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Lan Sizhui has an interesting relationship with the thousands and thousands of sect rules carved into the wall on the path into Cloud Recesses. The moon phases in and out of the night sky, and clouds shift, and the years pass, but there’s something lovely about the slab of principles that only seems to grow in size every time one walks past. Sizhui holds them dear to his heart the way he has heard people say that Hanguang-jun used to, the way he could see Zewu-jun doing now.
(They rarely see Zewu-jun these days, and Sizhui wonders but does not ask how long he wishes to keep repenting for the mistakes of someone who would never have recognized these sins.)
He traces his fingers, already beginning to gather the tender callouses of playing the guqin, against the cool surface of the rock.
There’s a rule squeezed somewhere along that rock that his eyes are drawn to. Somewhere between warnings against debauchery and promiscuity, among all those words he’s memorised and recited so many times over, there is a principle his heart seems inclined to reject.
(Gusu Lan Sect rules kept their disciples in check and made their hearts steadfast and unbreakable. Sizhui wants to believe this, but it gets harder and harder the longer his uncle’s doors remain closed. Whispers float around that just a generation ago, another young sect leader had flamed out too soon, locked himself inside the same room, repenting for things he had done and for things he hadn’t. Sizhui wonders but still does not ask if they were still considered unbroken in this condition.)
(He wonders how old Hanguang-jun was when he began to question these principles too.)
One should not be greedy.
This rule sticks out sorely in Sizhui’s mind.
It should be true, but facts usually do not need to be considered as carefully as he has been considering this.
One should not be greedy . Greed led to discontent and crime and evil, and greed led to people like Wen Ruohan and Jin Guangyao, and one should not be greedy. One should not be greedy because fate deals with a practised hand and the world distributes as it sees fit and we should all fight for what we deserve but not any more. Greed leads to wretched endings.
Sizhui thinks of the desecrated flags of the people whose name he bears alone. He thinks of the Jin Sect struggling to restore their reputation after the events of the Guanyin temple, poor Jin Ling being forced to deal with the aftermath of his uncle’s greed. He thinks of Zewu-jun sitting alone, day after day, because he had hoped too much and been too blind and then lost everything on the path he had taken to hold them together.
Despite everything, he still can’t help but wonder. Would it be so bad to be a little greedy? Maybe it wasn’t greed that he was thinking of. Selfishness, maybe.
After all that he’s lost before he knew what they were, and after all that he’s been given, Lan Sizhui wonders if he can allow himself to be a little selfish. People say that Jin Ling is selfish, and Sizhui’s always been quick to defend him. But he is selfish. About his (his father’s) sword, and his dog (a gift from the uncle who had held a bloody guqin string to his neck), and his new friends (his first), Jin Ling is very selfish. If he looks at it this way, Sizhui thinks it’s not so bad.
He supposes some rules can be broken.
Hanguang-jun has also become gentler to himself with regards to them— a glint of pride appearing in his usually stoic expression, a little bit of indulgence here and there. (There’s a mischievous-smiled someone to thank for this development, and said someone never fails to brag about it.) But Sizhui doesn’t know if he wants to wait until someone comes along for him too, when he’s sure that he already feels complete now by himself.
(He’s not sure if he wants to keep waiting when his fated person might already be laughing by his side.)
Still, even his father had limits to his letting loose, rationing out his freedom like a prize, unless it came to Wei Wuxian himself. Sizhui knows he must have the same kind of discipline too, and sets some guidelines.
He makes a mental list of things that are his. He makes a list of things he would like to keep, that he would fight tooth and nail to remain as his, and moves from there.
- His memories.
Lan Sizhui stands in front of a crudely dug grave next to a stranger he wants to call uncle. He stares into the hole filled with the remains of a family he can only half-recall and wonders what name his birth parents would have chosen for him. (They aren’t even part of the pile of mixed up ashes down there. It was the first slaughter that took them, not the second. What an ugly thought.) He wonders if they would have named him something similar, something like hope, or love, or if they wouldn’t have thought too much about it at all. If they had lived, it would be because there would have been no war, no danger, no reason to take refuge in a name and in a nameless child.
