Archive of Our Own ^beta

Yiling Tower was not an outpost for the faint of heart. While the resentful aura saturating the Forsaken Battlegrounds could not pierce the strong protective energies woven in by the Yiling Laozu of eras past, it was well known that most cultivators ended up crumbling under the weight of the sheer loneliness and the endless calls from outside for someone to come join them.

The average length of time any cultivator was stationed on a sentry tower was five years. Now this wasn’t to say that every tower was fairly staffed. The towers in regions with strong mountains and clear lakes often had cultivators fighting to get a placement in those exclusive, beautiful towers, whereas some of the outlying regions in less ideal places limped along with the smallest number of people required to keep things from collapsing at the seams. 

Very few people thought they had the fortitude and ingenuity it took to survive the Forsaken Battlegrounds. Even fewer were right. Before he'd taken up the position, Wei Wuxian had been forced to read through every account that the previous cultivators had made, all the way back to when the tower had been first built, sometime around twelve hundred years ago, back when heroes such as Hanguang-jun and the Yiling Laozu walked the world.

As far as he could recall, the longest anyone who had been sent out alone had made it before was a little more than two years. He was at twenty-two months, seventeen days and counting.

Much had been made of how terrifying and haunting the Forsaken Battlegrounds were. How even the Yiling Laozu's protections only lasted while you were in the tower. How at any point you might just lose your mind and go out to join the other fierce corpses endlessly wandering the landscape.

Wei Wuxian could safely say that above all else, it was boring. With very little true daylight and the tower being fixed in as close to a center of the area as there could be, while it was possible for him to fly out to Yiling, the risks made even him pause in consideration. He went out to the very edges once a month to pick up supplies from cultivators who seemed surprised to see him fly out completely unaffected by anything other than the endless boredom that filled his days.

With a sigh, he finished typing up his mandatory monthly report on the situation of the Forsaken Battlegrounds and hit send, watching the bar crawl very slowly across the screen.

“ Dear whoever reads my reports. The Forsaken Battlegrounds are still full of resentful corpses who have a problem with my beautiful tower. Wards are holding strong. Tomato plants not so much. Please send a solar lamp for my precious tomato babies.”

The last cultivator who had attempted to hold this tower on her own, a young woman named He Yan, had told him to find a hobby that he had to focus on every day. Gardening or cooking or something he couldn’t just let slide for weeks on end. “It may seem monotonous, but it will save your sanity, or at least as much of it as survives the resentment and loneliness,” she’d said sternly in her one email to him. “I wish I’d known that at the start. Maybe it will help you.”

At first he’d turned up his nose at the idea. Then he’d actually made it out to the tower with his books and projects and after a week started looking up how to grow his own vegetables. 

It seemed like a good way to keep things from getting too monotonous even for his daily hobby. After all, different veggies would grow at different speeds. 

He’d mastered radishes and potatoes easily enough, running out of room in his tubs for the roots to grow any deeper faster than he expected. Peppers and garlic and savory and spicy herbs had been not much more of a challenge. 

However, the tomatoes were proving to be more stubborn. One plant had given up on life entirely; even the resentful aura all around them couldn’t resurrect its little wilted leaves. The other two limped on, petulant and small, but refusing to give up the battle against what should have been perfectly adequate conditions to grow. 

Wei Wuxian adjusted his solar lamp again, trying to find what the gardening blogs called ‘the ideal blend of sunlight for tempermental, disease prone plants’. “I’m not going to remember to turn off the light all the time,” he warned his tomato plants. “You might have a few days where you get a little extra sun. But that’s good for you!“ he exclaimed, glancing out the narrow windows to see the dreary, dark clouds already growing even darker in threat of another resentment infused storm. “We could all use a little extra light here.”

Thunder cracked off in the distance and he sighed faintly, deciding to leave the light where it was for now and see how his plants did. If another storm came through, it would cut out the already unstable internet and he had things he wanted to download before it came through. 

Jin Zixun had just posted another long diatribe on how terrible the mandatory five years in a tower that wasn’t the illustrious Golden Scale Tower was and he was looking forward to reminding all of them that they could all be hanging out in Yiling with him instead. 

Wei Wuxian smirked faintly to himself as he picked up his tablet, walking around in loops until he found the best signal spot that day. He was pretty sure Jin Zixun would have called his uncle sobbing to take him home after the first day. 

“I am sorry to hear that not every tower can be as ornate or brilliant as the Jin’s great eyesore in the middle of Lanling. But then it’s only reasonable that the other towers get a chance to bask in your glow as well! 

“I’m certain that if all the towers looked like and acted like Golden Scale Tower, there would be no more resentment in the world because the sheer ego contained in those towers would blind everyone so brightly there would be no one with eyesight left to envy!”

On some level, he could understand why the previous cultivators that had been stationed here had eventually cracked beneath the pressure and loneliness. Nearly everyone who had been stationed here before had chosen it less because they wanted to be stationed in the loneliest outpost over the whole Jianghu, and more because it was a bad idea to leave the tower which prevented the Forsaken Battlegrounds from spreading. It would be a Very Bad Idea to leave this last bastion unguarded with no one to care for the delicate wards that kept them all safe. Make it five years out here and you could have your pick of any posting or job no matter how many cultivators might already be there.

Wei Wuxian knew that the rest of his yearmates had thought he was crazy when he'd taken one look at his posting and been excited. Really, if they'd thought about it, they would have understood exactly why he had secretly hoped for this posting.

This tower had been built by the Yiling Laozu towards the end of his long life, when it became clear that the Forsaken Battlegrounds would continue to grow and fester once he was gone. Built from solid stones each with talismans for purification and resistance to resentment carved into every block, it held the Forsaken Battlegrounds in place.

While the Yiling Laozu had offered suggestions for building many of the other towers, it had been the Forsaken Battlegrounds that was his magnum opus. To stand in this tower was to stand in the presence of a master of talismans and manipulation of resentful energy. Who wouldn't want a chance to see the work of an unparalleled genius? To get to reach out and touch the real work of someone who was so immeasurably gifted that even now scholars were still puzzling out some of the intricacies that he was able to put together a thousand years ago. 

Wei Wuxian could easily pat himself on the back for being a cultivator who had mastered three disciplines, but it gave him this curious feeling of being small and just scratching the surface of a much bigger world he had yet to understand.

But he had been prepared for the likely loneliness and the days stretching into endless monotony over time. Whereas most cultivation stations usually had enough other cultivators that those stationed there could occasionally take a break and fly into town, or go out on nighthunts for interesting things, or even just take the day off and spend their time doing as little as possible. Nie Huaisang's occasional letters to him were mostly him celebrating that every day he did as little as possible until his posting was up and he could lay down his saber for good. 

Sometimes Wei Wuxian was tempted to invite him out to the Forsaken Battlegrounds where once he’d done his ward maintenance he would have nothing to do for days on end! As much leisure as he could stand! But somehow he had the sneaking suspicion that Nie Huaisang would rather take up actual swordplay than set foot beyond the boundaries of the tower.

In other places it was still possible for cultivators to not only focus on their duties, but keep up with their own ambitions and build connections to do whatever they wished afterwards. Here, it wasn't as simple.

Here, their job as cultivators was to protect that ancient tower that kept them safe from the resentment curdling within the Forsaken Battlegrounds so that it would never again spread, sprawl and try to devour the world as it had all those years ago before the Yiling Laozu shot down the sun and tamed the malice within.

Here, their job was not to cultivate themselves, but to cultivate a tower that would long outlive them.

“Dear whoever has to read my reports. A whole lot of nothing continues to happen here. I can tell it’s close to winter because sometimes the corpses come wandering around with snow on thei

Wei Wuxian stopped mid-word as abruptly the wards above the window began to glow: a warning for the cultivator in the tower that there was danger to a living being outside but within its perimeter.

Which was strange, because there was only him out here, and the wards were too solid for anything to break into the tower without him knowing about it. Which meant there was something outside...

The wards pulsed again, brighter, more intense. Whatever it was, it was alive, but not for long.

Not unless he got there first.

He cursed and grabbed Suibian from where she sat on the desk, sprinting for the stairs and leaping down them three at a time. He could feel the energy pulsing through the tower as it woke up slowly like a slumbering beast, roused from a sleep of a thousand years.

It had been made for one purpose: to protect the living from the unquiet dead that filled the landscape. It needed no intervention to do exactly what it had been built to do.

He didn't even need to kick open the doors as he arrived at the bottom of the stairs; they opened for him. A knot of fierce corpses scattered at the burst of spiritual energy that radiated out with him, unable to get too close without burning up in its wake.

Wei Wuxian drew Suibian in one hand, flicking a light talisman out amongst the crowd of corpses to look for whatever living thing had been unfortunate enough to be caught here in the midst of the Forsaken Battlegrounds.

Somewhere off to his left he heard an animal yelp in pain, followed by the growl of corpses deciding to give up on the quarry with a sword and talismans in favor of something easier to hunt.

Wei Wuxian followed them at a run, light talisman held high. The fierce corpses were easier to track than the cry of the animal, even though he cut down a few of them with Suibian along the way.

He stumbled over a bluff along with two corpses that could not catch their footing and fell face first on the ground. For him it was more an undignified scramble that nevertheless did still leave him on his feet. It was there that he saw what the tower had noticed before him.

Several fierce corpses surrounded some large, white animal that was snapping at them, desperately fighting for its life. As Wei Wuxian watched, it managed to pull an arm straight off one of the corpses around it before yelping loudly in agony as another corpse grabbed its leg and yanked. It fell to the ground and did not stand up again.

Wei Wuxian glared at the corpses.

Suibian flew out with a single gesture to cut through the hordes around the white animal, slicing a path through that he promptly widened with talismans. Already he could feel older, angrier corpses trying to climb through the dirt to get to him and his quarry.

Above him the tower began to glow, the protections within reacting to the amount of resentful energy rising up above him. The lower level corpses out in front of him were too weak to resist the Yiling Laozu's ancient protections, so far ahead of their understanding despite its age that even he could only maintain and repair the small flaws that appeared with time. Now all of those ancient arrays drawn out by an unparalleled genius were coming to life one at a time.

He had never been more grateful that the Yiling Laozu was so brilliant as he was now. Suibian flew down around his legs to cut through hands trying to grab and pull him down as he took advantage of the momentary chaos to sprint across the dead fields to the creature now lying still as death, a white ghost in a black field.

It weakly lifted its head as he slid to a stop in front of it, long ears twitching. Between the heavy miasma growing around them and the fur matted down with blood, it was hard to tell what it was, only that it was large. It clearly recognized him as an ally, or at least not a fierce corpse.

Wei Wuxian knelt down next to it, gingerly feeling around fur matted with blood, trying to find a spot uninjured enough to lift it up. The animal let out a pained yelp as he accidentally prodded a bite, squirming away from him. “Come on,” he said, glancing around quickly. Suibian and the tower were still doing a lot of work to keep them safe, but that would only last for so long. “I'm sorry I touched a bad spot, but if you want to live, you should come with me.”

The animal lowered its ears and bared its teeth slightly, but began to push itself up with its front legs.

Beneath them he felt the roiling of the resentful energy building. Above them the tower flashed again.

They were running short of time.

The animal tried to put its weight on its hind legs, but he could quickly see that one leg was too wounded to support the creature’s weight. Gritting his teeth, he wrapped his arms around its chest and bodily slung it over his shoulder. The animal let out a pained yelp and fell limp against him. “Sorry buddy,” he said again, gesturing for Suibian to return to him and hopping up the moment the slim blade reached him. “I think you'd rather be alive than turned into another corpse here in the Forsaken Battlegrounds.”

The animal made no reply as he began to funnel his spiritual energy into the sword to carry them towards the tower with all due haste.

Wei Wuxian had never been so grateful before that when the sects came together to build the outposts, they’d decided that bathing facilities on the bottom level would be a good thing to have. He didn’t want to track animal blood upstairs anywhere near his plants! The heavy stone doors slammed shut behind him as he stumbled to a landing, snapping his fingers to activate the wards around them just in time for the building rage of the Forsaken Battlegrounds to crash into the tower like a wave upon rocks.

He stood in the center of the room, watching the wards flare with each crash. As usual, they did not falter, holding strong against the tide.

Only once he was certain that the wards would hold on their own without his intervention did he lower his bundle of fur to the ground, careful to not jostle it any worse than it already had been. A clap lit the lights in the room, throwing everything into stark relief.

It was then that he finally got a good look at the animal and all relief at having managed to save it drained in the wake of sudden panic, so potent it felt as if his soul were about to fly out of his body.

Four legs, a long bushy tail, a sharp, pointed muzzle with long white ears – a dog. Big enough to tear his throat out with one leap. His mind went blank with the only thought coming through to be to run run run.

He stumbled and tripped over his feet, scrambling backwards until he collided with the wall. Trapped with nowhere to go, he curled up into a ball and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable pain of teeth tearing into his skin.

Long, long minutes passed in silence aside from his panicked whimpering. Nothing happened.

Slowly some level of awareness began to creep back into his mind. His whole body hurt with tension, he made himself start to uncurl slowly. His whole chest felt empty of air, he made himself breathe slowly until it came naturally again.

When his heart no longer raced in his chest like it could hide from the dog elsewhere if it beat hard enough, he made himself cautiously look over at the animal. Even if it were a terrible dog, it didn't deserve to die at the thousands of hands of the Forsaken Battlegrounds. He would just... he would just have to request that someone else come to rescue it and take it back to town.

Although now that he got a second look at it, it didn't... quite look like a dog. Or even a wolf. It was still difficult to tell under the blood, but it looked more like a fox than anything else.

He remembered learning about foxes as a child, how while they looked somewhat like dogs they were a different species altogether. Or were only somewhat related to dogs. Random childhood animal facts were not something he thought of regularly. 

A pity, they would have been a lot more useful now if he could recall them.

The animal lay there, not moving. Only the rise and fall of its chest told him that it was still alive. He watched it until he was certain that it wasn't about to leap up and ambush him when he moved, then cautiously crept towards it, flinching at every other breath.

Closer up, it definitely was a fox. Much larger than any fox should be – it was nearly the size of a wolf – but for certain a fox with the most beautiful pure white fur he'd ever seen. Most of the blood on it seemed to be its own, but there were definitely some spatters of black goop from fierce corpses it had torn apart in its fight to continue living.

It was still bleeding in some spots. If nothing was done, it might bleed out right on the floor of the tower where it should have been safe. Despite his fear, he couldn't just let it die. Especially not after it had fought so hard to live.

He carefully reached out and patted its side, watching for it to snap at him. “You're a really brave fox,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “I've met a lot of humans who would just lose their heads and panic if they were in your situation.”

The fox did not move. Wei Wuxian let out a shaky breath and retreated just long enough to grab the medicine kit he kept near the door. Most of the things in it were set up for humans, but bandages and antiseptic would work just as well on foxes, he hoped.

He knelt back down and began to work on the bite marks, starting with the ones furthest away from its jaws. As he washed the wounds on its hind leg, he noted that it was bent at an odd angle. Probably broken from when it had been grabbed by the fierce corpse.

He would just have to tie it off and hope that he could find some sort of wood or metal pole that would hold it in place at least until someone else could take the fox out of his tower safely.

It lay there so still, he began to worry that it wouldn't wake up again even as he continued to clean bite marks and wrap bandages around bleeding limbs. He couldn't quite see its face from where he was dealing with one nasty mark on its back hip, but any animal would have at least made some sort of pained noise from what he was doing if it had come back to consciousness.

