Chapter Text
His spirit suddenly has taken flight
And left me behind far away.
To whom shall I look, on whom rely?
My tears flow in an endless stream.
"Yu, yu" cry the wandering deer
As they carry fodder to their young in the wood.
Flap, flap fly the birds
As they carry their little ones back to the nest.
I alone am desolate
Dreading the days of our long parting:
My grieving heart's settled pain
No one else can understand.
They say the good live long:
Then why was he not spared?
-Wei Wēn-ti
The stench of smoke still clings to his hair and battlefield mud black with iron and rot still stains the hem of his robes when Lan Wangji dismounts his sword in Caiyi Town in the dead of night. He lands lightly, boots hardly making a sound, but he can feel the pain of the mild impact jar through sore muscles and concealed wounds like a lick of fire up his spine. For a moment the world flashes white, the ground beneath Lan Wangji’s feet unsteady. Bandages stiff with dried blood pull at flayed skin, and he lets out a shuddering breath that from anyone else would be a cry of pain. Everything about Lan Wangji feels like an open wound.
But none of it matters. Nothing matters.
For years others have accused Lan Wangji of being blank, emotionless, but he’s never felt it like this before. He is pointless, broken—a wine jug drained empty, a lantern burned out, a guqin with the strings snapped. Lan Wangji doesn’t know if he could make a sound if he tried.
His landing, light though it was, is enough to remind Lan Wangji that he is not fully alone, despite appearances. There’s a gentle tug at his scalp as chubby fingers that were previously lax with sleep clench at a lock of Lan Wangji’s hair as if afraid he will leave. The faint sting forces him to amend that bleak thought: one thing still matters. Just one.
He has a mission to complete. Not his own mission and not his own cause… but one worth dying for. He has to believe it was worth dying for, and has to prove it worthwhile.
This is all he has left.
That mission puts him in motion, shifting the covering cloths again before putting one foot after the other down familiar alleyways. The hollow knocking of moored boats against the canal walls and lilting cries of the night birds is a haunting melody to accompany a clandestine task. Lan Wangji has never really been one for “sneaking” though, and his robes catch the moonglow and make him conspicuous. Yet when a bleary eye peeks out at him, it’s those robes that keep the doors from being closed. For who in all of Gusu could fail to recognize one of their Jades.
The room is dark and cold when the innkeeper welcomes him to it but he silently dismisses the woman with a silver ingot before she can light the fire for him, icy stare intended to keep her from casting too close an eye to him in the light. As she slides the door closed behind her retreat, Lan Wangji waits motionless in the dark room until her footsteps fade, before releasing a talisman to light the lamps. It’s only then that he plucks free knots and carefully loosens the sling across his chest, to reveal the pitiful muddy creature within.
The very last living member of the condemned Qishan Wen sect shivers in Lan Wangji’s arms, lashes fluttering over bloodshot unseeing eyes, and his breath lets out in a plaintive sigh.
“Daddy...?”
The word is weak and whispered and fades quickly in the room, but it echoes in Lan Wangji’s mind like thunder, accompanied by a bray of teasing laughter.
Hahaha! Lan Zhan, congratulations! He’s taken a liking to you!
“No.” It’s cold, distant, but Lan Wangji himself is very far away, on the streets of a town in the shadow of a mountain of bones, keeping time with a ghost.
Wen Yuan himself is even further away, his spirit weak and slipping, and what little consciousness he gathered flees again. The toddler’s breathing is quiet but laboured, his plump cheeks scarlet and body trembling in his soiled and ripped clothes. The fever still has him. Lan Wangji rips himself out of the past to kneel stiffly beside the bed to settle the emaciated child down.
By the time Lan Wangji arrived at the burial mounds, the fever had nearly taken the boy. While the first of the human scavengers had somehow missed him, the wilder scavengers had been holding a wake. It was the vultures circling overhead that sent Lan Wangji to desperately examine the fallen, burned out husk of a tree. Within, he found what had clearly been the child’s hide-away in the few happier days the Wens had in Yiling under... his care. The soft cloths he had stuffed inside like nesting material were all pungently soiled with sick, the toys he once cherished were scorched or ruined, but his thready breath carried on. A fighter, even as a child, desperately clinging to life even surrounded by death and decay. Lan Wangji would expect no less from a foundling adopted as... his... son.
The grief is so thick that it has clenched around his lungs, stealing his breath, squeezing the air from him. Fresh blood has soaked the bandages through again, and his underclothes are plastered to his back. His ears feel muffled, the taste of iron fills the back of his throat. But the child shivers, legs kicking weakly on the bed as he convulses, and Lan Wangji’s gaze sharpens again, perceiving danger.
Take him away!
