#includes my medical HCs for JYL and NHS

[robininthelabyrinth]

Initiative - aka NMJ and JYL get engaged - ao3 or tumblr pt 1, pt 2

Jiang Yanli’s first engagement had been announced when she was three and a half years old – there had been a big party, festooned in color, exquisitely and meticulously planned out in advance, and she’d been obliged to stand on stage next to a baby in a cradle that had done nothing but cry and spit as all the adults around her congregated and congratulated each other on the excellent match.

She hadn’t enjoyed that at all.

Her second wedding announcement was simultaneously more casual and more noteworthy, and she enjoyed it tremendously. 

Madame Jin had sent several invitations to Jiang Yanli to come visit Lanling in advance of the hunt planned for Phoenix Mountain, speaking of how beautiful it was and how much she looked forward to seeing her good friend’s daughter – talking about she’d always regretted how Jiang Yanli had been obligated by circumstances to take shelter at the Unclean Realm rather than in Lanling City, although she’d been pleased to hear from her son that she was doing well – all the right sort of words. The words might have been more welcome if Jiang Yanli hadn’t known that Madame Jin was still intent on securing the marriage she had arranged.

If she hadn’t been engaged, she would have accepted the invitation, hoping to form an alliance for her sect through a close relationship with Madame Jin even if she didn’t have one with Jin Zixuan (no matter what Madame Jin hoped), but as she was, in fact, engaged to another – even if it hadn’t been formally announced – it would be inappropriate to go. So she instead played ignorant and responded graciously, protesting that she couldn’t possibly impose, that the rebuilding at the Lotus Pier needed her, but that she would of course be happy to attend the hunt alongside the rest of her sect.

She arrived at her brother’s side, smiling all the while.

Her second engagement was announced like this: Sect Leader Jin, using his newly legitimized son as his mouthpiece, had brought forward some ghastly ‘entertainment’ that involved shooting at helpless prisoners, tied up in chains. Jin Zixuan had complied, but Wei Wuxian had marched out and disrupted everything by showing off to a ridiculous extent – Nie Mingjue, who had been watching with a black face full of rage but unable to speak due to propriety, had started applauding very loudly and very enthusiastically – and Sect Leader Jin had ordered the prisoners taken away.

“Well, then,” he said, clapping as if he had impressed himself: as if they hadn’t just been subjected to a powerplay under the guise of hospitality, as if everyone would be over-awed by his might now that they had seen him abuse the helpless while they were all forced by the rules of etiquette to say nothing or else risk carrying the blame for trying to start another war. “Absent anything else, we should proceed to the hunt itself, where await you only the finest of prey and the sharpest competition among your peers.”

For the further display of the power of the Jin sect, he meant.

“Actually,” Nie Mingjue said, interjecting in a moment in which Sect Leader Jin had paused to take a breath so that it was technically not an interruption, “there is one thing. A request, in fact.”

Sect Leader Jin’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, but he maintained his false smile. “Of course, Sect Leader Nie. What can I do for you?”

“I’m getting married,” Nie Mingjue said. “The bride is Young Mistress Jiang, of Yunmeng Jiang, and I would like –” He raised his voice to overcome the abrupt explosion of talk that had erupted. “– I would like to have her accompany my sect in today’s hunt. I hope that doesn’t interfere with your plans for a competition between the sects?”

There were those who said that Jiang Yanli’s chosen husband was bad at politics, and they might even be right. But it didn’t really matter in the end if he’d thought of the idea on a whim or if it’d been a prearranged plan by Nie Huaisang, who was cleverer than he liked to let on to people, Jiang Yanli’s future husband had still wiped away in a single sentence all memory of the farce they’d all just endured and of the hunt that was yet to come, ensuring that the only thing anyone would remember about today was the shocking news of the engagement of the leader of one Great Sect to the sister of another.

(And if everyone remembered that at the last celebration hosted by Sect Leader Jin, he had proposed to resurrect the marriage between Jiang Yanli and his own son, instead, forcing her to publicly demur on vague terms…well, that just made it all the more satisfying.)