It came around abruptly when he started to work on its leg, growling low in its throat. Wei Wuxian froze, cautiously looking over.

Bright golden eyes were fixed on him, fur vaguely fluffed up. He got the feeling that the fox was assessing him, trying to decide if he was friend or threat.

He considered smiling for a second, then remembered from a summer spent devouring all animal facts that most species considered the baring of teeth to be a threat. Instead he made himself breathe out heavily and stop moving for a second. “You're safe, you're out of danger, I'm just trying to clean your wounds,” he said, keeping his voice as even as possible. It was hard to say how much it would understand, but hopefully the message would come through. “I'm just trying to splint up your leg so it'll heal right.”

The fox glared at him with bright gold eyes, but lay its head back down to let him continue to wrap bandages around its hind leg. A long pink tongue flashed out for a second to moisten its nose, showing off a flash of very sharp looking canines.

Wei Wuxian swallowed hard. “You have rather doglike teeth, my good friend,” he said, trying to talk through his nerves before they got the better of them. “But you would never think of biting me, would you? You're definitely not a vicious dog of any sort. Just a friendly fox.”

The fox let out a whuff of air. Its leg twitched as he pulled the bandage tight before cutting off the extra length with Suibian. “I can't imagine you being any sort of fierce creature,” he lied, hoping that saying it out loud would make it true. “With such long ears, you really look more like a rabbit than a fox. Rabbits are the softest, sweetest animals ever.”

Even though his fingers were shaking, he managed to tie a good knot in the bandage and reached up to give the fox an appreciative pat on its hip. “Thank you for being a good patient, fox who is actually a bunny,” he said, grabbing a damp towel and wiping his fingers on it. “As long as you continue to not bite or attack me, you can stay here until you're all better. How does that sound, Bunny?” he said, the nickname slipping out before he could stop and think about it.

Well, the only thing he could do now was run with it. “Yeah, I'm just going to call you Bunny now,” he told the fox, putting his hands on his hips. “It definitely suits you, what with those long, furry ears.” He reached up and tugged one of them pointedly before hurriedly withdrawing his hand from biting range.

He was fixed with a glare so potent that he couldn't avoid cracking up at the sheer ire contained. The fox definitely understood what he was saying and did not like it. Too bad: the nickname and the furry ears were all that was keeping his cynophobia from flaring right back up with their current proximity, so it was just going to have to learn how to deal.

Bunny could only keep up the angry glare for so long. Soon its head dropped off to the side and it made a low whining noise. It was only then that it occurred to him that he hadn't actually fed the fox since he'd brought it inside. And there was nothing to eat in the Burial Mounds unless you could either climb the tall trees with dubious fruit or felt like taking a chance on the thousands of rotting corpses, so it likely hadn't eaten in longer.

His estimation of the fox's patience and strength of will ticked up another notch. “Hang on,” he told the fox, backing away while keeping an eye on it. “I know I've got meat and other stuff in the suspension boxes. I'll get you something to eat.”

“Dear Whoever is Responsible for Reading My Reports. The Forsaken Battlegrounds continue to be the Forsaken Battlegrounds. Resentful, festering, rotting corpses sometimes getting up and getting into big fights with each other. Considering testing their ability to dance with a few choice flute solos. Supplies are adequate for another month, although I am running low on tea. Refill on non-necessities would be appreciated. Also send extra meat in new varieties. New houseguest can't eat tofu. Discovered that the hard way.

“Unexpectedly found a fox in the area. It was alive when I found it and remains alive to this day. Was quite savaged by fierce corpse pack, but is responding well to basic treatment. Additional supply requests to continue caring for unexpected companion: fresh bandages, needle, thread, salve. Three queen sized fluffy blankets. Basket fitting these dimensions: 48-48-6 with a dip so that it can climb in and out easily. Hind leg is badly broken and bitten to all hell and back, so no jumping possible. Wooden box with same dimensions and enough sand to fill it. I am not making this poor animal go outside to do its business.

“Why did you never consider sending the previous cultivators a pet? Much easier to ignore everyone outside with a fox to talk to now. Strong recommendation that future cultivators who take my position adopt a cat or a rabbit or something.

“Regards, Wei Wuxian, Yiling Tower Cultivator.”

Once they'd made it over the hurdle of finding something acceptable in what Wei Wuxian had stored away in his chests to eat, Bunny turned out to be a surprisingly calm companion. While he'd initially considered requesting someone to come take it to a shelter once it was healed enough, those thoughts were fading with each passing day.

It was far more clever than any animal he'd ever met. It ate neatly and made as little of a mess as possible. Once the resupply had come in, it used the sandbox he’d requested with no trouble, and slept in the bed rather than sprawled across the floor. A cursory exploration that had resulted in him being yipped at in scolding and Bunny glaring at him from the bed for hours told him that his new friend was male.

Sometimes he ignored Wei Wuxian to sit in profound meditation staring at nothing, or glared at him when he got too close. He refused to share any of his jerky snacks and was easily offended by Wei Wuxian saying things to annoy him.

He also sat at the base of the stairs when Wei Wuxian was busy working upstairs, injured leg splayed out awkwardly, and looked over his shoulder at his tablet when he was busy fighting with the internet to read articles about foxes. He occasionally snorted whenever Wei Wuxian ran across something clearly written by an idiot, flicked its ears back whenever he called it Bunny and in general just seemed to have opinions about many things.

Wei Wuxian found himself reading out deliberately stupid posts just to laugh about them with Bunny, who sometimes gave him withering looks, but never left his side and never even bared his teeth.

It was surprising how much easier his days had become with his new silent companion sitting at his side. More than once he would look over at him, see the cunning glittering in his eyes along with the general patience for whenever his cynophobia flared up and sent him running for the stairs, and wondered how this intelligent animal ended up trapped in the Forsaken Battlegrounds with him. 

At least he’d chosen this godforsaken place. Bunny just appeared from nowhere with no way out. 

Wei Wuxian crouched on the stairs where he was watching his fox companion fast asleep in his bed before he went up to his own bed. “Don’t worry, Bunny, you’ll stay safe as long as I’m here too,” he whispered and felt something click into place in his chest. A promise to his new vulpine friend, that no matter how scary his fangs and general appearance could be, Wei Wuxian would be good to him. 

He always kept his promises. 

“Dear Whoever Reads My Reports. Thanks for the extra blankets. It turns out the ground floor gets much colder than the top of the tower and my poor fox doesn't like that. I have been burning through more coal than usual this winter. Please send a heftier supply along with more meat. He's eating more now that he's feeling better, and I can't have my Bunny going hungry.

“Nothing of note has happened and nothing of note continues to happen. Actually, one very important thing has happened. Bunny has learned how to yip along with my flute playing. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a fox singing, but it’s the sort of thing everyone should experience at some point.”

Wei Wuxian sat at the base of the stairs eating noodles, watching his snoring fox occasionally flick his tail about in his sleep. He couldn’t say why his overtired brain refused to remember how to sleep and had kept him up past… he squinted tiredly at the old clock over the door, 3am. Or why it had instead decided that he’d be better served eating noodles rather than doing something normal like dreaming about an army of flying radishes again, but it was the best he’d managed. 

Due to the fact that it was somewhere past 3am, he was wearing only trousers and one of his fancy inner robes from his one set of Properly Formal Cultivator Robes that he’d worn to his graduation. He’d also worn them to his subsequent assignation to the Yiling Tower outpost which was probably the worst kept secret that entire year. He wasn’t honestly sure why he’d packed them in the first place, given that his chances of human contact outside of the spotty signal and his rare calls to his parents and rarer still to his yearmates was unlikely at best, but sometimes it was fun to dress up in parts or all of the costume. 

It was a shame that there was no one for him to parade the red and black silk in front of. Fierce corpses weren’t very impressed by how fancy your clothes were after all. Neither were foxes, to be honest, but he could pretend that Bunny liked them a little bit anyway. 

Not that he was awake to appreciate his attire at the moment. While it had taken a while for Bunny to soften enough to him to not immediately leap awake whenever Wei Wuxian came down the stairs, he had now grown comfortable enough to sleep through whatever nonsense he was up to at the moment.

Unless it involved explosions. Bunny hadn’t learned how to ignore those yet. The last time Wei Wuxian had set his talisman (and robes) on fire, Bunny had paced back and forth at the bottom of the stairs, yipping in worry until Wei Wuxian had finished putting everything out and come down to pet him.

He had been ignored just slightly once Bunny had determined he was fine, but it made Wei Wuxian laugh. His fox would fit perfectly in one of Huaisang’s anime, being the pouty girl who got all worried over her love interest before realizing that her worry was unneeded and getting mad about it.

He sighed slightly and stuffed more cold, congealing noodles into his mouth. Bunny was curled up into a ball in his bed, long white tail over his nose, so deeply asleep it didn’t even look like he was dreaming. Wei Wuxian envied him just slightly. While he enjoyed staying up somewhat late, they had crossed beyond the hour where he was happy to swan dive into bed. 

Wei Wuxian pouted discontentedly at his snoring fox. He fed him the nicest treats, read him all the articles that he could load on his tablet and helped him scratch that one spot behind his ear that he couldn’t maneuver his splinted leg to reach. The least Bunny could do was wake up and be sympathetic to the plights of the insomniac living in this tower too.

He dismissed the thought and the pout as soon as they arose. It was good that one of them was getting proper rest anyway. Given the relative strength of Wei Wuxian’s golden core, he could have stayed up through the night and the next day and not noticed any actual adverse effects, but the headache it personally brought him was never particularly fun.

He sighed and rubbed at one eye. Sometimes he thought that the problem of sleeping here in Yiling Tower was that even with the incredible strength of the wards and the inability of anything out there in the Forsaken Battlegrounds to break through, it was hard to tell if the half thoughts lurking in the corner of his mind were really his own or not.

Not for the first time he wondered how a tower out here in the middle of nowhere was considered a simple enough task for one cultivator at a time. If it were up to him, he would have had a whole parade of cultivators manning the tower, just so that it never felt like there was only him and the spirits clawing at the edges of his sanity.

For a half second he wondered if this was how it started for the other cultivators, if the slow descent into madness or leaving the jianghu altogether began with insomnia and oddly morose thoughts. 

Then Bunny sneezed abruptly in his sleep twice, flapping his tail about until it no longer tickled his nose uncomfortably. He looked as offended as the day Wei Wuxian had lifted his tail up, all because of his own sneeze.

After a brief moment of flailing and flapping about, he settled back down into his deep sleep, with not even a sign that he’d just done something so undignified.

All morose thoughts fled Wei Wuxian’s mind as he bit down on a cackle, trying to not laugh half-chewed noodles through his nose. He dropped the cup on the stairs and clapped his hands over his mouth, willing himself to breathe normally until he could swallow.

His clever, clever fox. It was easy for anyone to have maudlin thoughts when they were already tired and cranky. Better just to sneeze them out and go back to sleep. No bigger concerns other than fluffy tails going in the wrong places.

Wei Wuxian swallowed carefully, a few tired giggles still escaping. He definitely had a magic fox. How else could such a simple thing make him so happy? 

On bare feet, he padded across the floor over to where Bunny slept peacefully, kneeling on the floor to run his hands as lightly as he dared over his ears. “Hopefully you don’t have any more sneeze attacks tonight,” he whispered, indulging himself in enjoying how soft Bunny’s fur was and how nice and warm his ears were to touch. “Unless you’re sneezing away any other thoughts I’d rather not have.”

Bunny snorted slightly in his sleep, flicking an ear back, but did not wake. Wei Wuxian smiled fondly at him.

After a few more moments of indulging himself in getting to pet and pull on long white furry ears, he stood up and collected the remnants of his noodle cup, stifling a yawn as he headed back upstairs.

Bunny was a magical fox indeed. Somehow he had the feeling that once he lay down, he would sleep just fine.

“Hey Mom and Dad. It’s Dongzhi here over in the Forsaken Battlegrounds too! I miss you both so much, especially right now when it’s a holiday and it’s just me over here. I know, I know, this was the thing I wanted to do and I really am enjoying the woodwork and the craftsmanship of the tower and all of that, but it’s harder than I thought it would be. Turns out there’s not actually much to do here in Yiling Tower.

“I’d say I wasn’t whining, but we all know that Xianxian gets whiny when he’s bored and it is so boring out here most of the time. I chase off fierce corpses, I make sure everything’s holding up, I go to bed at an almost reasonable time (I know, a shocker after how many times you caught me staying up till sunrise when I was in school) and that’s just how it goes. I started a garden to try and stave off the boredom, but even that’s only worked so long. 

“Good things have happened on that front though, I’ve got a pet now. He’s a white fox and his name is Bunny cause he’s got long white ears. I found him out fighting off corpses a little while ago, holding his own even with a broken leg! I took him back to the tower and nursed him back to health, so now there’s two of us out here, keeping each other company and driving each other bonkers. Better the two of us doing it to each other rather than the ghosts, right?

“I won’t lie, it’s taken us a little while to get used to each other, but we have now. I don’t get scared of him that often anymore. Only sometimes, if he’s growling or tearing apart his dinner. I don’t think I’d be okay with dogs, but I can be okay with my fox anyway. Hopefully you two will get to meet him when my tour is up.

“How are things at home? It takes forever for news to download over here, but tell me everything anyway! Did Dad get that ward to keep rats out of the trash working? How are Yanli-jie and Jiang-shushu doing? Has anyone else punched the Peacock in the nose yet? I want to come back to civilization not a total hermit if possible…”

A rare snowy day in the Forsaken Battlegrounds had him considering Bunny and how he was trapped on the ground floor. He'd only tried to follow Wei Wuxian to the upper levels once, yelping when he realized that he couldn't climb up the stairs with his hind leg out of commission. While the makeshift splint he’d made had stopped Bunny from hurting it any worse, it seemed to throw him off balance enough that he couldn’t figure out how to hop up the stairs even with three legs still working fine. 

While he seemed to be a patient sort of animal - he wasn't getting bitey with Wei Wuxian for not taking him outside nor did he fuss when he was changing the bandages on the healing bites - it couldn't be the healthiest thing for an animal to be cooped up in a small room all day.

Especially without any sort of entertainment other than what Wei Wuxian could provide. Which was very little for an animal that could not walk on his hind leg. Fetch and tug of war were quickly excluded for that reason, with tug of war even more banned because while his comfort level with Bunny grew by the day, that did not extend to ever wanting to see his sharp fangs. He still had to look away when Bunny was eating!

Wei Wuxian had been spending more time with his fox companion after his work for the day was done, but that didn’t change the fact that Bunny had to be a very bored fox the rest of the time. No matter how much fun they had reading terrible internet articles and irate cultivator arguments on the ethics of hunting endangered and rare beasts together, it couldn’t be enough.

He was sitting on the stairs, mulling over his problem when Bunny came up to him, doing his slow, elegant three steps and hop walk. His golden eyes seemed to gleam with curiosity as he sat down carefully in front of Wei Wuxian and waited.

Wei Wuxian let out a sigh and looked the fox square in the eyes. “I know you’re definitely smart enough to be a spiritual animal or something, but this really can’t be enough for you, can it?” he asked, propping his chin in his hands. “I’m sure you would much rather be doing something else like running or hunting or… I don’t know, bullying fierce corpses again. Not just sitting here listening to me read shit on the internet. That can’t be very fun for a fox.”