The words weren’t directed at him, but the message and desperation of the order is unforgettable. Then, the job of protecting the child fell to the Wen doctress, but like the others she is gone and there is no one else left to answer that cry against this new threat. This is his mission.
Lan Wangji takes a wracking breath and as the air fills him he carefully forces the chaos of his mind to silence, slamming the door on his emotions with the practiced discipline of a monk and the stubborn determination of a warrior—the Lan way. His family legacy is one of repression, and until recently Lan Wangji has been the paragon of those teachings. Lan Wangji has lived his life in libraries reading of disordered Qi, of resentful energy, of cultivational backlash. While he is aware of what he is barely holding off, he knows that he is stronger than this.
Lan Wangji closes his eyes to better focus on forcing the energy within himself into flowing properly, so that he can fortify the fledgling olden core within the child. Wen Yuan has the gift to be a cultivator someday—but for now his body needs to be taught to fight the enemy within. His Qi needs to be guided gently, and Lan Wangji is not the ideal candidate for that. Not in this state. Light sparks at his fingertips as he holds them over the rabbit-fast pulse of the boy, passing life force from himself to the child. The boy’s cracked and bitten lips part on a sigh of relief at the first balm of healing energy.
It should be slow, careful, but right now Lan Wangji’s Qi is a tsunami, the disturbance buried deep but the devastation cresting in unmistakable power that surges suddenly through the boy. He arches and then goes limp on the bed as energy slams through his mind and body, and Lan Wangji jerks his touch away from the child’s wrist before he causes more harm than good. His breath is ragged as he crowds closer to the bed, until the bird-thin chest rises and falls again. Sending a quiet prayer of thanks that he didn’t accidentally destroy what he sought to save, Lan Wangji confirms that while unconscious and ill the boy is no longer in immediate danger from seizures. Careless. That was careless and dangerous of him: what use is saving the child if he doesn’t protect the child too.
His knees creak when he finally staggers to his feet again, back held straight as if he can keep from moving it as he slowly and carefully heats water. The sweet wormwood infusion he stole from the ruins of Yiling is bitter despite the name, but he feeds it between the child’s lips again regardless of his unconscious whines. Using Wen Qing’s abandoned medical supplies to treat the boy is the last and most fitting tribute anyone will offer to a woman who dedicated her life to such cures, even if the child twists his lips and tries to turn away. The difference between life and death is often bitter, and while the child is being administered that lesson younger than most, it is one that Lan Wangji knows Wen Yuan will be forced to carry long into adulthood. If he even makes it that far.
The rest of the hot water he soaks into soft cloths, cleaning the child’s heart-shaped face of soot and sweat, considering the options. He’s rescued the child, taken him away in secret from the site of slaughter, but that won’t necessarily save him. The Jin, Jiang, and Nie sects... they all have dedicated themselves to eradicating every Wen. The child is a Wen, and even at this age possesses a golden core. In their minds when he comes of age he could rise to seek revenge and rebuild the clan the way Jiang Cheng has been since the fall of Lotus Pier. Worse, the child is also the adopted foundling son of the man they banded together to hunt to the ends of the earth, and even to chase the ghost of even after he…
The steam is stinging Lan Wangji’s cheeks, his eyes. He removes the water from the heat again and pours it into a basin so he can scrub the child’s clothing clean, tucking him beneath every blanket in the room as he does. Wen Yuan’s outer robes are clearly patched together from the robes of an older member of his family. He likely outgrew the clothes he was in when they were rescued from the camps, and someone at the burial mounds carefully stitched him new clothing from their own. The Wen scarlet is stained brown, the edges singed from the fire, the hems torn and frayed—but once this was a token to prove that this boy was loved. Lan Wangji stares at the slightly crooked stitchwork and imagines it was the woman the boy called grandmother, her own last gift to the boy.
Closing his eyes a moment over the stained cloth, Lan Wangji sends an apology to the dead and then calls a talisman to feed the robes to the flame. She would understand, he thinks: this is for the best, to protect the boy. He will send for new robes at dawn when people begin to wake. Caiyi Town has provided the cloth for the GusuLan sect’s disciple robes for generations. He can...
Bichen flies to Lan Wangji’s hand at the first sound of footsteps on the wooden floors outside, and he flings off his outer robe to cover the child on the bed with the protective warding stitched within. Then he holds his breath as he waits, head cocked to listen. The knock, when it comes, is polite and quiet to keep others in the inn from waking. A voice calls out softly.
“Brother.” Lan Xichen’s voice is as familiar to Lan Wangji as his own, but the tension doesn’t bleed out of him. He can hear the hesitation, a wariness that is new between them. There are only a few hours until sunrise, but it is still earlier than five, so his brother must have put disciples on watch for him or paid the innkeepers to report to him. The seniors could be in the hall now, prepared to… “Wangji, it is just me, and I’m going to come in.”
