t do what you were supposed to’ look that Uncle Wangji was best at and went to poke his head in. “Hi, bo-mu.”

She was lying in bed with a book in her lap, hair tied up in a plain bun, but she smiled and held out her hands, so he bounced up onto the bed and crawled up next to her, laying his head down on her squishy chest as she wrapped her arms around him. “What’s the trouble I hear?”

He held his headband up above his head near where he thought her face was. “My headband fell off and everyone is too busy being stupid and following rules and being in meetings to help me.” He knew stupid was a bad word, but that’s how he felt and he never got in trouble with Aunt Yanli, so he let himself grump, scowling down at the splotches in the book on the covers. 

“Mmm, that is tricky,” she agreed and stroked his hair a few times before she wiggled her shoulders a little. “Here, I have an idea. Sit up for me?”

Obediently, he did and climbed onto her lap when she patted the covers. She held her arms out on both sides so he could see her hands and made a pinch with them. “Hold it like this.

A-Fu spread out his headband between his hands like what she was doing, holding the fabric between his first 2 fingers and thumb. Then, she put her fingers over the backs of his hands and moved them around until the little stiff piece was in the middle of his forehead. Very patiently, she gave him instructions one at a time on where to hold the bits and with what finger and helped guide his elbows around behind his head where he couldn’t see. She sometimes pinched her own fingers over his on the fabric to keep it in place while she moved his other hand and it took forever and his arms started to ache from being held up so long, but she never touched the headband herself and, eventually, it was back on his head. “I think there’s a bit of hair in the knot,” she said with a laugh in her voice. “But that should be alright until your dies aren’t busy anymore, hm?”

Turning around, he squished her cheeks in his hands and said, very seriously into her face, “You’re the best.”

She grinned and poked his nose. “No, you. Now why don’t you go back to Zi Tian. I think A-Ling and A-Qiang miss you.”

“A-Qiang is too busy crying over melons to miss me.”

With a small chuckle, she shook her head. “I’m sure he can do both at the same time. Go on. Tell your dies I said hello.”

As he hopped down off the bed, he hmphed one more time, for good measure. “I’m gonna tell them they all get lines. Headbands are serious business.”

Uncle Zixuan snorted from the other room. “You tell them, A-Fu.”

[guqin-and-flute]

20 Questions: Writer’s Edition

Tagged by the fantastical @little-smartass​

Under the cut!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

55 (holy crap, when did that happen??)

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

319,602 ??? WHAT. THAT’S. THAT’S A LOT.

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Dragon Age, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, Detroit: Become Human, and now MDZS/The Untamed!

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

 RK1K DBH longfic The More You Know with 1107 kudos 

MDZS Peony to Lotus/Yaoli Flower of Another Kind with 794 kudos (when did that happen???)

MDZS Peony to Lotus All These Things You Have to Lose with 754 kudos

MDZS Peony to Lotus Stop Forcing It with 717 kudos

MDZS Peony to Lotus Are You Here to Stop Me? with 696 kudos

WOW I GUESS YOU GUYS LIKE PTL  😂

(Honorable Mention: And A-Fu Makes 4 in a close 6th with 665)

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Bold of you to assume that I finish things. Uhhh, probably He Was Never Meant to See cause JGY gets his canon ending? 

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Most fluff I’ve written! The stuff that actually HAS an ending tends to be short one shots within specific universes, so it’s hard to say the ending was happy when it really was just...all of it?

7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I’m not opposed to it, though I don’t think I actually have?

8. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I have written a couple things I haven’t really shared, not sure I ever will? Dunno! Mostly it’s romantic? I’m not sure what ‘what kind’ means in this context exactly??

9. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

YES, IN THEORY ;-; I’m about 400 (woOF) comments behind on replying on Ao3. I think I’m just very happy that anyone likes reading any of my things at all and I want to show them how much I genuinely appreciate them taking the time to do so and then tell me about it ♥

10. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yeah, but it wasn’t really about me, they were doing it do every Xiyao author, so I really don’t count that? It wasn’t about me, it was about their own issues

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not as far as I know 👁👁

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Into an audio medium as a podfic? But not another language, no

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not officially! I used to write OC stuff with a couple friends when I was younger, but I would love to try again in a more official capacity with fic! 

14. What’s your all time favourite ship to write for?

It really depends on my mood and what I’m into, currently! Sorry for the cop out answer 😂

15. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Well, my intent is to finish all my longfics at some point before I die, so...I’m gonna say none! Cause I’m optimistic and believe in myself 

16. What are your writing strengths?

When I get in the flow, I just go. I also enjoy writing dialogue and think I dedicate a lot of energy to capturing the voice/feel of a character. I also try to let the character act naturally, so if there is a pull in another direction/a scene isn’t working, I try to go with what’s happening.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Having any sort of schedule or deadline and actually just fucking, uuuuh, physically writing.

18. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Personally? As I don’t know any other languages past a semester’s worth of study in high school, Imma stick with honorifics and vocab where I can. I’m sure I still fuck up a whole bunch 😬 In theory? As long as they do research and are being respectful, I don’t think I see a problem?

19. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Harry Potter, back in, like, elementary school. Never shared it.

20. What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

That’s like asking me to pick a favorite kid! I like them all and write them all for different reasons. 

I tag @lilac-buttons, @madtomedgar, @greenwitching, @theleakypen and anyone else that wants to do it and thinks they should!