The Ghost General— Uncle Wen— squeezes his shoulder with a cold hand before kneeling down and beginning to sweep the soil back into the hole. Sizhui drops to his knees too and joins him. Grandmother, Uncle, Auntie, Cousin. He doesn’t remember what he used to call them when they were all still together. The soil is thick and muddy under his touch, and his white robes pick up grime where his knees are pressed into the grass. Slowly, they pat the soil back where it had been. It’s a few minutes of silence before either of them straighten up.
“A-Yuan…”
Multiple voices that he cannot put names or faces to echo in his mind. Even now, he’s unsure which ones were of those who had once loved him and which ones he had desperately imagined. That day at Burial Mounds (a name he had been trained to detest but a home he had been raised in), when they had reached for him, had they been calling him too?
“A-Yuan…”
Does it hurt to burn?
He clenches his fist around his robes, trying to focus on the way the white-etched talismans crinkle and fold instead of the block in his throat. Did you miss your homes in Qishan? Sizhui recites the Lan Sect rules over and over again in his mind until the tears stop pricking at his eyes. My proudest ancestors, did you ever imagine everything you ever built would end with me? He re-ties his forehead ribbon, being extra careful with the knot, and makes to stand. Will you ever forgive me?
“A-Yuan.”
His legs give way at the call of his name and everything breaks. (Everything is already broken.) He has a million questions in his head. Sizhui wonders but does not ask, does not ask. Is it disrespectful to bury the last of his people dressed in the pure white of the ones who killed them? Does he have a right to mourn? Heavy tears slip past his cheeks and nose and chin and he doesn’t want to make a sound but it hurts, and it hurts, and it’s a pain he’s never and always remembered. Does it hurt to burn? Do you want me here? Does it hurt to burn? Did it hurt to burn?
The Ghost General seems to want to reach for him, but pulls back quickly. Sizhui unwittingly recalls being told that he “looked a lot like one of my cousins”, and is overcome again. The end of his forehead ribbon drags in the dirt, but he barely cares. He wonders what the Ghost General is feeling, watching his last remaining relative sobbing soundlessly, unable to reach across and close the gap, eyes tracing the face of someone he once knew but never actually got to know at all. How does it feel to be the only one left , he wants to ask, but the only one left is him. He wonders, wonders, and can never stop wondering, because the people with the answers had gone before he had the thought to remember them.
“Uncle…”
It comes out strangled and quiet, and Sizhui tries again.
“Uncle.” The Ghost General tilts his head up, and there is an infinite sadness in his eyes. (Everything is broken .) Sizhui murmurs quietly, and he knows he shouldn’t ask, “Do you wish you could cry?”
Immediately after, he collapses into his uncle’s cold chest and the Ghost General holds him until the sun begins to set.
-
There are the people that have been forgotten; their ways and their beliefs abandoned, and in their rare mention, only scorned. Then, there are the people who stand unfaltering in the face of all that’s happened and all that will, that carve their goodwill and their morality into the paradise they had built and protected to this day. For the former, he had erected memorials and graves in the small parts of the world where they were allowed to have existed. For the latter, he is eternally grateful.
Lan Sizhui, Wen Yuan, is sure that where he is now is where his past and his future meet. Even (or especially) to him, it seems impossible to reconcile the two clans that had warred against each other in a history that barely included him. It’s impossible to think of all the people that shed blood and broke skin and lifted battle-worn swords before, all these people that maybe had not been good but had been great, and how in the end both of these bloodlines had converged on him.
Sizhui knows that once upon a time all of his friends’ fathers and mothers had been silent in a room that had hotly debated his family’s right to have survived the war. Some had spoken. All the words that had been tossed back and forth, all the people that had chosen to be passive, and in the end, the Wen people had died again anyway.
Sizhui knows that all the idols praised in the cultivation world today would want him dead if only they knew what his name used to be. He’s all that’s left of the Wen people, and he protects their memories fiercely. The ghosts of a past and memories that are and are not his live within him, and he chooses to be selfish about them. All the worlds’ heroes and saints might spit on their graves, but Sizhui is selfish and won’t let go, and won’t let go, and maybe the sun has set but he hopes fate will still allow a warmth to remain.