Bunny tilted his head to the side, the very picture of confusion. Wei Wuxian snorted despite himself, sliding down the stairs to reach over and rub his furry face affectionately. “Well maybe it is fun for you, but I’m sure you would still like more to do than that.”

The fox leaned his head into Wei Wuxian’s hand, making no sound but clearly seeking out more attention. Wei Wuxian had been right all those weeks ago when they first met; he really was a sweet and friendly fox. One with a lot of pride and dignity, but when they were getting along, he was happy to sit right next to Wei Wuxian or lower his head to be petted.

Maybe when he left the Forsaken Battlegrounds, he could just… keep Bunny. While he hadn’t found anything on the internet about foxes as large as Bunny was or the legality to keeping them, it wasn’t impossible to assume that for his boon as the one person keeping this tower going, he could get some strings pulled so they could stay together.

But that was still close to three years off. They were problems that he didn’t have to worry about right now. Not like the problem of what would happen when Bunny inevitably got bored and wanted to do something new before his leg was better and he could come upstairs to annoy Wei Wuxian instead.

Bunny bumped his hand insistently and he realized he’d stopped actively petting the fox and was just holding his hand absently in place. He laughed as the fox nudged his hand again, rubbing his face along it determinedly in search of pets. “Spoiled little brat, aren’t you?” he teased, even though he immediately gave in and started petting the pouty little fox like he wanted. “Is this what you actually want? More of my undivided attention?”

Bunny whined slightly and rubbed his head on Wei Wuxian’s hands for several more minutes before abruptly stalking off towards his den to lie down again, walking slower than before. He turned about twice, carefully nudging the blanket into place with his teeth before flopping down with his bandaged leg spread out.

Only once he was laying down did he look at Wei Wuxian again with those large, golden eyes. Wei Wuxian understood his great trials. He’d had a broken leg as a kid, once, and there was nothing worse than wanting to do things and just not being able to stand up or walk around to get to them himself. 

He stood up from his spot on the stairs and walked over to ruffle Bunny’s ears one more time. “It’s okay, we can keep hanging out doing this. But I’ll think of other fun things you can do once that leg of yours is out of its splint.”

Bunny thumped his tail once and Wei Wuxian bit down on the urge to run screaming for the stairs. He definitely talked to Bunny like he could understand what he was saying, but how was he supposed to explain that he was just a little frightened by anything that acted and made noise like a dog?

He couldn’t even explain it, while he’d been bitten by a dog as a child, his parents had been adamant that he’d been terrified of them before that. Some people were born with phobias; it wasn’t uncommon at all. 

He just wished his particular fear didn’t make it as hard as it was to spend time with his new friend, or surge up at such inconvenient times! It wasn’t even all the time that these little things bothered him, but he just couldn’t shut them down as he wanted when they did. Bunny whined slightly when he stood up with measured calm, lifting his head and ears in confusion. 

He did his best to summon a smile so Bunny wouldn’t be too worried. “I haven’t checked the upstairs wards yet. I should do that before it gets too late,” he said truthfully. He could keep putting it off for a while, but his nerves were strained and he didn’t want to make Bunny feel bad for something he couldn’t control. “I’ll turn out the light for you so you can nap, okay?”

Bunny whined again, but dropped his head back in the bed obediently. Somehow it made Wei Wuxian feel a little worse. None of this was either of their fault. It was just… sometimes much harder than he wanted it to be. 

He did his level best to save the dejected trudging upstairs for after the second floor. 

“Dear whoever reads my reports. You remember all my complaints about humans needing enrichment when stuck by themselves in the same place for ages? Well that holds true for foxes too. I think if my poor Bunny has to hear inane cultivator arguments one more time, something’s going to end up getting bitten and it’ll probably be my tablet.

“On that note then, in addition to regular restocks, can you send along two fat rabbits who can't really run faster than a fox with a healing broken leg? He can have fun catching and eating some dinner for once.”

Bunny perked up the second he sent the doors flying open, large ears standing to attention. Wei Wuxian grinned as he struggled with his armful of monthly supplies plus surprise for his fox companion, kicking the door shut behind him. “Hello, I'm back,” he called, dropping the bags on the floor. He kept the wooden box in his arms. “Did you miss me?”

Bunny twitched his ears in dismissal, but Wei Wuxian couldn't be so easily fooled; especially when the fox stood up and came to investigate him, hobbling slowly as he carefully tested the stability of his hind leg. Good, they wouldn't need to have another talk about regaining his ability to use it.

He reached down to stroke his fluffy ears, grinning as Bunny pushed his face into his hand again. “I'm happy to see you too,” he told the fox, patting his head before kneeling on the floor and setting the box down next to him. “I brought you a surprise.”

Bunny paced around him, giving the box a cautious sniff as he tried to ascertain what was inside it. Unfortunately the talismans he'd placed on the box to keep the denizens of the Burial Mounds from noticing his bounty also made it so the fox couldn't tell what was inside. He flicked his ears back and gave Wei Wuxian a baleful look.

Wei Wuxian rolled his eyes. “Why are you so suspicious? You're gonna like this, I promise.”

Bunny eased himself back to the floor, stretching out his bandaged leg and gave him a look that said he would believe it when he saw it. He even let out a heavy sigh.

Wei Wuxian ignored him to start undoing the locks on the box. The second the latches were down, the box rocked as its inhabitants realized that freedom was in their grasp.

Bunny's ears went up.

Wei Wuxian grinned and held the lip of the box shut, watching his fox companion with glee. “Are you excited about what's inside?” he asked, knocking on the lid just slightly. “I knew you’d like this.”

Bunny lowered himself to the ground carefully, ears still perked up high hopefully like the bunnies in the box. Wei Wuxian hadn’t specified a difference between perked and lop ears, but the perky ear bunnies were cuter, so hopefully that was what was in the box. 

He waggled a finger sternly at the fox as he prepared to open the box. “Please try to not make too much of a mess on my floor. Cleaning up blood always takes so long.”

Bunny snorted dismissively and Wei Wuxian resigned himself to at least one afternoon down on all fours scrubbing blood out of the tiles again. At least his fox would have had a good time in that case. “Are you ready?”

Bunny’s tail thumped once loudly. Wei Wuxian opened the lid. 

Two sets of white, furry, perky ears popped up almost immediately, followed by sniffing noses and a loud, angry thump. 

Bunny’s eyes were as huge as he’d ever seen them, golden as the moon. He pressed himself even flatter to the floor until Wei Wuxian could have called him a rug if he wanted. The only thing that stood out was his own white ears, pricked forward towards the rabbits with an eagerness he’d never seen on his fox before. 

For a predator animal, the image was surprisingly submissive. Bunny barely even breathed as Wei Wuxian reached into the box and lifted out one squirming rabbit that kicked fruitlessly at the air before he set it on the ground. 

It immediately dashed off to hide behind one of the other supply boxes, followed shortly by the other one that managed to unexpectedly swipe Wei Wuxian in the arm with its claws. Who told harmless bunnies they were allowed to have sharp claws?? Sure his Bunny had sharp claws and sharper teeth, but these guys were soft and fuzzy and fat, just as he’d requested!

Wei Wuxian lifted the box that had once held rabbits off the ground so they couldn’t jump back in when he turned his back and made a calm retreat to the stairway to see what Bunny would do. 

The fox continued to lie there on his belly, barely even moving, his eyes fixed on where the rabbits had hopped off to. Despite the fact that he knew where they were and could definitely smell them from the way his nose was twitching, there was not an ounce of killing instinct in his body. 

Wei Wuxian frowned slightly and sat down on the stairs, box forgotten next to him. “What’s up with you?” he called out to Bunny, who had instead of springing to his feet and trying to catch them or even getting up to stalk them as he might have expected, was trying to crawl on his belly over to where the rabbits were hiding, making some sort of soft panting sound in his throat. “Oi!”

Three sets of heads popped up at his call. The rabbits saw the fox on the other side of the box from them and promptly hopped off much further away, this time under a table covered in papers he was meaning to clean up one of these days. Their little beady eyes glowed in the lamplight as they stared warily at the fox in the middle of the room who had turned his back on them entirely to glare at Wei Wuxian reproachfully.

Wei Wuxian glared back. “What?” he demanded of the suddenly grouchy fox. “You’re a fox. You eat rabbits, don’t you? Or at least chase them? Why are you glaring at me?”

Bunny turned his head away dismissively and promptly slumped onto the floor in his previously submissive position again, tail pressed firmly against the ground. A long, high-pitched whine emanated from his throat. 

Wei Wuxian stared at the strange tableau unfolding in front of him and his pet fox, who apparently wanted nothing to do with hunting the plump bunnies, hiding from him under a table. He definitely wasn’t a trained animal who was waiting for permission or anything like that; he was too keen on doing as he pleased otherwise for that to be the case.

No… no, the only conclusion Wei Wuxian could come to was that he really didn’t want to hunt the rabbits at all. It wasn’t that he lacked interest in them, but that his interest was entirely non-predatory.

Not for the first time he wondered what was up with his strange fox who acted very little like the internet descriptions of foxes he’d seen or like any sort of normal animal at all. There’d been one evening where he’d been up until dawn looking into every detail of the huli jin and their last known appearances and whereabouts, even though they had long since gone extinct. But not only were most of those decidedly mythological, but often seemed to show up mysteriously only to seduce and assassinate powerful leaders in the guises of beautiful women, none of which would have applied to him in the slightest. 

Definitely Bunny was something new and interesting all his own, but that meant that sometimes Wei Wuxian couldn’t determine just what he was going to do. Usually it was things like hanging out and reading his articles with him, or turning up his nose to random things that Wei Wuxian would have assumed he would like to play with.

Now it apparently included attempting to befriend prey animals barely a tenth of his size. Bunny had given up on creeping closer to the rabbits after they’d scrambled away from him twice and was now just lying in the center of the floor, ears flat with dismay and whining slightly in his throat. Even the doglike noise couldn’t frighten Wei Wuxian it was the most abject picture of woe he’d ever seen.

With a sigh he stood up and walked over to sit down next to Bunny. The fox’s golden eyes flicked over to him for a second, then dismissively and pointedly away. His ears didn’t even move when Wei Wuxian reached over and patted him on the head. 

Experience both with his fox and also small children back in his schooling days told him very quickly that he was being ignored because he had been determined as a meanie and Bunny wasn’t going to acknowledge meanies even if they were scratching that nice spot behind his ear.

Wei Wuxian sighed and scratched the spot anyway, confirming that Bunny wouldn’t look at him for the moment. “I’m sorry I scared off your new friends,” he said quietly. “I don’t know why you want to be friends with the bunnies instead of eating them, but I guess you’d rather hang out with other animals, huh?”

Bunny vaguely turned his ear in Wei Wuxian’s direction, but flicked it back after a second. There was no other reaction.

After a few seconds, he patted Bunny’s shoulder and stood up. “Well I’ll be upstairs if you need me, I guess,” he told the fox, trying to ignore the rejected feeling in his chest as he set off for the stairwell.

He turned back to look just once, but Bunny still hadn’t moved.

“Dear whoever reads these reports. The rabbits are still alive after a week, with no sign of that changing any time soon. I guess you’ll need to add more vegetables to my next supply run since apparently my fox is broken.”

To his dismay, Bunny ignored him for a whole day, choosing instead to spend his time attempting to call to the rabbits in a strange huffing sound that it took Wei Wuxian way too long to realize was the laughing sound fox owners referred to on their blogs. He managed to get within about five feet of them with that strange noise before they were racing across the room once again.

Wei Wuxian resigned himself to taking his cold dinner - long forgotten in the focus of watching his growing pack of animals’ failure to communicate - back upstairs. He was thinking glumly about the long, dull evening ahead, reading trash novel updates beside his struggling tomatoes, when Bunny seemed to give up on his new companions, and plopped himself down almost on Wei Wuxian’s feet before he could stand.

Wei Wuxian almost spat out his noodles in surprise. Bunny still wasn’t looking at him, but the message was loud and clear. He was not allowed to stand up and leave Bunny alone downstairs. “Oh, are you talking to me now?” he asked through a mouthful of noodles, earning a disdainful ear flick. “Or do I have to sit here and watch you until you’ve forgiven me?”

Bunny said nothing, as expected, but he thumped his tail once. Wei Wuxian snorted in spite of himself and leaned forwards to ruffle those fluffy white ears instead. 

It had been oddly distressing to be completely ignored by the fox. Fighting with friends was never fun and fighting with the only friend he got to see on a daily basis was even worse. 

Maybe Bunny had been feeling the same way. Wei Wuxian had read dozens of pet owners warnings not to ascribe too many human actions to their animals; that they had their own body language and ways of communication and assuming that they would easily translate over often ended in disaster. But some of the ways Bunny acted made no sense unless he called it petulant or sulky or curious or any number of things that reminded him of the younger cultivators that used to follow him around in droves, back at the college. 

In his wildest thoughts late at night, sometimes he wondered if Bunny was secretly a cursed human or something like that. He couldn’t be; Wei Wuxian had both ruled out and removed any possible curses the first night he’d been at the base of the tower, with Bunny lying on a set of his spare robes with a torn shoulder as a cushion while they waited for a proper bed to be delivered. Even if he hadn’t broken it, there was no curse that could hide from him.

Bunny was just Bunny, whatever curious thing he was, a fox that didn’t act like a fox and sometimes instead like a teenage girl being tormented by her crush. Which made no sense but the image made him snort.

His silly fox had grown on him so much in the last couple months. He didn’t know what he would have done if Bunny had gone on ignoring him for much longer. Probably something rude like pouring water over him while he was sleeping. Or just pouting until Bunny gave in. Both tactics that had gotten him his way in the past.

One of the rabbits poked its white furry nose out cautiously from their current alcove, looking to see if the scary fox was still anywhere to be seen. He saw Bunny go completely alert from where he was sitting on his foot, could feel the tension ratchet up in his body. 

Wei Wuxian couldn’t help tensing in response. He knew after watching Bunny all day that none of it was predatory instinct, but it still stabbed at his urge to run away and hide with the bunnies.

Bunny flicked an ear back towards him. Then he let out a heavy breath and all the eager tension in his body melted away like spring snow. And as if that weren’t enough, he turned around and lowered himself on the ground, front legs out in front of him, tail over Wei Wuxian’s feet, ears and eyes both looking up cautiously at him.

Wei Wuxian’s fear and confusion alike were stalled in their tracks. A disbelieving laugh left his throat before he could control it. “What, are you trying to not scare me?” he asked after more than a minute of Bunny giving him the same quiet, submissive energy he had been showing towards the rabbits all day. “Are you treating me like your bunnies?”

The fox started to whine, then actually stopped himself instead. He lay there patiently, the only movement the occasional slow blink more like a cat’s than anything else.

Something in his heart softened and eased over, a crack he’d never noticed before healing over. He couldn’t help smiling at his silly fox. “I’m not scared of you, you know that, right?” he asked calmly, sliding down on his butt closer to the fox on the floor at the base of the stairs. “I’m not scared of bunnies, whether they be fox or rabbit.”

Somehow Bunny managed to convey skepticism on his face without ever moving a muscle. Wei Wuxian laughed. “I’m being serious! Really!” He protested the entirely unreasonable suspicion, ruffling the fur on the top of his head until it stood up straight.

Bunny looked vaguely annoyed, but resigned to such things now. The price of living with Wei Wuxian: only so much dignity was allowed at any given moment. He flicked his ears forwards in that way that meant he was curious about whatever Wei Wuxian was doing or thinking, otherwise lying there as still as he could manage.