Now it was Sect Leader Jin’s turn to scowl and glare, and Madame Jin’s expression looked no less thunderous, but in the end Jiang Yanli got to go with the Nie sect on the hunt.

“You know I’ll only slow you down,” she said to Nie Mingjue, who snorted.

“No more than Huaisang will,” he said, and if his face was stern and his voice gruff then she still thought she detected fondness and humor beneath it. “Besides, it’ll be a good opportunity to measure you.”

It turned out that he meant that more literally than she might have thought.

Jiang Yanli was promptly whisked away to the back of the Nie retinue by a small cadre of Nie disciples, men and women both. She was presented with a number of training sabers shaped out of wood and made to hold them in a variety of positions as they murmured things about stability and reach and balance as if they really, truly thought that she would actually use the saber they were preparing for her.

“This one,” Nie Jiahui, a steely older woman with silver in her hair and fierce eyes, eventually announced, and the practice saber Jiang Yanli had been waving around was taken away. She was then presented with one that was twice as heavy, for “practice”.

“Do you always practice with something heavier than the actual thing?” she asked, and Nie Jiahui nodded.

“Strengthens the shoulders,” she said, curt but not standoffish. “Have some candy.”

Jiang Yanli blinked, but smiled and accepted the offer. It was licorice, which she liked.

“Do you often carry candy with you on night-hunts?” she asked, listening to the sound of fighting from up ahead. Every so often, a disciple or two would trot by carrying the corpses of larger and larger creatures, slain in the fighting; it seemed that the Nie sect was not, in fact, being slowed down in the slightest by her presence.

Of course, she also wasn’t being tended to as if she were their chosen lady, either, as she might have otherwise expected – all pomp and flowery language, Nie Mingjue by her side at all times to show her around as if they were on a pleasure stroll – but in all honesty that would have been a little bewildering. It was very much not the Nie sect’s character, all practical and straightforward, and she found that she preferred it that way.

“It’s important to have something to replenish energy,” Nie Huaisang said, having dropped back to join them from the front. He looked tired and grumpy, but his saber appeared to have been put to some work; he immediately climbed up into the carriage that people were taking turns riding and started cleaning it. “And licorice candy clears the lungs.”

“Clears the lungs?” Jiang Yanli asked.

“It’s good for more than that,” Nie Jiahui said. “But that’s one of the uses, yes. Do you ever feel like your chest is too tight, especially when you move too much? Leading to coughing, shortness of breath, your lips turning blue?”

Jiang Yanli blinked. “Yes,” she said. “But that’s just because I was born with a weak body.”

Nie Jiahui scoffed and Nie Huaisang laughed. “Good luck with that,” he said cheerfully. “I was born with muscles that didn’t keep their tone: too flexible, incapable of gathering strength, requiring more energy to do less, making me twice as tired twice as fast – even sitting up straight can be a struggle in some extreme cases, though luckily not mine. And do you think that helped me one bit in getting out of saber training? It did not.”

“Early childhood intervention is best,” Nie Jiahui said. “But the next best is starting today. I’ll show you some low-impact exercises that you can start working on to strengthen your shoulders and stomach, as well as some balance movements to center yourself and improve your posture – that way, by the time your actual saber is ready, you’ll be able to take it through one of the basic routines.”

“I’m happy to learn whatever you have to teach,” Jiang Yanli said, ignoring Nie Huaisang’s dramatic cry of ‘And here I thought you’d be on my side!’ “I only regret troubling you.”

“Not at all,” Nie Jiahui said. “It’ll be good to have someone watching the Sect Leader’s back on night-hunts.”

Jiang Yanli felt a surge of terror and excitement in her belly. “He would trust me with that? You would trust me with that?”

“I did tell you that you’d need to keep up with him,” Nie Huaisang said mildly, and it was true, he had, only she’d assumed it was a bit more metaphorical. “You don’t have to fight or even walk too much, if it doesn’t suit you – my grandmother was lame in both her legs from a childhood illness, she rode everywhere, scariest woman I’ve ever met by far – but you do have to be there. Someone needs to be able to tell my brother to stop. Someone he’ll listen to.”