He does moments later, sliding the door open just enough for him to enter, and then closing it behind him as he meets Lan Wangji’s eyes from across the room, hands loose and held away from Shuoyue’s hilt as a sign of peace—not a sign of harmlessness.
When Lan Wangji fled the Cloud Recesses only three days into his isolation, he wasn’t thinking clearly. His punishment was far from over with the whipping he received—his isolation proscribed as much to give him time to heal as time to think. He took time for neither. As soon as word reached him about the fate that claimed him, Lan Wangji stole from Cloud Recesses in the dead of night.
Neither Wangji nor Xichen have seen each other since he was punished, because as much as he hated to do it and as much as it doubtless haunts him, Lan Xichen was the hand that held the whip. It wasn’t personal, and it wasn’t vengeance. It was righteous and just, and Lan Wangji can hold no ill will to his brother for that. Only his uncle as his senior and his brother as the sect leader had the right to enact the sentence for Lan Wangji’s betrayal, and only Lan Xichen had the strength to do the deed. The discipline whip is meant to slice deep, to bleed long, to scar for life as a memory and a brand. He’s nowhere near healed yet. But nothing Lan Xichen has done or could do to him would scar him as badly as the news that he was gone.
“Wangji, you’re bleeding.” Worry and care paint themselves across Lan Xichen’s features, his expression so much more open than Lan Wangji’s ever has been. He searches his younger brother’s face, marking the trace of blood at the corner of his lips, at the dip beneath his nose. Lan Wangji is not a fool: he knows what Qi deviation is, and what he’s staving off with his control, and he knows his brother can mark the signs as well as any cultivator. His fingers twitch not for the sword but for the flute at his side, Liebing white and glistening, a true healer’s instrument. “Let me…”
From the bed, beneath the cover of his robes, a weak rasping cough interrupts the moment and draws attention to what Wangji was shielding with his body and sword.
“Stay there.” It’s a command, though Lan Wangji has no authority to issue commands to his brother and no face to ask him favors. Gathering a cup and water again, he carefully draws back the robes, propping his arm under the child’s head and holding the cup to help him drink. He doesn’t tut or hush him, doesn’t spare him words of comfort, but he’s as gentle as he can be as he settles the child in again, the robes now drawn to beneath his chin instead of covering his face when he’s already fighting to breathe.
“Daddy...?” It’s not the first or even third time the child has feverishly begged for his long-dead parent, but it’s the first time Lan Wangji hasn’t denied him. This is a choice. It is the only choice he can let himself make, the one path at a crossroad that he can even consider without losing himself. Smoothing his palm over matted hair, Lan Wangji silently makes a promise. To the abandoned child. To the innocent Wens. To him.
“...I am here.” Raising his head, Lan Wangji meets his brother’s dumbstruck gaze across the room, half a plea and half a challenge as he kneels beside the child on the bed. Blood still trickles down his face and has soaked through the robes on his back, but determination is in every line of his features. “Sleep, Lan Yuan.”
Lan Wangji’s reputation is already tarnished. He fought on behalf of the Yiling Patriarch against his own people, he attacked thirty-three men who answered to him and trusted him, he ran away from home in defiance of his brother, he has gambled everything and lost everything. Let the people of Gusu whisper, implying that he ignored his vows of keeping chaste and pure until marriage. Let them think of him the way they do the head of the Jin clan, leaving bastards in his wake. If it will protect this child, let them think anything they want. He has learned the last and most painful lesson that a good man died a horrible death for: that the fickle regard of others is not worth sacrificing his own honor. Whatever the cost.
That open face shows Lan Xichen’s every thought—the worry for his brother, the realization of what he has done, and finally the acceptance of his choice. No, he doesn’t think the child is his brother’s by blood, but he knows that this is the compromise that will bring Lan Wangji back home. Be righteous, the single phrase that dictates the entire belief of their family, that has been drilled into them both since birth as the heirs of their sect. The Twin Jades support one another and his brother feels this is the only righteous choice. It is this, or he follows in another’s footsteps and flees with the last Wen, to keep him safe and damn the consequences.
“… I understand.“ Lan Xichen bows his head, accepting responsibility alongside him, and Lan Wangji un-tenses slowly, though it leaves his muscles trembling, though it makes the pain he was holding off sear through him. “Rest, Wangji. Let me play for you now. I’ll look over you both until dawn, then we can make arrangements.”
Tonight, his brother will play the Song of Clarity for him on a flute whose voice is too light, too sweet, that will only taunt him with memories and loss. In the morning they will bring the child to the Cloud Recesses together, concealed by GusuLan robes and a new name. Lan Wangji can resume his seclusion while nursing himself and the child back to health.
After that, they will decide together how to proceed… and for Lan Wangji, how to move on.