Thread by @HSkyfarer

#BabyLWJSeason but make it part of #HotTentacleSummer tentacuddles prompt? Veers into soft #DarkLanZhan territory.

Lan Zhan is five when he first meets Wei Ying in the streets of Yiling. It is love at first sight, or so his older brother will tell everyone who asks later on.

((His Shufu will say it is an unhealthy obsession borne from the recent loss of his mother, but by the point he finds out it is far too late to break the attachment. And really, what does he know? He has never been in LOVE!))

When little Wei Ying tells him that he can’t come to Gusu with him because he is waiting for his parents to return, little Lan Zhan trundles after him for the rest of the day, unwilling to let Wei Ying out of his sight.

It’s a little known fact that the Lan Clan has shape shifting abilities, able to take on the forms of most animals in times of heightened emotion, in both a partial and full shift.

In one of his recent lessons about animals with his Shufu, Lan Zhan has learned all about Octopuses. In the way of all children everywhere, he has decided they are the B E S T animal.

They have plenty of arms to hold on to things and never let go if they don't want to, and they have a beak they can use to bite (and well, everybody knows that the youngest Lan boy has a bad habit of biting people he doesn’t like) and they are super smart.

It only makes sense that when Xichen comes to tell him it’s time to stop playing with the little street kid and go home, Lan Zhan decides the Octopus would be the form best suited to convince everyone that parting him from Wei Ying is useless.

Exchanging his lower body for tentacles and suckers, he curls around Wei Ying in the world’s tightest hug and refuses to let go of him, so that in the end Xichen has no choice but to sweep both children up on his sword and take them back to Gusu.

Little Wei Ying cries and cries, still convinced that if he waits for long enough on the streets of Yiling then his parents will come back for him. He doesn’t want to go to a place he hasn’t ever even heard of. What if he misses them? What he never finds his parents again?

Little Lan Zhan knows better than that, even at the young age of five, however. “Parents never come back,” he says, “You can kneel in the snow and beg and cry and wait, but in the end they’ll still be gone.”

With Xichen's arms tight around them both, Lan Wangji promises Wei Ying they will make their own family.