And wasn’t that something of a thrill to think of?

Jiang Yanli wasn’t someone anyone listened to – not her parents, not her brother, not her sect disciples. She’d always been the one who comforted them afterwards, who supported them; she made them food and tried to convince them to be kinder to each other, and sometimes they even tried for a while before getting into another tiff. They would kill for her if she so much as hinted at it, tear down the sky for her, but it was more in the nature of indulging her rather than actually allowing them to guide her.

Yet here was Chifeng-zun, a war hero and a sect leader, one of the most powerful men in the world, a man admired by men and sought after (even if only in their hearts) by women, and his family was telling her that he would listen to her.

“If you say so,” she demurred, but they insisted, and by the time the hunt was over Jiang Yanli was surprised to realize that she hadn’t needed to resort to sitting on the carriage more than twice the entire time.

“We’ll send Auntie Jiahui to the Lotus Pier after today’s hunt is done,” Nie Huaisang chattered cheerfully in her ear as they headed back towards Jinlin Tower. “She’ll work you through your paces, believe you me, and all the supplemental things, too – making sure you eat the right thing, take medicinal baths to improve your meridians, apply massages to loosen your joints…those parts are nice, actually. Take care of your body as you would your saber, take care of your saber as you would your wife! That’s how the saying goes. Trust me, you’ll be regretting the whole thing soon enough.”

Jiang Yanli didn’t think she would. “You seem very confident that A-Cheng will allow you to do as you please, even in the Lotus Pier.”

“I’ll tell him it concerns secret Nie sect marriage rituals,” Nie Jiahui interjected. “When two women are involved, men tend to run away when the words ‘marriage’ and ‘secret’ are combined.”

Sadly, she was probably right.

“Show me those exercises again,” she requested, and Nie Jiahui climbed up on to the carriage to show her the ones she could do even while sitting down.

Jiang Yanli might never have had the opportunity to strengthen herself before, and she was moderately certain that she wouldn’t have too much success now, as the various tricks Nie Jiahui had taught her were largely body refinement, barely reliant on qi, and her cultivation was still as low as ever.

But she was good at devoting herself to learning something when she wanted to, and as soon the hunt at Phoenix Mountain was over and they had shifted over to the various feasts and meetings that Lanling Jin had planned for the rest of the week, she began her efforts at self-improvement in earnest.

The weak body her mother had always despaired of might always be weak – Nie Jiahui had been quite blunt on that subject, making it clear that nothing she was suggesting was some sort of miracle pill, and furthermore that there was nothing wrong with being weak as long as she made an effort (Nie Huaisang had been the recipient of several pointed looks there) – but Jiang Yanli was determined to at least demonstrate that she was trying.

A gesture of good faith, perhaps. Some small show of initiative.

Nie Huaisang had said that Nie Mingjue appreciated her initiative.

“A-Xian,” she called one morning, only a few days later. “A-Xian, are you going out for a walk? Let me come with you.”

“You’ve gone on a lot of walks recently,” Wei Wuxian laughed, but allowed her to take his arm as they walked into the crowd. “Do you like Lanling City so much?”

“It’s the exercise I’m after,” she said, smiling at him. “The Nie sect is a martial sect, remember? I’ll be going on more night-hunts in the future, if all goes well, and I’ll need to keep up.”

“Oh, but surely they’ll bring a carriage..? I don’t know if you really need to go on night-hunts –”

“I want to! It’ll be nice. Don’t worry about me so much, A-Xian –”

Wei Wuxian was shaking his head, smiling, and he wasn’t looking where he was going; perhaps that was why he bumped into the young woman.

But then she looked up at him, and he looked down at her, and he froze.

“Wen Qing?”

#mdzs #jiang yanli #nie mingjue #nie huaisang #wei wuxian #my fic #my fics #initiative #the untamed #includes my medical HCs for JYL and NHS #but no actual medical incidents