His amusement faded as he looked over Bunny’s head, trying to figure out how to explain enough of his cynophobia for a fox to understand. “It’s kind of a silly thing, really,” he said, his smile twisting wry against his will. “Usually people are cynophobic after they’ve been bitten by a dog, not before.”

Bunny made no movement still, but something in his golden eyes seemed to sharpen. He definitely understood what Wei Wuxian was saying.

Somehow that made it easier for him to continue on. “It’s just a thing I deal with, it’s a lot easier here than it is in other places,” he said with a careless shrug. “And I can kind of like… focus if it’s only something that kind of looks like a dog or it’s on tv or something like that. Costumes, still pictures. I still don’t like them, but it doesn’t send me running and screaming.”

He let out a heavy breath and smiled more brightly at his fox, who had somehow ducked his head even closer to the floor. “I know you’re not a dog, or even close to one. And most of the time it’s really fine! You don’t have to stop doing what you like to do just because some things like yipping or teeth are scary, especially when I only see you out of the corner of my eye. I’m not going to ask you to be anything other than your charming Bunny self. If your rabbits can get used to you as you are, so can I.”

Bunny thumped his tail once in response, a clear acknowledgement of the situation. He was so smart. If only all animals could be as easy to understand as his Bunny. 

Wei Wuxian had to be the luckiest man alive, to get to meet and find this brilliant fox out in the wastelands of the Forgotten Battlegrounds. Whoever had chased him out here had better hope that Wei Wuxian never found them, because the sheer audacity and evil they must have had to do such a thing to such a smart, sweet fox left him seeing red just thinking about it.

Before he could stop himself, he leaned down and wrapped his arms around Bunny’s neck, hugging him like how he sometimes woke up holding his pillow. It was the most awkward position ever, but somehow really nice. It was the closest they’d been together since the day they’d met.

Bunny went stiff in his arms, but didn’t try to pull away or snap at him or anything. Instead, after several semi-awkward moments, he rested his chin on Wei Wuxian’s shoulder. 

Wei Wuxian let him go after that, laughing at himself a little bit. “Ah, you’re a good fox,” he said in explanation. “I’ll try not to grab you too often.”

Bunny gave him another one of those inscrutable looks, but seemed to not hold the whole event against him. Which was good; it would suck if he got the cold shoulder again so soon after the last time they’d squabbled. Apparently feeling like their conversation had concluded in a satisfactory manner, he stood up from where he was sitting and padded across the room to where the rabbits were watching them with the sheer judgment that only two white, round balls of fluff that were meant to be dinner could produce.

Wei Wuxian watched the animals in unabashedly rapt fascination, the slow dance of a giant fox attempting to befriend two animals small enough to fit in his jaws if he tried hard enough, and somehow slowly succeeding.

Forget anything to do with the wards outside or any amount of stupid nonsense Jin Zixun seemed to spout just for him to refute it, this was a much better and more enjoyable use of his time.

“Dear whoever reads my reports. I hope you don’t get tired of animal reports because guess what! That’s way more interesting than whatever same old nonsense is happening out here in the Forsaken Battlegrounds! All that’s happening out there currently is that fierce corpses rise and fall and rise and fall and sometimes things get really mad about my beautiful tower and attack it and then go away again when they still fail to break through.

“But let me tell you about a recent observation of foxes and rabbits: Did you know that given sufficient snacks and a strangely intelligent fox they will instead of playing out the predator/prey game, become friends and spend all their time playing and hopping together? I can tell you, there is nothing funnier than watching a fox that comes up to my hip, he’s bigger than most wolves, watch two bunnies a tenth of his size hop across the room, then proceed to do the exact. same. thing. that they do. Did you know a fox could hop like a rabbit? Well I didn’t either but it’s fantastic.

“[myfoxisgreat.jpeg] a photo of a piece of talisman paper with a swiftly drawn fox doing exactly what the Yiling Tower cultivator describes his fox doing. The effect is somehow very charming.”

Wei Wuxian had never thought of himself as a pet owner before. His parents had a cat when he was younger and he remembered enjoying that silly, grumpy animal, but she had passed away when he was four and they’d never gotten another, especially not when most places they could have gone to would have triggered his cynophobia.

It was why it hadn’t occurred to him when he’d first set up in the Yiling Tower. Pets were forbidden in cultivation boarding school, despite the various protests of people who owned spiritual animals, so by the time he was old enough to make his own choices on the matter, an animal entering his life hadn’t come up as a viable possibility.

All it took was one random giant fox appearing in the Forsaken Battlegrounds one day to completely change his mind on all of that. He’d completely renovated the very bottom floor of the tower into a place suitable for his tiny menagerie, carrying everything but the first aid supplies and the storage bins up to the second floor and pestering the people on the other end of his supply runs to bring him odder and odder things for his pets.

Hopefully whoever took over for him would take his advice, because otherwise they were just going to have to undo all of his hard work on the first floor and then where would they be? He’d built a whole little rabbit tunnel system for plump bunnies to crawl through when they didn’t want to be pestered by one big Bunny who wanted to play chase with them again. 

They didn’t get much use as hiding spots, but he’d seen them hopping in and out of the tunnel system randomly and it had been a good way to spend a week playing with tubes and wooden slats and swearing colorfully when he hit his thumb with the hammer.

Bunny had given him sympathetic looks when he pouted about it, but he wouldn’t kiss it better with his pink tongue no matter how much Wei Wuxian wheedled him. Spoilsport.

The bunnies had turned out to be a much better gift than he could have imagined, for both of them.

While it hadn’t been exactly what Wei Wuxian had in mind when he’d requested the rabbits, they really had helped his fox out a lot. Before he could play with them, he would walk slowly and carefully, still barely putting down his weight on the one leg even though it seemed to have healed up properly. It was clear that he was scared of hurting it again even though the only way for it to keep getting better was for him to use it.

But now sometimes Wei Wuxian would stagger downstairs in the morning with veggies for the bunnies and meat for the Bunny and they would be playing together, the rabbits waiting until Bunny was close enough to bite their little furry butts before bounding off rapidly in different directions, hopping around while he ran after them making his funny laughing noise, using that hind leg to propel himself forwards and stop and turn suddenly.

He was pretty sure they gossiped about him sometimes, taking advantage of the fact that they were animals with their own special language and he was only a dumb human who called them all silly names and provided them with food and pettings on request. But they were all getting along well.

The loneliness sitting in the back of his mind since he’d come out to Yiling Tower had abated entirely. How could he have time to be lonely with these three demanding his attention at all times?

It was as clear as crystal in his mind. When Wei Wuxian finished up his five year mission and went home, he would take his bunnies and his Bunny with him and anyone who tried to tease him about it could see just how scary his Bunny could get when he felt like it.

“Sup. It’s that time again. Restock time! Meat, veggies, fresh stuff this time, my usual requests plus put extra frozen bao in there. Several flavors. More talisman paper and ink. More socks would also be nice. I don’t know how I manage to lose them when it’s literally only me and three animals in this giant tower, but I definitely have fewer than I used to. Bunny is beyond suspicion, although the rabbits definitely have the cunning to commit such crimes if left unchecked…

“It’s getting warmer up here, which means the corpses are slightly more lively than usual. Nothing serious of course, definitely nothing I can’t handle, but they’re giving me somewhat of a work out. Maybe add a general medicine cabinet resupply to that as well. Never hurts to be prepared.”

The light had changed from the muzzy light of daytime to the muzzy slightly different shade of light that meant the sun was setting. Alas, how quickly time could pass when you had an actual project to work on!

While the tower itself still held firm against any and all assaults, recently on his patrols around the outside of the tower to make sure everything was just as pristine as it had always been, he’d spotted the long dead remains of an old path leading from the tower. Winding and serpentine in its twists, it nevertheless looked like at one point it had actually been a maintained trail between the tower and Yiling down at the base of the mountain.

Unfortunately, this long dead path, unlike everything else in the Forsaken Battlegrounds, could not be easily resurrected through cunning whistling, but he’d found odd divots in the ground that he was willing to bet had belonged to wooden or stone poles with talismans carved into them to act as a smaller repellent against the ceaseless corpse army. At last, a good use for his talisman specialization!

It had been the most exciting thing to happen since he’d first seen Bunny and his bunnies all sneaking upstairs to come and find him, or at least Bunny was looking for him and the rabbits were looking for his tomato plants. That had been an adventure with more yelling than he would usually care to admit, but they had eventually forgiven each other their crimes and now they could be welcomed up for supervised exploration of his workshop.

They were less likely to create terrible messes of his space if he invited them up of his own accord and told Bunny to stop the rabbits from knocking things down than if they were all throwing tantrums on the ground floor because Wei Wuxian was too far away for them to pester. Animals!

Today the rabbits had been content to help destroy neutralized test talismans for him, tossing scraps of paper everywhere and attempting to steal them from each other. Bunny had discovered that he was tall enough to stand on his hind legs and look at what Wei Wuxian was working on, but also that the smell of ink was offensive to him and had wisely instead chosen to take a nap on one of his discarded robes over in the corner. The tomato plants, along with his peppers and herbs sat well out of bunny or Bunny reach and he could cover the radishes and potatoes for a day without them being too cranky about it. 

They’d all had a good time and surprisingly enough for how much chaos they were attempting to commit around his feet, having the distractions had helped him focus harder on the incredibly complex warding talismans that he would need to carve into each and every wooden stake he buried in the ground. If they could survive the subtle shaking of his brush from him trying to not laugh at rabbits playing chase around and between his legs, they could survive the corpses outside.

He’d made six to start with, while he had an estimate of how far the originals could ward off the path, he knew he didn’t yet have the skills to match the one and only Yiling Laozu at the height of his power, so better to make test stakes and watch to see where the holes were in the original design so he could fill in the gaps properly.

Sunset wasn’t too late to go out and set them up, but he didn’t want to dawdle too much longer.

“Okay,” he called out, shattering the relative silence of the workshop, “it is time for all rabbits to go back downstairs. Mad scientist time is officially over for the day.”

Naturally, no one moved. Bunny barely opened an eye before closing it again and tucking his nose more firmly beneath his tail. The rabbits, paused in a brief moment of cuddling between acts of wanton destruction, clearly saw no need to obey him if their foxen brethren was not, and instead promptly resumed their tossing of papers across the floor.

Wei Wuxian barked a fake laugh and put his hands on his hips. “Very funny, all of you, but seriously. We’re done. Bunny!” he called out to the fox, who was still ignoring him despite obviously being awake. “Go chase your rabbits downstairs, now.”

Bunny heaved a dramatic sigh and pushed himself slowly to his feet, looking for all the world as though Wei Wuxian had wounded him terribly by making him wake up and do his duty as senior pet in the household. He trudged over to nudge one lazy white rabbit under its butt, then the other, sending them scampering for the stairs.

Once both of their furry white tails had disappeared, Wei Wuxian started to unpack his plants, moving the tomatoes and peppers back down onto their usual counter and taking the lid off of his root veggies. Slightly more awake, Bunny trotted over to the solar lamp and patted at the long pole with a paw till Wei Wuxian got the hint and came over to flip it off. “It’s a good thing you’re going to be a gardener with me,” he told the fox, reaching down to pat his fluffy head quickly. “Otherwise my tomatoes really would die.”

Bunny whuffed in amusement and followed along behind him while Wei Wuxian picked up his bundle of sticks and tucked them safely under one arm before double checking that he’d collected everything else he needed for a sunset excursion outside. “Talismans, sticks, where did I put my sword…” he muttered to himself, looking around the room.

Next to him, Bunny’s ears went straight up. He almost seemed to prance next to Wei Wuxian as he turned around in circles, getting in his way and making Wei Wuxian almost trip over him.

“What?” he demanded of the fox, glaring down slightly as he hastily moved his foot just in time to avoid stepping on one delicate paw right in his way. “Do you think you’re going to come out with me?”

If he thought Bunny looked eager before… somehow he managed to perk up even more, bouncing around Wei Wuxian to show him that his leg was working just fine. It was the most doglike he’d been in a while, but somehow it no longer seemed to bother him in the same way. All he saw was a silly, eager fox who seemed to think that he was invited to go on adventures outside with Wei Wuxian.

He loved his confidence and eagerness to help. But this was not a task that needed foxes in order to be completed. Besides, while he knew that Bunny was in much better shape now, he balked at the thought of letting him get that close to the fierce corpses that had tried to kill him the first time again. 

He didn’t quite know what he would do if his fox companion were badly hurt again, or worse. His life had brightened so much since Bunny unexpectedly appeared in it. Losing that… while Wei Wuxian could confidently say that he was strong and capable, it would be a very hard thing to deal with, and even worse out here where who knows what waited to prowl on the helpless the moment they let their guard down.

It was just better for Bunny to stay inside. Once they were somewhere else, somewhere less murderous, he would be happy to take Bunny with him anywhere he wanted to go. Even the supermarket.

He shook his head and patted Bunny’s head again, stilling the fox’s eager bouncing. “You’re not coming out with me today,” he told Bunny firmly. “I’m not even going to be out for very long. I’ll be back before the sun’s actually gone down.”

The ears and tail went down almost instantly. No one could convey extreme disappointment as effectively as a fox. It was a well aimed dagger to his heart. 

But it was still a much more survivable knife than the one he would be living with if Bunny got hurt outside of the tower, so he could let it go.

With another pat to the head, he adjusted his grip on the poles and reached for the sword lying right where it was supposed to be, only for Bunny to suddenly dart in and snatch it from him, bounding away in a single graceful leap, Suibian cradled in his mouth. Faster than Wei Wuxian had seen him move, he ran across the workroom, putting the table between him and the mischievous fox. Only his white ears and plumey tail, held straight up in an expression of pride, showed over the table’s surface.

Wei Wuxian had to stop and gape. What a little brat! Feigning disappointment so that Wei Wuxian would let his guard down only to run away with his sword so that Wei Wuxian couldn’t leave either?

He tossed his stick bundle back onto the table. He was going to need both hands to wrangle this feisty brat of a fox. “Bunny, get back here!” he called, pacing around the table until he could see Bunny standing there, ready to run at a moment’s notice, Suibian held gently in his jaws.

The fox stood there, his golden eyes and perked ears the picture of innocence despite the proof of his crime resting right below them. 

He had to admire his fox’s subtlety in thievery, but nevertheless he put his hands on his hips. “Bunny, put the sword down,” he scolded, wagging one finger in disappointment.

Bunny shook his head vigorously, ears angled straight at Wei Wuxian.

Well, if he wasn’t going to behave… Wei Wuxian took a step towards the unrepentant fox. “Bunny…” he said warningly, reaching out to take Suibian back.

The moment he came within grabbing distance, Bunny did what he really should have expected and darted off, huffing as he jumped over the table, all the while with Suibian held captive in his jaws.

When the table was a barrier between them once more, he paused and looked back.

Wei Wuxian sighed and trotted around the table. “That was an excellent jump,” he called out, watching the white tail wag slightly in pleasure. “I can see that your leg is all better.”

Bunny nodded vigorously. Wei Wuxian hoped that the cunning fox would stand still long enough for him to grab his sword. “You’re very clever, you know that? You deserve ear scratchings for your cleverness.”

Bunny must have caught onto his plan, for the moment he got close enough, he was off running around again.

