68 Returning the Goods
It was easy enough for Lan Chang to snatch up little A-Yuan on his way to the kitchens, the child already awake at the crack of dawn, following his brother here, there and everywhere, as if the annoying man was the centre of the tiny baby's world.
Lan Chang had already memorised A-Yuan's brother's schedule years ago, in her most sincerest efforts to begin avoiding him as soon as she realised that the man was trouble and that it really was in her best interests to listen to what he had to say and make a concerted effort to stay away.
Especially when she had seen the state of the shed that his family had once maintained and kept to store their gardening equipment and other such things.
She had never gone back to his family's ground afterwards, happy enough to even separate the two siblings from each other just to keep A-Yuan safe.
The boy had been inconsolable, and seeing how his older brother had easily cradled him and shushed him, arms coated in dark, dark, crimson red and drying blood to his elbows, Lan Chang knew that she could not keep the siblings away from each other.
But at the first signs of A-Yuan suffering at all, even in the slightest, would result in the immediate destruction of their so called sibling bond.
Nobody could bond with the man that A-Yuan's brother had become, even if she could understand him and see what had actually happened, despite what everyone around her had said.
She wasn't crazy.
She knew what she had seen, and she knew that she hadn't been dreaming.
A-Yuan didn't even struggle as Lan Chang grabbed the back of his robes, his servants uniform already donned and as exactly as prim and proper as required, no doubt the careful efforts and time of his brother had gone into his appearance, as it had done every morning.
He did not struggle.
He did not flail.
He made no attempt to escape.
He did nothing.
He let himself be manhandled as if he was some sort of ragdoll, not at all reacting with any weight or force.
Lan Chang let A-Yuan fall to the floor quick enough, setting him down gently onto the floor, spinning him around to face her, placing a finger over her own mouth to indicate that he needed to stay quiet and that it was imperative that he did so.
She pulled the scroll out from her right sleeve and placed it within A-Yuan's tiny arms, those tiny limbs cradling that roll of paper and wood as if were made out of the greatest gold and jewels.
A-Yuan gave a serious expression to Lan Chang, before leaning over to the side to look at Ming Cheng once, for one short second, before he scampered off to the medical wing of the Imperial Palace and the Chief Physician's Office to return the scroll that he had stolen before the man in question realised that had happened to him and did something petty in retaliation.
