#XuLi crackship

[any-mouse]

I keep running into the fic where the tags and summary make it very clear that Madam Yu knows her husband is a pedophile and doesn’t care so long as he focuses on Wei Wuxian instead of their kids. And you know what, that’s ok. I’m not going to read it, but it’s ok for them to write it and other people to read it. That’s not what this is about. This is about the damn crack fic and crack ship it spawned in my head. Not sure if this is a ‘no-war’ AU or not.

Madam Yu is not ok with this, and she takes steps.

She was married to a monster worse than any she hunted. She didn’t like the brat her husband brought home, but he was a child. He had no clue what her husband’s lingering looks and hands meant but she did. So Madam Yu made an excuse, bundled up her daughter and the brat and set out for Meishan. On the way, in a tiny port town, she hands her daughter, dressed in plain but sensible hanfu, a dagger and a purse full of silver. She put the boy’s hand in hers and told her she could never come home again. And she told her first born why.

But that’s only the beginning. Wei Ying may have been a child, but he came from the streets. He had known very well the role he had been meant for in that house. Madam Yu had just made it clear that such men are wrong. So Jiang Yanli and Wei Ying are on their own now. Wei Ying has a few years of cultivation training now, and Jiang Yanli has a few distantly remembered sets from before her cultivation had to be diverted to maintaining her health. They make their way as wandering cultivators, young to be on their own, but better by far then other options. A few hunts around the borders of Qishan, and they run into a Wen doctor.

He patches them up, and helps Yanli with better strategies to mitigate her illness to keep up with her lifestyle. It’s not a cure. Sometimes finding the right strategies and combination of things really helps to manage a condition and that’s what I’d like to see. Mostly because I remember a post where someone speculated that the problem was actually something like a congenital heart condition that could have been fixed with surgery but the cultivators just applied spiritual energy to fix. So. Keep the vague nature of her medical condition, but she can manage it. Empower her to be able to take control of her body and health.

Wei Ying is not going by Wei Wuxian or Wei Ying in public. Yanli always calls him ‘didi’ and he calls her ‘a-jie.’ I don’t know enough characters to pick out appropriate names for them, but they use homophones for their original names.

They nighthunt, and they do odd jobs. Yanli grows skilled with her dagger and takes to singing while A-Ying plays his dizi at night. They fish a sect cultivator out of a very messy night hunt when A-Ying is just shy of fourteen. The stranger is finally dressed and equipped, but the monster they finished off was cunning. I’m thinking spider based, for the traps and I hate spiders. Really creepy area.

Of course they’re still fundamentally themselves, still kind. So they nurse this cultivator back to health. And he wakes up. He’s arrogant but not unaware of the debt he owes. He could have done it himself, but they had stepped in on his behalf for no real reason. Also, the woman held a dagger against his femoral artery when he was threatening her brother when he first woke up. He found that very, attractive.

After all blades are sheathed, clothing and wounds tended to, introductions are made. A-Ying and A-Li make the acquaintance of Wen Xu, First Young Master of the Wen sect.

Adventures are had, bonding, a very vague backstory of why they are on their own. When A-Ying is fifteen, Wen Xu finally convinced A-Li to accept his suit and become his wife.