Wei Wuxian followed as quickly as he could, jogging around his workroom and trying to fake out Bunny. He could hear the fox whuffing as he darted back and forth, Suibian’s tassel swaying behind like a banner. “What are you even trying to do here?” he called out as Bunny successfully made a play like he was going to run one direction, then went the other way back over the table again. “Are you really saying I can’t leave without you?”

Bunny paused long enough to give him a withering look that made him crack up despite himself before taking advantage of his laughter to make a break for the stairs up to his bedroom.

Wei Wuxian had to commend his planning even as he sighed and trotted up the stairs. Going downstairs meant that Wei Wuxian would have an easier time getting outside without him, but upstairs he could cause trouble for a bit before he could regain the upper hand.

Outside the sun had started slipping beneath the horizon. His window for safely going outside was closing rapidly. Even he wouldn’t run outside so casually after nightfall without a good reason.

Like rescuing certain pesky foxes who were currently rooting around in his bedroom!

He rounded the narrow stairs that leveled out into his bedroom and paused, looking around for his quarry. One of his robes that he was sure he’d left on a different part of the floor now had a rather funky wrinkle in it as though a paw had pushed it aside while running for safety.

He was in no rush now, not since he knew that he wouldn’t be able to make it out before sunset. In fact, he could rearrange his plans to set up the barriers and then hang out on Suibian and see how close the corpses could shamble. He eased the door shut so that Bunny couldn’t escape so easily before returning to his quest.

His closet was still firmly shut, and Bunny lacked the necessary thumbs to open the door so there were no foxes in there. His single travel chest was still bolted closed and Bunny still lacked opposable thumbs to open the clasp. And while he’d left his blankets in disarray when he’d rolled out of bed to give the insatiable beasts their breakfast, they didn’t have such a large lump on them before.

Wei Wuxian grinned. 

It was difficult to tell if Bunny hadn’t noticed him, or was just hoping that if he held still enough that Wei Wuxian wouldn’t catch him hiding in his bed, but either way the lump barely stirred to breathe as he crept across the room, careful to not let his boots thump on the ground too hard.

When he was close enough to leap on the bed, he pounced, pinning the lump of blankets to the bed under his body. Bunny let out a genuine yelp, squirming under him dramatically, but to no avail. “Got you!” he cried triumphantly, pulling the blanket off of Bunny’s head before proceeding to hug the living daylights out of him. 

Bunny made a few more dramatic motions that might have been an attempt at escaping before resigning himself to his fate of being cuddled by Wei Wuxian. He let out a heavy breath and dropped his head onto the bed, giving up on his pathetic attempts at freedom. 

Suibian lay in front of them, its slightly tooth-marked sheath poking out from underneath the blankets, but Wei Wuxian was perfectly content right now. He rubbed his face in the soft fur at the back of his neck, laughing. “Naughty, naughty fox,” he scolded lightly, “running away with my sword and going into places you definitely weren’t invited.”

Bunny made the low whine that meant he only sort of felt bad, allowing Wei Wuxian to roll onto his side and keep hugging his silly fox-self. Such a good fox, really, letting Wei Wuxian cling to  him like a barnacle. 

He let out a sigh and poked Bunny on the nose, immediately reaching out to scratch his ear as he turned his head. “Why do you suddenly wanna go outside with me, huh?” he asked, watching those golden eyes curiously. “Aren’t you happy being in the tower with me?”

Bunny immediately pressed his face up under Wei Wuxian’s chin, nuzzling him firmly. He didn’t need Bunny to say words to understand what he meant. It definitely wasn’t out of some hidden motivation to run away and leave him alone in the tower again. 

Wei Wuxian stroked his neck ruff slowly, trying to think through what motivations Bunny could have had for his antics, if not for leaving. He definitely was having plenty of fun in the tower, so he wasn’t bored and wanting to make new toys out of the fierce corpses wandering around. And he hadn’t shown signs of wanting to hunt for anything between always having enough meat without any pesky fur or bones in it, and befriending the one attempt at hunting Wei Wuxian had tried to make for him. 

Bunny seemed perfectly content to lie around with him, no longer interested in Suibian now that Wei Wuxian wasn’t going outside without him. The sword lay forgotten halfway under his pillow, where it would likely stay until the next time he went outside. 

The realization came to mind easily once he connected Suibian with Bunny’s rush of mischief. “Oh, are you wanting to go outside with me so you can protect me from anything that might come our way?” he asked suddenly, propping himself up on an elbow to get a better look at Bunny’s face. “Are you just trying to be protective of me by stealing my sword so I can’t go outside without you?”

The simultaneously chagrined and hopeful look that Bunny gave him made Wei Wuxian crack up and fall back onto the bed in a spate of giggles, immediately pulling the fox into another hug. Bunny protested these handlings with a grumbling noise usually reserved for unexpected sneezes, but let Wei Wuxian have his moment. 

“You are the silliest fox I’ve ever met,” Wei Wuxian said happily, fluffing up the fur between his ears again. “I’m pretty sure I’m better at fighting fierce corpses than you are.”

Bunny gave him a skeptical look, but it was even less effective than usual. It certainly wasn’t stopping Wei Wuxian from absolutely ruffling him to hell and back until he looked as silly as he was inside. 

“You don’t get to come out with me when it’s dark and they’re more active,” he relented, “but maybe if I’m doing stuff during the day, you can come along.” He wagged his finger sternly at the disappointed looking fox. “You may want to keep an eye on me, but I can assure you that I would be very upset if you got hurt again by anything out there.”

Bunny sighed heavily, but did his fox approximation of a nod and head butted him under the chin again. His fur was very ticklish on his neck, making Wei Wuxian laugh again. 

“And don’t think you get to climb in my bed anytime you want to!”

“Dear whoever reads my reports. Happy Mid-autumn festival! Things are going well here in Bunny Tower, where three of our inhabitants have long white ears and spend the early morning hours hopping in circles when we should really be sleeping. Some of us do have to stay up late subduing random surges of fierce corpses attempting to break through the main door and leaving terrible messes all over the place. Thanks for the surprise box of mooncakes. They were a good surprise after the bad one. Apparently fierce corpses want to come in and celebrate with us really badly, so make sure that’s noted for any future cultivators who come here with their pets.

“Requesting additional cleaning supplies and fresh ink. The wards themselves are holding, but I’d rather bolster them a bit while I’m tidying up.”

Wei Wuxian double checked his message for clarity before sending it on, popping the last of his current mooncake into his mouth. While his taste buds ran much more to spice rather than sweets, he could enjoy a good batch of mooncakes as much as anyone else.

The rest of the tower was quiet, both inside and out. Apparently the mid-autumn festival was just as exciting for shambling corpses as for everyone else, and they’d all wandered off to go do their own thing for a bit. He could see them dimly wandering about far away from the tower itself, not interrupting his quiet evening in.

He’d flipped off the lights early that day, wanting some peace and quiet before bed, but now he was considering going back downstairs to see if any of his companions were still awake. Bunny probably would be; nowadays he always seemed to hear Wei Wuxian coming down the stairs no matter how quietly he tried to sneak down and would be sitting up watching him with keen golden eyes by the time he made it to the ground floor.

But at the same time he was comfy in his chair with his fuzzy blanket and his mooncakes and a relatively decent internet connection for once! He’d been able to talk to his parents for a good twenty minutes before things had cut out, something he’d sorely missed, and he’d had fun catching up with several of his former classmates at their own postings before they had to get back to whatever work they had - off in Qinghe and Tanzhou and wherever it was that Song Lan had gotten posted off to.

One of the double-edged blades of Yiling Tower was that there was certainly a lot more downtime than the other towers. While he had plenty of time to keep up with the latest happenings and furry pet shenanigans and whatever it was his tomatoes were up to now (sulking, most likely), it meant that sometimes there just wasn’t much to do some evenings.

He’d nearly made his mind up to go downstairs and bug his pets again when he heard an odd sound behind him. He frowned and set his mooncake down in the box on his chest.

The sound echoed again. So it was what he’d thought it was to begin with! The sound of claws scraping on stone.

He used one toe to push himself around in his chair, holding his mooncakes securely. He couldn’t decide whether to frown or laugh at the most unexpected times when his fox decided to act like a fox.

He couldn’t see him properly round the winding stairway yet, but there was the shadow of pointy ears on the wall where the fox couldn’t stop his shadow from betraying him. Wei Wuxian waited with bated breath, watching the fox shadow slip up the stairs as quietly as he could. 

A long white muzzle poked around the stairs first, sniffing eagerly. Wei Wuxian smirked. “You're not being sneaky enough!” he called out to the naughty fox, watching that twitching nose freeze before glumly walking up the rest of the way, plots foiled. 

Bunny’s ears and tail both hung low as he looked up at Wei Wuxian, caught out in his crime of coming up where he wasn’t invited. Wei Wuxian attempted to affect a stern face, waggling one finger at the fox while using his other hand to hold his mooncakes steady. “Did I invite you up here?” he asked rhetorically, popping the last bite of cake in his mouth. “Did I tell you that you were allowed to come into my secret lair?”

Bunny’s head dropped even lower. He looked the very picture of a repentant animal, just waiting for the command to go back downstairs, yet hopeful that he might be forgiven his crimes and allowed to stay in this exciting, rare treat of a place. 

If Wei Wuxian were a good pet owner, properly responsible and all that, he would scold Bunny properly and send him back downstairs to his rabbits. But then, he was pretty sure that a properly responsible pet owner wouldn’t be raising one oversized fox and two rabbits on the ground floor of a tower out in the middle of a massive field surrounded by resentful energy that had saturated the ground so thoroughly that no corpse that fell there ever stayed down for long. And it wasn’t like it was the first time Bunny had been in his bedroom, just the first time he’d snuck up of his own accord.

He spun around in his chair instead, turning his back on Bunny. “If you knock anything over or eat my tomatoes, you’re going back downstairs immediately,” he called over his shoulder. 

Claws scraped against the stone floors again, he could just see in his mind’s eye the way that Bunny had immediately perked up, ears and tail going right up in the air, all thoughts of penance for fox crimes completely forgotten in the excitement of permission. Of course the first thing he did was trot up to his pepper plants, sniffing them curiously before sneezing twice in polite disdain. 

Wei Wuxian bit down right into the center of another mooncake, feeling the stringy bits of lotus root try to slide between his teeth. He could scold Bunny for lacking the fine palate needed to appreciate his spicy peppers, but he was pretty sure foxes didn’t have sweet or spicy palates or anything like that. It was mostly Meat and Not Meat if he remembered correctly.

He could only bully Bunny for the things he had no excuse for not understanding. Like that he was supposed to eat rabbits, not cuddle them, or for having big fluffy ears that were fun to pull on. He could let the not understanding how lovely and spicy his pepper plants were slide this time anyway.

Now that he had a companion up here cautiously investigating his plants and the space underneath the desk where he wrote his talismans at (it would likely not be long before he found the spot where Wei Wuxian discovered that his light talisman grew hot enough to leave scorch marks on the floor when he dropped it), he felt no more inclination to leave his comfy chair and go anywhere. He leaned back in his chair again and propped up his feet on his desk, leaning back to watch his questing fox.

Now that he wasn’t attempting to hide and had been given tacit permission to be a hardened criminal fox, he was busy exploring where he hadn’t before. The tomatoes got small sniffs of approval, the herbs were shunned with another delicate sneeze, this one slightly more displeased than before, and then he found the scorch mark and pawed at it for several seconds before determining that Wei Wuxian had tried to remove it at one point before giving up and accepting its existence in his life now.

Wei Wuxian pushed off the desk to spin his chair around, running a bare toe over the back of Bunny’s head. “Yeah, I know it’s there,” he teased the pouting fox who was ducking away from his feet. “I promise you there are a lot more interesting things in here to explore.”

Bunny huffed slightly at him, pawing at the mark one more time pointedly before returning to his explorations. Wei Wuxian laughed and popped the last of his mooncake in his mouth as Bunny delicately batted aside balled up socks into a corner for him, pulled the blanket straight on his bed and came over to inspect the tomato plants again. “Did you come up here to clean my room?” he asked in amusement. “Are you now a housekeeper with four paws?”

Bunny gave him a look and then poked his nose under the leaves of the tomato plant. One sharp fang poked out from under a lip, glittering under the solar lamp. 

To Wei Wuxian’s surprise, even the glimpse of his sharp teeth didn’t bother him much any more. It, like all the other curious things about his beloved pet, had become just a part of him. Bunny had long white ears, a plumey tail that he would occasionally thump on the ground in a single wag to express his opinions of things and sharp teeth that he never, ever brought anywhere close to Wei Wuxian’s skin, not even in play.

Once again, he couldn’t help smiling at the fox, carefully investigating the tomato plants as if they had some great secret to reveal to him. Recently they had been fluffier and greener than usual, as if they’d finally stopped pouting and had instead chosen to grow as they were supposed to. Maybe he would get his tomatoes after all.

When he had finished inspecting the tomato plants to his satisfaction, Bunny shook his head slightly and came trotting over to Wei Wuxian, tail low and golden eyes wide in his face. Wei Wuxian wanted to tease him for playing cute, but his mouth was full of mooncake.

It didn’t exactly stop him, it just came out too muffled for anyone to understand. Bunny tilted his head at him in confusion, ears slightly turned back. Wei Wuxian almost choked on his mooncake in laughter before managing to swallow his mouthful. “I said ‘What’s with those cute eyes? Do you think you deserve a mooncake?’” he repeated, chasing down the remaining crumbs with bitter tea, cold from having been forgotten for hours. “These are for Wei Yings, not for foxes.”

Bunny gave him a very skeptical look, his eyes still wide and fixed on the mooncake box in his arms. It was almost as pleading as the “Be my friend!” look that he’d given the bunnies all those months ago. 

Only unlike that look, there was a hunger in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Wei Wuxian fought against the urge to crack up as he bit down demonstratively on the cake in his hand. “They’re my snacks,” he explained, reaching out and scratching behind Bunny’s ear with a toe. “Given to me for working so hard on keeping this tower running all by myself. I don’t think you can even have lotus seeds?” 

He couldn’t remember everything that foxes couldn’t safely eat, and to be fair Bunny was also definitely not an ordinary fox, what with how much bigger he was than his fellow vulpine brethren. But the fact remained that he didn’t want to hurt his furry friend nor share his treat. 

Unfortunately Bunny had other ideas on the matter. His eyes were firmly fixed on the cake box, his golden eyes narrowing as he crouched down to leap up for them. 

Wei Wuxian swiftly tucked the remaining mooncakes behind his computer monitor before they could be knocked to the floor, stuffing his own partially finished one into his mouth so he had the hands free to hide his treats. 

He hid them out of sight just in time before Bunny sprang up into his lap, scrambling with his front paws to find his balance. Wei Wuxian nearly lost the mooncake in his mouth in an involuntary oomph as one paw went square into his stomach. 

He wrapped one arm around Bunny’s middle, pulling him around so that he would stop sticking his feet in painful places and also to keep him away from the hidden treasures. Bunny whined and squirmed, but was unable to break free of his grip without sending the both of them tumbling to the floor out of the chair. 

Wei Wuxian locked his arm in place further, kicking them away from his desk and the tantalizing cakes. “Now, now; naughty foxes get cuddles, you know this,” he scolded Bunny, moving his partial mooncake to his free hand. “If you didn’t want to be put in cuddle jail you- hey!” He yelped as his terrible, horrible, adorable gremlin of a fox lunged forwards and bit right down on his treat. 

