Thread by @luuuunadiane

[for @lotussbear and @Sigur_Pirullini's contributions giving me brainworms]

Jiang Cheng wakes up at Lotus Pier, her childhood home. Her abdomen aches when she sits up, and she falls back onto the bed she is lying on, disoriented and bewildered. The place is familiar, but strange

- as if she is meant to be somewhere else, and her siblings come visit her, Wei Wuxian barreling in followed by her serene A-Jie. They fuss over how she is feeling, faces growing dark when she mentions the pain in her stomach, sharing glances at each other, and she demands to

be privy to their thoughts.

"It's nothing, Jiang Cheng," Wei Wuxian finally says, after what it seems like a whole silent conversation with A-Jie, which only makes her more suspicious. "You were sick, that's all."

Whatever discretion they tried to give her is shattered by

her own mother.

"The dragons stole you away and impregnated you, don't you remember?!" Niang snarls, anger and hatred burning in her eyes, and Jiang Cheng shrinks. She was - raped? Forced to carry the offspring of dragons? A hand goes to her stomach as she processes the words,

is this why - why she feels pain when she tries to walk, why her stomach - her womb - throbs?

She can't remember anything - is it a mercy?

Jiang Cheng drifts through the next few days in a haze, noticing how her mother seems to glare at everything, how her father barely looks

at her, surely ashamed at her, at what happened to her, even if an instinctive thought crosses her mind that it wasn't her fault. Wei Wuxian and A-Jie give her unbearably pitying looks, and the atmosphere at home is suffocating.

She wants to run away. She could run away-

and that thought stops her in her tracks, as dangerously alluring yet frightening as it feels, an odd calm settling upon her at the thought.

Better to leave than to bear the silent judgment at home, which has turned stifling, and she quietly prepares for her departure.

While laying her hand on her aching abdomen, she remembers feeling a small, hard lump inside of it - which immediately makes her worry. She is no healer, but that can't be a good sign, it could very well be some internal injury she sustained from her previous abuse.

Yet the concepts of abuse seem alien, even if the implications in her mother's words are clear. She supposes it is the blessing of losing the memories of what happened to her.

Her plans of escape are interrupted by a cramping abdomen, and she wonders if her period has come,

but when she forces herself to sit up and check her bed and clothes, there is no blood, not even between her legs - just a roiling, squeezing pain.

She has to bite down on her hand to endure a sudden sharp spike, resisting and relaxing bringing no respite as she writhes on

her bed clutching the sheets and hoping for it to be over-

then there is a sudden drop, there is a - a weight inside her, inside her-

it feels a bit like she needs to use the chamberpot, and her eyes stare disbelievingly at the ceiling as there is a squelch, a trickle of

moisture, and she cringes as she feels something push out of her.

Jiang Cheng is nearly too afraid to look at what it is, what that weight is which has just fallen out of her, something small and wet sitting between her legs, but curiosity eventually overtakes her, and she sits

up, spreading her legs and pulling up her clothes to find a small round object there - an egg, it looks like, moist and smooth and with a silvery shell.

Said egg almost immediately starts to crack, and she stares in shock and trepidation as a tiny silver snout pushes its way

out of the shell and out slithers a little dragon.

Jiang Cheng was told that she had been impregnated by the dragons, forced, but upon laying eyes on this newborn creature, she feels a rush of affection she cannot explain. The dragon is the colour of moonlight, and warbles

softly when she reaches out to touch it, the dragon nudging her hand with its snout before curling itself around her fingers.

"Hello," she says breathlessly, "I'm - I guess...I'm your mother?"

It seemed so strange but so right, after all, she had birthed this creature, it had

come from her body.

Her next thoughts were of anxiety - her mother hated dragons for what they did to her, the creatures were not received well by the people she lived amongst.

They would not accept her little dragon, and she had to protect them.

She ends up hiding her little dragon in her room, inside a little box with tiny holes that she locks for their own safety with a bit of dried meat, unsure of what baby dragons eat. Jiang Cheng is wondering if she should be trying to find a dragon - a reckless idea, she knows -

and trying to return the baby creature before it is discovered and harmed by other humans.

Before she can make plans on that front, Lotus Pier and the surrounding villagers are attacked.

She feels the rumbling before she sees them, the ground shaking as large, serpentine bodies curl around houses and crush them with inhuman strength, dark blue and pale blue dragons diving toward villagers and grabbing them with their pointed teeth before flinging them to their

doom. Screams fill the air, one of the smaller houses in her line of sight is reduced to wood and splinters, and fear grips her heart.

She cannot let them kill her baby dragon by accident, and before she knows it she is running back to her room.

Quickly, she unlocks the box they are lying in and picks them up, hiding them in her sleeves, when the walls around her tremble before snapping like a broken twig, light flooding the vicinity as she falls to the ground in terror. A blue dragon is destroying her room and she

scrambles over its immense body when she sees her chance, digging her hands and feet into its scales in her attempt to escape. She runs, and her little dragon snakes out of her sleeves, prompting her to push it back in with a cry- "no, don't come out! I'm trying to protect you!"

Adrenaline rushes through her as she flees, the baby dragon refusing to go back into her sleeves where it is safe, and the sun is blocked out by a massive shadow. The baby dragon tilts its head up and trills out to a full-sized dragon the same shade - gleaming silver, its golden

eyes fixed directly on Jiang Cheng, and the sight is awe-inspiring and terrifying as she backs away in fear, one hand against the little creature and trying to shield it. The dragons have come, they have come for her baby, and she can't let them be taken away-

The silver dragon advances toward her, and she tries to run, but she's trapped on both sides by its massive, elongated body, forced to turn around and confront it directly-

and the dragon shifts into a human.

Curling silver horns and golden eyes remain on a handsome male face, scales and serpentine body rippling into a bare human torso as claws change into hands and arms and Jiang Cheng gasps-

She knows this man, who approaches her with shock and love and grief in his eyes.

"A-Cheng?" He murmurs, and a name comes to her immediately.

"Lan Huan?" She asks, before her attention is drawn by her little dragon trilling happily and darting out to the silver dragon, who beams in joy and reaches out to touch the infant creature reverently. "A-Cheng, this-"

"this is our child, are they not? I thought..." His voice turns mournful, "I thought they were all gone..."

"I...I don't know who you are," She says truthfully, and his face falls, "but I feel like I know you."

"You're my wife." He says mournfully, and nothing her family has

told her seemed right, but this one rang true.

She doesn't remember this man, but she feels like she can trust him.

"I believe you." She says, watching her baby dragon happily skitter up their father's face and wrap themselves around his horn.

Her words once again reassure him into a soft, gentle smile, and he reaches out a hand to her - one that she takes, and walks with him as he starts to move, slowing down and telling her to "Ride on me, my heart. Let's go home," and she climbs on and lets him take her away.

(Jiang Cheng ran away from the Jiang family, met Lan Xichen, fell in love, got married, was pregnant with his eggs when she was kidnapped by dragon hunters and beat to miscarriage - except they missed one egg, and she had amnesia from all the torture when she woke up back at

Lotus Pier - and Xichen would never give up trying to find his wife again.)