NieLan Tangled or Witch AU? Or Spy X Family AU???
Lan Xichen, twenty-seven years old. Works in civil service; older son of Lan Haijing and Chen Mingyan, both deceased, and brother to Lan Wangji, age twenty-three. Passed high school with flying colors, but dropped out of university three years later to look after his ailing uncle.
“If you don’t care about having a wife, he’s an ideal candidate to play the role,” Huaisang said, when they were going through the list of single young people within a few years of Nie Mingjue’s age. “With his family issues, he won’t say no to the cash offer.”
Nie Mingjue had kept Lan Xichen’s name in mind—it stood out, what with the man’s good looks and family obligations—so it was a shock to meet him here, at the tailor’s shop of all places, all because Jingyi needed a new wardrobe and Lan Xichen wanted a coat mended. Lan Xichen slipped through the doors so smoothly that Nie Mingjue failed to notice him, registering nothing about his presence until he spoke, his warm, clear voice wafting through the air like a breath of sweet fragrance and stopping the whole shop dead in its tracks.
Jingyi had been the first to freeze, going still as stone with a measuring tape still wrapped around his chest; and then, inexplicably, Lan Xichen looked at Nie Mingjue, his cheeks flushing red as he took a step away from him.
“A-Die,” Jingyi said suddenly, while Nie Mingjue was busy staring at the slim white hand writing out Lan Xichen’s name and address on the registrar in the loveliest calligraphy Nie Mingjue had ever laid eyes on. “Can I have another pair of sandals?”
“If you want,” Nie Mingjue frowned. Was there something wrong with the first pair? “But why? I bought you good ones yesterday, and you’ll grow out of those before you know it.”
“I want them,” his new son insisted. “I don’t have a mother, and these shoes don’t look like the ones you bought me, so I’ll pretend they’re a gift from my mama.”
Nie Mingjue felt the swift intake of breath before he heard it, as birds must feel the changing of the wind before the coming of a storm. But Lan Xichen’s gasp felt like a heart cracking open, or a fruit baring its vulnerable pit to the sun; and then, without a word of warning, Jingyi gathered the pink sandals into his arms and toddled across the shop to pluck at Lan Xichen’s coat.
“Help put my shoes on?” he said shyly, holding the shoes up over his head; and Mingjue saw Lan Xichen fall, tumbling headlong into Jingyi’s small clutches as easily as breathing. “Please?”
“Of course,” Lan Xichen said. And in that moment, Nie Mingjue was irrevocably convinced that he would trust him with his life, and Jingyi’s, though probably not with the success of his latest mission.
However, considering what the latest mission was, would he not be putting its success in Lan Xichen’s hands anyway?
He would be, which was why Nie Mingjue caught up to him in the street ten minutes later and explained the situation with A-Yi’s nursery interview. To his surprise, Lan Xichen was more than sympathetic; apparently, his younger brother had recently been married, and now seemed to think it was his fault that Lan Xichen never had the chance to date anyone.
“A-Zhan worries, and I don’t want him to worry,” Xichen fretted. “We can pretend to break up in a month or two, and by then, your son will have passed the family interview for that fancy nursery school. Does that sound all right?”
“More than all right,” Nie Mingjue replied, and meant it.
But he never intended that agreement to lead them here, behind a solid steel dumpster with gunfire rattling past their ears and sirens screaming in the distance. Nie Mingjue doesn’t know how he managed to convince Lan Xichen that the people chasing him were his ex-patients, rather than a group of thugs and seditionists determined to take out the country’s top secret agent; but he did it, and Lan Xichen accepted the excuse and followed Nie Mingjue’s lead to safety.
There is no fear in his eyes, Mingjue realizes: only shock, and trust, and a great deal of ill-advised bravery.
“Let’s get married,” Nie Mingjue blurts, taking Xichen’s hands in his. “I ruined everything by going to that party and saying I was your husband, and you say your brother won’t leave you alone about finding someone. Jingyi’s mother—my first wife—all she wanted was for A-Yi to go to a good school, and they won’t accept a child with only one parent. We can dissolve the arrangement whenever you like, but either way, Lan-xiansheng—I have the means to care for you and yours all my life, whether we remain together or not.”
Lan Xichen nods. “I’ll do it, Nie-shaoye. After all, it’s for my didi’s sake as well as your son’s.”
Mingjue rifles through his pockets for something vaguely ring-shaped, or a bit of string or ribbon he could tie into a circle—and then he spots the intact grenade lying by his knee, and tears out the pin with his teeth before standing up and hurling the grenade back into the dark.
The ground rocks with the force of the blast as the car behind them bursts into flames, and Nie Mingjue can hear more than one scream as a couple of supply trucks catch fire. But his mind is elsewhere: Lan Xichen’s eyes are fixed on his, and Nie Mingjue’s lips are already shaping the vows he thought he would never have the chance to make until this very instant.
“I take you to be my husband, for better or worse—”
It will be better, on his part as well as Xichen’s. Lan Xichen needs money, and Nie Mingjue needs a partner, so what could be more beneficial to them than this?
“In sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer—”
Mingjue will make sure Xichen’s uncle continues to receive the treatment he needs, and that Xichen is well looked-after himself. In all honesty, it’s the least he can do.
“To love and to cherish, for as long as we both shall live.”
He slides the grenade pin onto Lan Xichen’s finger, taking a minute to appreciate the way it glints in the moonlight before pulling his new husband away from a Molotov cocktail that had exploded too close for comfort.
And then he and Xichen are running, fleeing into the night and back to the motorcycle Mingjue left by the street that afternoon. “Where to now?” Lan Xichen shouts, as Nie Mingjue hands him a helmet and a jacket to keep off the wind. “Back to your place, or mine?”
“To the city hall,” Nie Mingjue yells, kicking the motorcycle to life as Xichen’s arms slip around his waist. “We have to register our marriage before Huaisang leaves his office for the night.”
Lan Xichen nods against his back, his shoulders beginning to tremble from the shock—or more likely from the cold, since the jacket is a thin one—but not due to nerves, because he comes off the motorcycle as cool as a cucumber and signs the marriage papers at the town hall without a second thought.
Somehow, because of Lan Xichen’s assurance, leaving the building arm in arm with him feels like the natural consequence to every decision Nie Mingjue has ever made.
He looks down at Lan Xichen’s long finger, now crowned by a trio of half-carat diamonds instead of the ring from the grenade, and tightens his grasp in sheer wonder before leading his husband to A-Sang’s car.
From this day on, he and Xichen will face the world together.
(And of course the mission too, he supposes. Just, perhaps—not yet.)
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
izzy806
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
2087
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