Half of a perfectly good mooncake disappeared down Bunny’s gullet, followed by the satisfied lip-licking of an unrepentant criminal who had enjoyed his ill-gotten treat.

Wei Wuxian gaped at him. Bunny only stared at him impassively. A pink tongue flicked out to lick his nose, presumably collecting any leftover crumbs. His golden eyes glimmered with satisfaction. Despite the fact that Wei Wuxian still had a tight grip around his middle, his breathing was even and calm.

He seemed… fine so far. He didn’t look like he was about to keel over from eating something deathly poisonous, at least.

Wei Wuxian still frowned at him, lower lip coming out almost unconsciously. Even if Bunny knew better about the things he could eat, (and given the fact that he’d read a million horror stories of pet owners who had left things that their pets couldn’t have accidentally in range and found out only when their animals died right in front of him, he wasn’t inclined to trust that even the smartest of foxes were good at that), Wei Wuxian had still told him no and he’d ignored him and didn’t even have the grace to look sorry!

He thumped Bunny on the shoulder in discipline, loudly rather than hard, ignoring the offended yelp.“Don’t act like the victim in this,” he said with a scowl. “We are going to read everything that foxes can and can’t eat and decide if I’m leaving my post early because you decided to poison yourself.”

Bunny let out a soft whine, his ears going flat against his head. Now he felt bad about his crimes! But Wei Wuxian’s anger was already cooling even as he pulled them across the floor back towards his computer.

It wasn’t completely gone though. He cleared his throat meaningfully when Bunny cast a wistful look at the mooncake box and ignored the resulting pout. They could return to the discussion of Bunny eating his special treats after he found out if his fox was going to have seizures and die.

At least the glow of the computer screen distracted Bunny from being a whiny baby about being in reasonable amounts of trouble from his actions. In fact, it fascinated him almost as much as the tablet screen did when Wei Wuxian was showing him the latest in cultivational stupidity. 

Wei Wuxian fluffed the fur on his shoulder as he leaned forwards to type one handed. “Okay,” he said out loud, grinning as Bunny followed his movement, eyes fixed on the blinking cursor. “What… foods… can… kill… foxes!” he drawled out as he typed, one eye on Bunny for any other reactions.

He remained as stoic as ever in the face of Wei Wuxian’s stern disapproval, the only sign of possible emotion being the way that his ears were completely straight. Or he was focused on the noise of the keyboard. Either was possible, he was a silly fox after all. 

The loading screen went at its usual, painfully slow rate, spinning endlessly as the signal struggled to break through the resentment of the Forsaken Battlegrounds. Bunny looked away from the screen only once at the mooncakes, but turned his gaze back to the screen before Wei Wuxian could scold him again. 

At long last, the search page loaded, the blank gray giving way to blue links on white background. Wei Wuxian scanned over the brief descriptions, trying to verify how helpful they would be. “Let’s try this one,” he said, clicking on a link for a site proclaiming itself to be a fox sanctuary. “See what they have to say about your choice of snacks.”

Bunny huffed slightly, but he didn’t seem very concerned about what might be on the site. Wei Wuxian waited again as the internet hummed slowly, painstakingly loading the page that would give him the answers he needed as to the health of his beloved fox. 

Naturally, it started with a long ramble about the mission of the fox sanctuary and how to get in touch with them if you found an injured or in otherwise poor shape fox, not that Wei Wuxian was going to do so for his Bunny. Then it finally got into things that foxes could eat without concern if there were stray foxes in the area, which contained a surprising number of vegetables. “Have you been sneaking treats from your bunnies too then?”

Bunny huffed slightly and refused to look at him. Wei Wuxian sniggered and patted his side. But his slow scroll down came to a halt as unexpectedly terrible words revealed themselves to him.

“Tomatoes?” he squeaked, the sound unexpectedly high. “You can’t eat tomatoes! Or peppers!” Wei Wuxian stared in growing horror as the site went into unnecessary detail on how toxic tomato plants were for foxes, not just the fruits, but the stems and leaves too. How it was recommended that for gardeners who wanted to not injure or kill foxes that might be wandering through the area that they keep those plants in pots and bring them inside at night.

Just to add insult to injury, there was nothing about lotus seeds or salted egg yolks anywhere on the listed dangerous foods. Bunny had been safer stealing his treats than he had the entire time Wei Wuxian had been letting him wander around his little garden, examining the tomatoes almost every day for whatever it was he found so fascinating about them.

He closed the page without even thinking about it and slumped back in his chair. Bunny immediately shuffled around awkwardly to try and look him in the eye; his ears tilted forwards in that way that meant he was worried about things, usually either Wei Wuxian’s talisman experiments or the state of his cursed tomatoes. When Wei Wuxian didn’t immediately reach up and ruffle his ears silly, he even let out a little whine.

Wei Wuxian made a face at him. “I’ve been poisoning you with tomato plants for months,” he said with a pout. “I guess you must be a very magical fox to have no ill effects from it, but still, you’d think I’d be a better pet owner than that.”

Bunny snorted delicately, flicking his ears back in dismissal of Wei Wuxian’s words. He couldn’t help laughing at that, just a little. He did reach out then and stroke his soft ears, taking comfort in how warm and lively he felt and the plaintive face he made as he put up with being terribly mishandled by his terrible owner.

Wei Wuxian let out a sigh and spun them around in the chair again. Bunny yelped and slid down to sprawl over his lap, unprepared for the sudden movement. He was warm and heavy against Wei Wuxian’s legs, all tensed and looking like he would have to spring down from the chair again if this spinning continued.

Wei Wuxian just laughed and continued to twirl them at the perfect speed to make it difficult to get down while being graceful, something that Bunny would never do if he had any choice in the matter. “Nope, you’re staying up here with me tonight. You invited yourself into my space and stole my treats, so we’re going to be buddies and you’re going to keep me company.”

Bunny flattened his ears at him, but remained stationary. While he could be wrong, he was pretty sure Bunny was doing the thing where he was refusing to admit he was enjoying whatever Wei Wuxian was doing at the moment, the face reserved for being poked in the side randomly, or flute solos at three am when sleep chose to elude Wei Wuxian and he was sufficiently bored enough to risk poking the sleeping fox. 

Once they had gone in enough circles that the rest of his melancholy had been spun out of the tower and into the Forsaken Battlegrounds where it could go and die, he pushed them back across the room over to the computer again. “Well, it’s still the Mid-Autumn festival, so we should do something fun. What do you say, Bunny?”

Bunny looked at him curiously, then with great skepticism, then curiously again. Then hopefully, as they both remembered what was hiding behind his computer desk. 

Wei Wuxian cracked up. “What, was your secret sweet tooth not satisfied by one?” he teased, poking Bunny on the nose. “Are you going to look at me sadly until I share more of them with you?”

Bunny did not give him a sad look. He glared instead. It was still somehow the most plaintive look he’d ever seen.

Wei Wuxian couldn’t stop laughing as he leaned forwards to awkwardly hug Bunny again. He loved his silly fox so much. “Okay, fine, but no more grabbing them from my hands without asking,” he said, giving in at last to the saddest glare in the whole history of Yiling Tower. “How does an evening trolling the cultivators over in Lanling sound?”

Bunny huffed dramatically, but immediately squirmed around until he could see the computer screen as well. His ears were pointed directly forwards at the monitor, clearly watching for stupid posts to offer opinions about.

Wei Wuxian rubbed those soft ears once more as he clicked on the browser and grabbed the box of mooncakes to tide them over while they waited for it to load.

“Dear whoever reads my reports. Things go well here, nothing new to report on corpse front. 

“The path I dug out a few months ago works well and the makeshift wards hold up with minimal repairs needed. Would recommend making sure that future cultivators keep that path maintained as well. Makes trips down for supplies much easier. Normal food requests, plus cinnabar restock. My batch got wet and ruined. 

“We are all comfy up here for wintertime. I was worried that my pets would be too cold, but they have solved that problem by cuddling together. All my Bunnies huddled up together, too precious for words. 

“Happy Dongzhi, have a picture of the three most adorable animals on the planet.”

Wei Wuxian was accustomed to waking up in odd positions, or sometimes not in his bed at all. His mom had teased him often as a child for being as active in sleep as he was awake, rolling and tossing and turning all over the place until he’d be sleeping sideways with his head hanging off the bed and his foot resting on a misplaced pillow. 

Since he’d moved out to Yiling Tower, there were certainly a non-negligible amount of nights where he’d fallen asleep either in his desk chair or hunched over his talisman workshop. He preferred the desk chair of the two of them if he had to fall asleep in a weird place, that one at least had decent neck support. 

It usually tended to be a variant of the insomnia he sometimes struggled with out here in the Forsaken Battlegrounds, when sleep lurked at the edges of his vision, but refused to come close enough to let him rest. It seemed to be less often now that he had three pets to run him ragged and make enough weird noises at terrible hours to drown out the spirits roaming around, but it still struck him from time to time. 

He was dimly aware that he’d had another one of those nights last night; first pacing about his workshop restlessly, then going through all of his sword exercises to try and trip his brain past the wakeful state, then when that failed, climbing back into his desk chair to try and read until he got tired enough that he fell asleep there. 

He had no memory of getting into bed, which was confusing because he didn’t sleepwalk, if he fell asleep in one place, he woke up still there, if at new and interesting angles. 

The second confusing part, though less so honestly, was the presence of a warm, furry body curled up next to him, with bits of fluff trying to go up his nose. 

His sneeze woke them both up, with Bunny’s head immediately popping up from the ball he’d curled himself into so he could see better what was going on. The instant he saw Wei Wuxian sneezing from fur up his nose, his ears went flat in embarrassment.

Wei Wuxian grumbled and rubbed at his nose, then smiled at Bunny, who looked as though he were about one ear flick away from sticking his nose back into Wei Wuxian’s face to make sure he was okay. “Good morning Bunny. Did I invite you to come stay in my bed?” he asked mostly rhetorically. It was unlikely, but given that he’d also apparently fallen asleep in his chair and woken up in bed, it was definitely a possibility.

Bunny nodded his head stiffly, stretching and yawning hugely. Wei Wuxian looked away from his mouth for a moment until he was done before reaching out and tugging him back into a hug. Bunny let him cuddle him without fuss, going limp in his arms. “It’s too early to get up,” he whined into Bunny’s fur, happy to hide from the morning light in his fluff. “We should stay here forever.”

Bunny huffed slightly, his laughter noise. It made Wei Wuxian laugh too. He reached up and scratched that one spot behind his ear, where he still always seemed to have trouble getting the itches there. 

Somehow despite the late hour that he’d been up and his general aversion to mornings, just having Bunny there to cuddle and play with made him feel more energized already. With a groan, he sat up, shaking the stiffness from his arms.

Bunny perked up and sat up with him, ears lifted in anticipation of breakfast. Wei Wuxian immediately reached over and fluffed them. “Fine, fine, we can go get food and check on your bunnies,” he teased. “Just give me a minute to finish waking up first.”

Bunny gave him a flat look, then leaned over and pushed his wet nose into Wei Wuxian’s ear, making him shriek with laughter and chase Bunny off of the bed and into the morning.

He set aside the strangeness of his waking for later, when he had more time to stop and think about it. There was definitely something off, but his memories were too fuzzed by sleep to be certain of them just now.

There would be plenty of time later; right now he had foxes to chase.

“Dear whoever reads my reports. We had an adventure the other day when the fierce corpses decided to vary it up and send a boar guai to come ram itself against my precious tower for several hours before I could dispatch it. The tower itself is fine, but some of the stones were chipped and need repair now. This would not be a problem on its own if I could find the chisel that supposedly came with this tower when I set up here and now is nowhere to be found.

“Requesting a replacement chisel and also twenty new wooden stakes built to these dimensions so I can continue warding the path down to Yiling. Turns out that while I am brilliant, I am not quite as strong as the Yiling Laozu himself and while discovering a bunch of fierce corpses stuck in tiny spaces in my path between the wards is funny, I would rather that not keep repeating.”

To say that he’d given up on his gardening ambitions since he’d found himself becoming a pet owner would be to lie. He definitely hadn’t given up at all! It made the meals that he could prepare for himself much more fun to have genuine fresh vegetables most of the time and gave him things to do with his hands on days where nothing in the tower itself needed doing. His gardening endeavors were still holding strong and keeping him entertained on the more boring days.

To say that he was as focused on them as he used to be would also be a lie. If it weren’t for Bunny’s own interest in them, as poisonous as tomatoes and peppers supposedly were for him, his tomatoes likely would have finally died a miserable death after a long life of being stubborn plants that refused to grow.

Instead, Bunny had taken over reminding him to water his plants on a regular basis and had taught himself how to turn the solar lamp on and off. He was much more consistent about it than Wei Wuxian had ever managed to be, most likely because he was an incredible fox who did not have an executive functioning disorder when it came to simple things like lamps and remembering to turn them off and on at specific designated times.

Thus it was that his tomatoes had gone from wilty and pouty to actually perky and green and lively at all times. Whether it was because Bunny was the most magical fox or just the solar lamp finally being consistent enough that they were getting only as much light as they wanted, they were thriving at last.

With that knowledge, it shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise to him as it was when Bunny came running down the stairs from where he’d been investigating the plants to yip and bounce around at him until Wei Wuxian stopped his wood carving to pay attention to him. He looked almost doglike in his excitement, his plumey tail swaying from side to side and his mouth very slightly open as he looked up at Wei Wuxian eagerly.

“What is it?” he asked, setting down his knife and brushing off slivers from his sleeves. “Did you catch more fierce corpses doing awkward dances while stuck on the path again?”

Bunny snorted and shook his head, circling around Wei Wuxian and nudging him by pushing on the back of his knees till he almost lost his balance and fell. It was as animated as he ever saw him playing with the rabbits or chasing fierce corpses into Wei Wuxian’s sword. He was excited.

When Wei Wuxian started heading upstairs, he took off at a run, claws scraping against the stone floor audibly. Wei Wuxian suppressed a snort of laughter at his fox acting like a toddler wanting to show him his monochromatic drawing and be praised for it.

As he exited the stairs into the top of the tower room, he could see Bunny standing in front of the tomato plants, solar lamp making his already white fur almost blinding to look at too closely. His whole body had gone still as he waited in anticipation for Wei Wuxian to come see what he’d noticed, barely even breathing.

Wei Wuxian ruffled his ears softly as he knelt down next to the plants, but stopped when he saw what it was that Bunny had wanted to show him.

Little green balls had sprouted everywhere along the stems, partially hidden under the leaves. Many of them were so small he doubted they’d even existed a day or so ago, but they were definitely there now. He reached out and brushed his fingers over the little balls, feeling the hard flesh that would turn into beautiful, ripe, red tomatoes in a few weeks if they survived.

Wei Wuxian sat down on the floor, admiring the little tomatoes that had somehow survived against all odds in this forsaken hellhole of a place; locked up in a tower with him, a mysterious, magical fox and a pair of criminal rabbits likely causing destruction somewhere downstairs. Bunny leaned against him, knocking their shoulders together like he would have with his friends out in the wider world, looking up at him with happy, golden eyes.

For a moment it stirred something in his mind, something so faded it felt like it had been one of those dreams that disappeared as he woke up. Maybe it had been. But it felt like looking at Bunny’s eyes that he’d seen them in a different face, the only light in a dark room.

It wasn’t frightening or anything, more like the sense of something he’d known in an innate way even if it wasn’t something he could name exactly what it was.

The memory faded as quickly as it had come on, but now that he knew it existed, he could try and dig it up again. Later, though. Later when he wasn’t busy admiring his and Bunny’s combined work to create something amazing and taste that neither of them could have done on their own.

“Huaisang - do you remember showing me that strange website that was all for categorizing and listing facts about mythological creatures, their last reported appearances and suggesting that some of the ones where they completely disappear for hundreds of years and then reappear may actually be new species? I’ve been trying to find it recently, but I can’t remember the link.”

“Yeah, no prob, Wei-xiong! I got you! Here it is: http://mythbeastsoldandnew.co

“Yiling Tower still the scariest, most boring place on earth? Corpses doing new things that you want to see qualifies as a new species?”

“Given that you can make them dance with the right flute solo, you could say that… Nah, I just remembered us talking about it the other day and thought it would be a fun way to pass the time as I continue to break my own records for staying out here every day.

“No one tells you that when you’re setting records for the longest amount of time stayed in a boring place, you are constantly bored.”

“Makes sense. I couldn’t do it!”

“Anyway, I should get back to work. Or playing with my pets. Whichever one is more pressing.

“Thanks for the link!”

“No problem! Good luck!”

Wei Wuxian leaned back in his chair as Huaisang closed out the chat, the page he’d linked to already open and waiting for his attention. It still had the lovely garish colors he remembered from almost four years ago crammed in a dorm with Huaisang’s face pressed against his to hide the glow of the screen after curfew, eagerly scrolling through blurry pictures and long essays about the various creatures and their appearances, confirmed or otherwise.

He’d locked the pets out of his bedroom for the evening, Bunny in particular to his great disappointment. But Wei Wuxian had a feeling that if Bunny could read the things he was looking up, things would go a little differently than he wanted.

If his growing suspicion had some basis in fact, then he wanted a chance to decide what he was going to do before he brought it up to his fox.

He almost had to laugh at his previous dismissals of the idea of Bunny being some form of shapeshifter just because huli jin had been confirmed to have died out sometime in the past. Just because one form of a thing was gone didn’t mean they were all gone. And cultivation had been known to produce things that might have otherwise never appeared before, especially when animals cultivating to a human form was a recorded event in history. Rare, but never so rare as to be assumed it could no longer happen.

Still, working up the courage to scroll down and look at the garish, but apparently recently updated website was proving to be trickier than he thought it would be when the idea had first occurred to him. He didn’t even know if it would have the answers he was seeking, but all other attempts had been thwarted.

He was absolutely certain that Bunny was something entirely different and special from any other fox in the world. That was without doubt and beyond reproach. There were no foxes as big or as clever or as sweet or as immune to tomatoes in the world.

But did that make him a secret shapeshifter of some kind who had been hiding his identity for over a year?

It might. While the Jianghu had improved greatly in its treatment of people over the last several hundred years, its treatment of mythical beasts and the non-living still stumbled at points especially when it came to the ones not well understood. The Yiling Laozu’s work with resentful spirits and corpses was over a thousand years old and still some of the most groundbreaking stuff they’d learned and used regularly.

If Bunny were a shapeshifter or something similar that had grown up in the Jianghu with all of these attitudes, it made sense that he might have preferred to keep it a secret, especially with how treacherous the area outside was. Wei Wuxian’s warded path was getting better and better with time, but it was still a work in progress, making it very unlikely that he would be able to sneak out and run away if he wanted to escape without detection by the corpses.

But then there was the fact that he seemed perfectly happy to stay in the tower with Wei Wuxian. He had whined and pouted and sulked when Wei Wuxian had told him that he wanted to be left alone and he was shutting the door today, and had still been pouting in his bed and ignoring the bouncy rabbits who wanted to play with him when he’d gone upstairs. He expected that after he was done he might have to tease and poke and cuddle Bunny until he came out of his sulk.

Was it that he’d spent too long in fox form and it had changed the way he thought and acted? Was it that he simply enjoyed the life they were living and was loath to change it by revealing something that he hoped may not be necessary?

He wanted to know what it was that Bunny was hiding, but he didn’t want to make his fox companion feel unsafe when he’d so clearly shown a desire to only be thought of as a fox, or at least be mistaken for an ordinary fox given his habit of doing decidedly unfoxlike things.

Meanwhile, the website waited on his screen, taunting him with possible knowledge and answers to his questions.

Wei Wuxian sighed and leaned forwards, making himself click on the list of beasts known to change forms. Dawdling and doubting his convictions would certainly get him nowhere and leave him with only the knowledge that he’d pissed off Bunny for no reason whatsoever because he couldn’t even try to rule out a possibility gnawing at the corners of his mind.

The text seemed to blur before his eyes as he scrolled through, scanning for mentions of foxes. The website owner seemed to be very devoted to covering only stories they could verify. There was a single terse paragraph about how most reports of people who had animal features had added them themselves later in life and therefore did not qualify for this website.

Wei Wuxian snorted at that, wondering idly just how many emails he’d received about the same people before he’d added that line and how many people ignored it.

Normally the bottom of the page was where the website owner posted his citations and his lists of fauna that had gone extinct but for the stories. This page seemed to be the same until he noticed that there was a last section sneakily hidden underneath the parts people would skip unless they wanted to check his research.

The first word had him sitting back in his chair, rubbing his chin before he could even read the rest of it. It was a strange choice of word to have on its own here, especially since it seemed more like a catchall term for the page itself than any one being.

Yet it sat there, in italicized text, the first true confirmation of a suspicion lurking in the back of his mind.

Shapeshifters.

Wei Wuxian let out a breath before scrolling down to the rest of it.

I do not list this with the rest as there are no articles, historical facts or anything other than hearsay and gossip that I can currently point to. Yet I can say without a doubt that I know they exist. There may be only a few of them in the world, but they deserve to be known and respected as they are.

Occasionally a mortal human will be born with the ability to take on a mammalian form. From birth they are able to shift between the two at will, marked by the mammalian form in features such as ears and tail that they cannot conceal or erase and their unusual size and intelligence when in mammalian form.

I cannot say what it is that has led to these few people existing, but they do. As far as I know right now they prefer to keep to themselves and those they trust. Unfortunately, as given by the amount of similar beings above who have since disappeared from existence, I can understand that they do not wish to be known to the wider world. It has often not been kind to them.

I write this not for the people who study mythical beasts and beings as I do, but for those who live in this world feeling so alone, as if there is no one else like them out there. I promise you there are. I have met you. I have held your hands. If you are seeking a friend who understands what no human can, please reach out to me and I will help you find your kind.

You are not alone in this world.

Wei Wuxian read it thrice over before he could remember to breathe. More than anything else the website owner had written, it was this that sounded most like a person. Despite his lack of evidence and evident unwillingness to provide any of his own sources, he couldn’t fault him in the slightest.

A shapeshifter whose mammalian form was characterized by being much larger than it should have been and too intelligent as well? Well, he had a fox who read articles and grew tomatoes and came up to his hip living in the tower with him. Who had been given rabbits and chose to befriend them, who had somehow befriended prey animals a tenth of his size and cuddled up with them regularly when not pestering Wei Wuxian himself.

If his Bunny were a shapeshifter, a few recent mysteries began to make sense. Perhaps Bunny had discovered him fast asleep in his chair and carried him to bed. He trusted his fox so much his sleeping self probably didn’t notice anything off about the situation. Bunny was safe, so no need to wake up.

He laughed slightly, leaning back in his chair again. He couldn’t even begin to wonder why Bunny had kept himself concealed like this for so long; how was he to know if Wei Wuxian was a safe person? As well as his hind leg had been broken when Wei Wuxian had found him, so of course remaining in the form that could walk just made sense. While a part of him wished that Bunny had revealed his secrets to him of his own accord, he really couldn’t blame him for waiting and doing his best to try and be an ordinary fox. 

Not that he was all that good at it, but he had been Wei Wuxian’s favorite fox ever, so it was more than good enough for him. 

He wanted more than anything to run downstairs and tell Bunny what he’d seen, ask if Bunny felt comfortable revealing himself and meeting him a second time. But given how careful Bunny had been about not tipping off any of this, running down without a plan after locking himself up for several hours might scare him off.

He would have to approach the situation calmly and with plenty of patience. Basically tell Bunny what he knew and wait for Bunny to decide on his own. They had been sharing the same tower for more than a year, so he definitely knew what kind of person Wei Wuxian was now, but still it couldn’t be easy to reveal a secret of that level.

Idly he wondered if Bunny had ever met the person who ran this website, or even seen it. If he were one of just a few people in the world who could change forms like this, then it was likely that he’d grown up alone, although hopefully with a family who was never bothered by him sometimes being a fox.

Wei Wuxian definitely wouldn’t be. Why would that be a thing that would change how he felt about him?

Bunny was Bunny, full of sass and attitude and opinions about so many things, but he was also so kind and patient and gentle. He’d never tried to scare Wei Wuxian by doing anything doglike once he’d found out about his cynophobia, he liked to come over now and lie down next to him or sit on the stairs with him and read stuff together. They had fun all the time now.

Maybe that was why Bunny hadn’t said anything, he was afraid that it might change things between them and they would lose this connection they had now. But Wei Wuxian couldn’t see how it would. He loved his Bunny just as much knowing this now as he had before. Maybe even a little bit more because thinking back on their year together, he could see where sometimes Bunny had held himself distant not necessarily because he didn’t like Wei Wuxian, but because he did and he didn’t want to lose that.

He wouldn’t talk to Bunny about it today though. He would wait for another day when they were more relaxed and had more time to talk. He would tell Bunny the things he suspected and let Bunny decide what to do next.

Maybe if things went well and Bunny chose to shift back to meet him again, he could find out more about him. Things like his name . Not just the silly pet name that had stuck because Wei Wuxian was scared and grabbing at anything that didn’t remind him of dogs, but the one he thought of himself as.

Maybe that would be the only real change between them. He could find out his Bunny’s real name and call him that instead.

A single piece of paper that had obviously been drawn on while the artist was bored and thinking through a problem. There are several light sketches of rabbits and a fox playing or cuddling together, a few scribbled song lyrics with musical notation around them, one question stricken through so firmly that the paper tore and the words are no longer legible.

In one corner, there is a half sketch of a human face with fox ears. The features are vague, but fine boned with eyes obviously drawn to be striking. Above the picture are a few question marks and another scribbled out sentence that looks like it might have once said “just what will he look like?”

After much thinking and a small amount of fretting and pacing, Wei Wuxian had come up with a plan. It was perhaps not the wisest plan he’d ever made, but then it was unlikely that anyone had ever lived through this situation before, let alone could offer him advice out here in his tower beset by shambling corpses, no matter how solid the path he’d made up had turned out to be once he’d gotten the spacing right on the stakes.

The plan involved leaving his bedroom door open, which Bunny knew to be an open invitation to come and pester him if he hadn’t come downstairs yet. The plan involved Wei Wuxian leaving his sword and his flute downstairs well out of threat range so that Bunny wouldn’t feel worried about him bringing it up for nefarious reasons. The plan involved waiting for Bunny to come see him and then broaching the conversation from there.

He had no idea what he was going to say, but then his best speeches had always been the ones that he’d done on the spur of the moment. It was much easier to say the right things when the conversation was happening than to try and plan out something when he didn’t know what the other person was going to do.

He hadn’t said anything to Bunny about what he’d been researching that day, instead putting all of his energy into spoiling all three of the rabbits who had been locked downstairs. To his surprise, instead of being pouty about being locked away, Bunny had stuck to his side like a burr that whole rest of the day and even come up and sat on his bed for a while that night, though of course when Wei Wuxian woke up the next morning, he’d gone back downstairs. The whole time his ears had been in their most worried tilt, no matter what Wei Wuxian had said or done.

It had been adorable, but Wei Wuxian hadn’t meant to scare him. The whole point of doing the research on his own was to not scare him. But then if Bunny was a shapeshifter who had been uncertain as to what Wei Wuxian would think and wanted to stay anyway…

Well, he hoped that he could adequately convey how greatly he wanted Bunny to stay in the tower with him. He had no doubt that Bunny would be much the same as he was now, his silly, smart, opinionated self and there was enough room for both of them in here very comfortably. There were even other beds up in his bedroom, he just had to stop using them for storing his books first.

They could keep making it work. All they had to do was talk.

Which was part of why he hadn’t come downstairs yet, even though his door was open and he had things he really should be doing. Sooner or later Bunny would come up to check on him like a worried parent and they could go from there. He’d switched spaces a few times from sitting on his bed to his desk chair and back to his bed again. Why they were the only two places he could think of for trying to start the conversation, he couldn’t explain, but standing up and pacing definitely felt like it would give the wrong impression.

Not that his bed was probably going to give the right one? But he couldn’t think of a better option and at this point his plan was happening no matter what because he could hear the familiar clacking of claws on stone as Bunny came up the stairs to investigate.

A few moments later, the white fox poked his head into the doorway, ears pricked forwards in curiosity. Wei Wuxian smiled and tossed aside the book he’d been failing to read, leaning forwards. “Good morning Bunny,” he said, keeping his voice as light and normal as possible. “Came to make sure I was awake?”

Bunny padded over to him, avoiding the robes he’d left lying on the floor the night before with only the slightest of dismissive lip curls at Wei Wuxian’s cleaning habits. He sat on the floor a few feet away, head tilted slightly to the side.

He seemed to be waiting for something too. Probably for Wei Wuxian to say something else. Despite his cute posture, he looked tense, almost as tense as he had that first day that Wei Wuxian had brought him in from the outside.

Maybe he too had sensed that this time was coming to an end, that something would change between them and there would be no going back regardless of what direction everything went.

The very air itself in the room seemed slightly thinner now. But Wei Wuxian had been brave and gone for everything he’d wanted all his life no matter what challenges lay before him. That wasn’t going to change now.

He shifted position slightly, made himself uncurl his hands from the covers and kept his smile warm and light. “I think you know what I’ve figured out in these last couple days,” he started, seeing no reason to not cut through to the heart of the matter. “If that’s the case, then I understand why you never said anything before. How were you supposed to know that I was safe?”

He watched Bunny for any reaction, but he seemed to have gone as still as stone, not even breathing. For once his face was completely unreadable to Wei Wuxian, his golden eyes like chips of glass.

Well, there was no taking back the things he’d already said, so it was better to keep going then. “I’m not angry or anything. Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably do the same thing. Pretend to only be what I looked like and hope that whoever I was stuck with was a good enough person that I’d be fine until I had more options left.”

Bunny looked no more convinced than he did a minute ago, but Wei Wuxian couldn’t help smiling at him anyway. “But… it’s been a year that we’ve been together in this tower now. We’ve spent every day together. I know that you’re a really fun and interesting person, that you have so many opinions and you’re so clever.”

Ever so slightly, he could see some of the tension melting out of Bunny’s body with each passing word. “I trust you,” he said, trying to fill his voice with the magnitude of it. “I trust you and I like you and… I’d like to meet you. All of you, if you’re willing to trust me.”

Silence fell in the room. Wei Wuxian kept his smile up, his body relaxed. He had done what he could to convince Bunny that he was trustworthy.

It was Bunny’s choice now.

Bunny stared at him. His golden eyes were still unreadable, heavy, weighted. For half a second Wei Wuxian started to wonder if he’d misjudged everything and poured his heart out to a fox who was not secretly a shapeshifter.

Then he sort of straightened up. And continued to straighten, shifting into a position a fox could not make and standing up from that. Fur melted away into pale skin, delicate fox feet became hands and human feet and unexpectedly hip length black hair came into existence with a single shake of Bunny’s head. His face flattened out a lot, yet somehow still carried the sharpness of a fox in fine and delicate features so pretty he might have suspected him to be a huli jin after all.

The only things that remained the same were long white ears that nestled neatly into the black hair, flattened against his head; a long, plumey white tail that swayed slightly as he found his footing and those piercing golden eyes that had never left him the entire time.

One moment Wei Wuxian had been staring at his familiar white fox, seated on the ground like a fox, staring at him. The next he was looking at the most beautiful man he’d ever seen with his arms crossed over his chest and a genuine tail and fox ears pressed flat against his head, still not saying anything. 

He was also completely naked. Undeniably, completely naked. In a way that left nothing to the imagination. Which only made sense but somehow he hadn’t expected it until he could see him.

Belatedly he realized his mouth was hanging open. He closed it. All words had completely fled his suddenly dry mouth and throat.

Bunny shifted slightly from foot to foot, either an expression of nervousness or perhaps not being completely adjusted to standing on just two legs again. Wei Wuxian had to look up at his face in order to avoid accidentally looking anywhere else.

After a few moments of awkward silence some of his brain returned to him and he smiled awkwardly. “Uh, hi?” he said, his voice coming out slightly higher than intended. “You… seem to be naked.”

Bunny blinked at him once, as if nothing that Wei Wuxian had said was what he’d expected. He glanced down at himself and then back to Wei Wuxian, his ears flicking slightly. “I am sorry,” he said in a deep, rich voice. “My clothes do not shift with me.”

Wei Wuxian nodded quickly. “No, that makes sense,” he said, springing up from the bed and over to where he’d tossed his clean robes the last time he’d washed everything. Would they even fit Bunny? They seemed to be about the same height and build at the glance he’d gotten, though it wasn’t the most thorough look he’d ever taken at someone.

He picked out the longest robe he had just to be safe, one that was meant to go over his normal set to keep him warm, and a sash to tie it closed. It would be easier for them to have a proper conversation if they were both dressed.

“Here,” he said, walking over closely enough to hand the robes to Bunny before returning to his safe spot on the bed, eyes politely averted so that Bunny could dress himself in peace. “It gets cold up here,” he explained, “it’ll be easier for both of us to talk if you’re not freezing.”

Bunny made a quiet sound in his throat at the explanation. Wei Wuxian was not looking closely, but he could still see his ears twitch slightly from their position almost plastered to the side of his head.

Only once the sounds of fabric rustling had abated was he able to look over with a warmer smile, more prepared for this conversation. Bunny met his eyes almost shyly, he thought, or perhaps it was the fact that his ears had not perked up since he’d shifted back. 

Was he really that afraid of Wei Wuxian going back on his word? Well if that was the case, then he needed to show Bunny that it really wasn’t the case.

He leaned forwards and patted the side of the bed. “Come, sit down!” he invited Bunny with a grin. “It’s straining my neck to look all the way up there at you. How are we supposed to talk like that?”

Bunny’s lips parted slightly before he pressed them together firmly again and walked slowly over to sit down. His tail swayed with some difficulty beneath the long robes, but he sat down on the other end of the bed from Wei Wuxian very gracefully as if he’d never forgotten how to sit without hurting his tail. It was probably the sort of thing he’d learned when he was still small and less graceful than he was now.

The image of this beautiful man being a tiny, cute child with a big tail and ears that twitched at everything filled his mind for a moment before he dismissed the thought. He could wonder about those things later, once they were more acquainted with each other and Bunny wasn’t eyeing him warily.

He clapped his hands together once Bunny was situated, refusing to let the slight awkwardness of the mood grow any further. “Okay, I figure we probably both have things we want to ask each other, so why don’t we take turns?” he said, knowing for a fact that he had rather a lot of questions if Bunny were willing to answer them. “Do you want to ask first, or answer first?”

Bunny stared at him impassively, but his ears lifted a little bit in the way Wei Wuxian  remembered the fox did when amused. “You have already asked first.”

Wei Wuxian stared at him for a second before putting a hand over his mouth to cover the gurgle of laughter. He had been right all along! Bunny was just as funny in human form as he was as a fox. “That’s not fair,” he whined playfully. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

Bunny inclined his head slightly. “Even so. You asked, I answered.”

Wei Wuxian stuck out his lower lip in protest. “Fine. It's your turn then. Ask me a question; I’ll tell you the truth.”

Bunny tipped his head again, his ears slowly turning backwards and down in shyness. It really was exactly the same as when he had been a fox, his ears showed all the same expressions as before.

It was so endearing. His face remained smooth and pretty no matter what, but his ears betrayed all of his thoughts to Wei Wuxian almost immediately.

His fingers itched to pull on them again, but instead he curled them closed as Bunny opened his mouth to speak. “Are you truly not upset?” he asked, not quite meeting Wei Wuxian’s eyes. “I did lie to you about my nature for more than a year.”

Wei Wuxian shook his head emphatically. “Not at all. I told you, I would have done the same thing if I were in your shoes, or had your tail, I guess,” he shrugged. “Everyone has secrets that they don’t tell people right away until they know they can trust them. That’s all.” He couldn’t help laughing as he thought about all the times that Bunny had continued to act like himself rather than an ordinary fox. “Some things you did do make a lot more sense knowing this. I wouldn’t have suggested that you eat your pet bunnies if I’d known. Or maybe I would have; you’re still a fox even if you’re standing on two legs and talking to me now.” 

Bunny’s expression immediately became completely unamused by the reminder. A lesser man might have been scared by it, but Wei Wuxian was not a lesser man. He’d watched Bunny sneeze himself awake multiple times and climb on his lap to steal mooncakes and hop like a rabbit and so many other things that he could only laugh again at the look on his face.

After a few moments, he made himself breathe and calm down. “Okay, my turn for an actual question,” he said, leaning forwards on the bed to prop his chin in his hands. “What name should I call you instead of Bunny, since you’re not a pet fox after all?”

Bunny’s ears flicked back and forth several times. “I do not mind the name you have called me. It is understandable.”

Wei Wuxian made a face at him. “Good to know. That’s not an answer.”

Bunny looked down at the blanket where his hands were resting neatly on the gray blanket. He had rather clawlike nails on his hands, they made them look even more slim and elegant than they already were. It was hard to tell when he spoke so briefly, but it looked as though his teeth might still be sharper and more foxlike than most people’s. “Lan Wangji, Lan Zhan.”

Wei Wuxian smiled. “Lan Zhan. That’s a really nice name.”

Lan Zhan looked at him for a moment, then away again. His ears flicked back and forth again. It seemed to be all he could manage to say in response to the compliment. “What is yours?”

He couldn’t help making another face at him. “You’ve been reading all my emails for a year and you didn’t notice that?” he teased, grinning when Lan Zhan looked at him again. “You can call me Wei Ying.”

Lan Zhan said nothing in response, but his ears were betraying him again by being tilted forwards and open in happiness.

He’d known it, but it was still very gratifying to be proven right, that less would change than he’d thought. So what if his Bunny had turned out to be the prettiest shapeshifter in the world? It couldn’t stop Wei Wuxian from telling what he was thinking just by looking at his ears. 

It made him really excited to get to know him better, that now they could be friends and talk to each other. He still had so many more questions to ask and answers to give.

Lan Zhan’s lips quirked up just slightly, so quickly that if he’d blinked, he would have missed it. 

But he was used to watching his fox for the slightest things like that, so he caught it.

Wei Wuxian scrunched up his nose and smiled at him in return. “I’m really glad to meet you, Lan Zhan. Now come on, ask me another question.”

“Dear whoever reads these reports. Thank you for the emergency restock partway through last month. I know I missed the regular deadline, I have no excuse other than that I had a really hard time getting out of bed all month. I had to use all of my spare energy just to deal with the normal things. Thank goodness for vegetable gardens!

“Supplies are still a little low due to my lapse in judgment, so please send more extra of everything food related. Cultivation supplies are doing fine. It’s cold enough right now that most of the shambling corpses are too stiff to shamble and mostly fall down randomly.

“Happy Lunar New Year to everyone out there, bring on the year of the Rabbit! I’m going to have fun continuing to break records out here in the Forsaken Battlegrounds with my bunnies and my Bunny.

P.S. Can you also send a length of ribbon perhaps 10 chi in length? I would like to make matching ribbons for my pets and need enough extra for tests.”

“I should also ask them for ointment for all of my bites,” he whined, mostly playfully, leaving the cursor blinking at the end of his note as he spun in his chair to look at the other man lying in their bed, waiting for Wei Wuxian to be done with his belated emails and come get back in bed with him. “I’ll make you put that on me since you refuse to stop no matter how much I beg.”

Lan Zhan refused to dignify him with a response. Admittedly, he was very focused on reading something on Wei Wuxian’s tablet, his ears twitching back occasionally whenever he disagreed with it. He was adorable, always so animated even when sitting quietly and reading. His ears betrayed his every thought and Wei Wuxian knew every slightest twitch.

Their life together had changed both very dramatically and also surprisingly little once Lan Zhan had finally revealed himself. He still spent a good portion of his time in fox form, especially when it came to playing with or cuddling with his bunnies whose names he still refused to say out loud, but Wei Wuxian had quickly gotten used to him switching to human form when he did have something to say or for meal times. Meal time was apparently exclusively for human form now, as he’d immediately commandeered the kitchen on the second floor for his own use.

Wei Wuxian liked to sneak up while he was cooking to put kisses all over the back of his neck very distractingly. It wasn’t like the threat or the action of being bitten could scare him off from doing it. After all Lan Zhan wasn’t a dog, he was his Bunny and his Lan Zhan. What could possibly be scary about him?

Yes, they’d settled into living together with Lan Zhan sometimes as a fox and sometimes as a very beautiful man, who stole his breath away just by being there and sometimes by kissing the air from his lungs until he was panting and helpless on the nearest flat surface. 

He refused to admit to Wei Wuxian how long he’d been thinking about him in that way, but given the way his ears went flat in embarrassment every time he guessed, it had been for a while. 

That was another thing that had been less of a surprise and more of a foregone conclusion once they’d had the chance to meet. His initial plans to clear off one of the other beds for Lan Zhan’s usage turned out to be completely unnecessary after a week or so. After all, if they could use his work table for unspeakable acts multiple times when the mood took them, they could cuddle up in the same bed and be all warm now that winter had set in.

A week wasn’t too fast, not for them, not even for Wei Wuxian’s tastes and romantic sensibilities. After all, they had already been living together for more than a year. A week was all they needed to finish figuring out the rest of the ways they could fit together. After all, it wasn’t like there was much else to do out here in the Forsaken Battlegrounds.

Lan Zhan’s ears immediately flicked forward in excitement when the tablet pinged, likely a message from his brother. That had been a fun discovery; that the same website owner that had tipped him off to Lan Zhan’s nature and the irate cultivator that had occasionally been trawling over posts about hunting trophies to demand more information on the beings they had killed were in fact Lan Zhan’s very worried brother, unaware of the circumstances that had forced Lan Zhan into the Forsaken Battlegrounds in the first place.

That had been another intense evening that had gone slightly funny when with the fickle blessings of the oft-spotty internet had resulted in them spending several hours on calls that lasted only a few minutes before losing the connection again. It had taken them a few tries to get used to the idea that it wouldn’t get any better and instead started continuing the conversation as though they hadn’t been interrupted.

Lan Xichen was a very kind man, to be sure. Fiercely protective of his younger brother and he had kept up an at first intense, but now pleasant email conversation with Wei Wuxian since then, but Wei Wuxian could understand the reasons behind it.

Lan Zhan was just that special and loved. When he had suddenly disappeared with no word and no ability to come home, his family had been terrified that something awful had happened to him. Finding out that he was fine, but had been living inside the most isolated tower in the most inhospitable region of the Jianghu with a single cultivator whom he had hidden his nature from for over a year, they had good reason to be worried.

Still, they had reached an understanding quickly and had proceeded to build their own rapport outside of their mutual favorite person, somewhat out of an understanding that while it might have seemed out of the blue for all of them, that things were likely to be permanent in a way that made him want to roll around on the floor out of an excess of happy emotion and that they should build their own bond for the future ahead as well. Lan Xichen had recently told him that he couldn’t think of a better cultivator to have found his brother in his time of need and that he was grateful that Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan had met, even if it wasn’t exactly the ideal way to meet someone.

It had been a lovely thing. He was happy to hear that. Lan Zhan was very happy to hear that. And judging by the way that his ears were pointed back, he was being teased about finding a boyfriend in the least likely place in the world again. Which was cute; he always deserved more teasing.

Still, he was more focused on defending himself from his brother and not hearing Wei Wuxian’s reasonable whines about how cruel he could be with his sharp teeth. He pouted as his boyfriend refused to give him attention for his plight.

However, he was sufficiently distracted for the moment… a smirk curled over Wei Wuxian’s face as an idea came to mind. 

As quietly as he could manage, he slipped out of his chair to sneak across the room, his bare feet not making any sound on the stone floor. One of Lan Zhan’s ears twitched sideways, but then straightened out again.

When he was close enough to pounce, he tossed himself onto Lan Zhan’s back, squirming to wrap his arms around his chest and cling onto him like a monkey hanging onto a tree during a windstorm. In human form, he was less likely to yelp as cutely, but the slight oomph of air leaving his lungs very suddenly was just as satisfying. 

The tablet bounced out of his hands to land on the floor.

“My Bunny is so cruel to me,” Wei Wuxian whined playfully into Lan Zhan’s hair, his voice muffled. “Not only does he pin me down and bite me all the time, but he doesn’t even pay attention when I’m talking to him.”

Lan Zhan hummed slightly, a faint smile in his voice at the pet name. “I heard all that you said.”

Wei Wuxian grinned, shifting about to find a more comfortable position. “Oh really?” he teased, reaching up to tug one of those soft, fluffy, white ears. “You heard everything?”

“Mn.”

Wei Wuxian grinned. “Including the part where I’m asking for the ribbon you want?”

There was a long pause. Then abruptly his world was spinning around for a second as Lan Zhan flipped their positions and pinned Wei Wuxian to the bed by his wrists with a strength that left him smiling giddily under the weight of those molten, golden eyes.

When Lan Zhan spoke next, his voice was slightly husky. “Is that so?”

Wei Wuxian nodded, not at all complaining about the position they were in now. “If all goes to plan, it’ll be here in a week. Then we can play with it,” he crooned, running his toe up the back of Lan Zhan’s ankle. “Doesn’t that sound fun?”

Lan Zhan’s answer, while wordless as usual, assured him that he was looking forward to it just as much as Wei Wuxian was. The email would just have to wait to get sent for after they were done, like everything else in the tower had learned to wait. They had a year of not having sex to make up for, after all.

And there would still be plenty of time in the future for all the other things too, the ripe tomatoes and the chubby rabbits that followed Lan Zhan around and waking up at terrible hours to sweet kisses and sometimes the soft rasp of a fox tongue. They still had a little under two years left out here.

They would be here together, every day, until the end of his assignment here in the Forsaken Battlegrounds. After that, while he couldn’t determine the future perfectly, he was pretty certain that they would still be together just the same wherever things happened to take them. There was no longer any lingering doubt in his mind that he could do what no one else had in an era and finish out his term here in Yiling Tower.

After all, now that he had Lan Zhan at his side, how could he not?