- His father.
Hanguang-jun is many things to many people but sometimes children see differently and sometimes they see worse and don’t understand but— in all that he’s seen and all that he didn’t understand but has come to understand (because Hanguang-jun is quite simple, but only to him), there are mornings and silences and small smiles he would rather keep secret for himself.
Sizhui knows Hanguang-jun belongs to someone else, a memory of a warmth from long ago that slowly begins to be family again. He knows his father will never fully belong to him because he’s been Senior Wei’s for as long as he’s known him, even before he had learnt for whom his perfect father had worn that bitter mourning expression all these years. Even before he knew for whom his father had cracked his jade skin and lain broken in bed for those few years, before he knew for whom his father played again and again the same song of inquiry. He knew his father had never really been his alone.
But in the early mornings of those thirteen years when his father seemed sometimes to wish not to wake up, in the quiet dark of Cloud Recesses when he pleaded for Hanguang-jun to keep him company after bad dreams (before he found out his father had worse), Sizhui had been there. He had met him for the first time all over again halfway through his seclusion and learnt to cherish the days when he was allowed to visit. He had learnt to sit small beside his father on the Jingshi bed without pressing onto his healing wounds, and it was by the same bed that he learnt how to love him too.
Loving Hanguang-jun is easy. First, Sizhui learns to love his smiles, rare and precious, and almost for him only. His father smiles whenever he enters the Jingshi, when the moon hangs gentle and cool above the courtyard, and when Zewu-Jun looks more downcast than usual, he seems to smile as a gift. When he finally begins to play the guqin and Hanguang-jun blinks slowly at him and then grants him a fond smile, Sizhui learns for the first time what it means to want to hold on tightly to something.
Those smiles were his. He had earned those on his own. When there’s danger in night-hunts and they set off their light signals and Hanguang-jun arrives just a little faster than he normally would, Sizhui gives himself the quiet pleasure of claiming that for himself. His father came to get him. He came because he was here. He tucks these little selfish thoughts away for himself and keeps them safe. He is breaking the rules, he knows. Loving his father is his repentance.
-
“When humans feel pain or fear, they’d be scared, they’d want someone to help them, they’d want to scream and shout and cry— isn’t that what makes us human?”
Humans are prone to pain and humans are prone to fear and Sizhui supposes it’s only natural to not want to or dare to bear all of it alone. He can’t count the number of times he’s had to deal with tears and wails and shouts on a nighthunt, the number of people falling into his arms or onto his shoulder with stories that were heartbreaking at first, then just sad, and then normal. Sometimes Jingyi still gets scared on nighthunts, and Sizhui makes sure he provides a steady shoulder to grip onto, keeps an ear out for the telltale shaky breath and waits for his best friend to slip his hand into his. Even Jin Ling has cried once, in a moment Sizhui doesn’t like to recall, cried and cried like he would never stop until his uncle took him away. It’s natural to cry and shout, if only because pain and fear are natural. It is natural to scream for help.
For Sizhui, it was learnt. Like most things, it had been Hanguang-jun who taught him.
One of the things Sizhui had begun to remember was hiding. He remembered folding into himself, knees pressed against his chest, being desperately silent against the frightful din around him. He remembers his first time seeing a sword glare, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing his hand against his mouth to keep from screaming for his Xian-gege, his aunt, his grandmother; they were right outside, fighting, dying, burning, burning . If he screamed, he would be killed too. If he screamed, bad things would happen. The world around him went up in flames, the cave in Burial Mounds awash in blood and tension and so much fire. A scream rang out into the night and many followed. A-yuan stayed silent.
It was a habit he carried into his later childhood, without knowing where he had picked it up. Lan Yuan was often praised for being mature, and independant, and for being such a good boy. He would get hurt and brush it off, take punishments without complaint, take the fall, take the fall. He wondered but did not ask what it would take to stop the pain. Still, his father had answered.
Hanguang-jun taught him how to ask for help, to draw back when he couldn’t take it anymore, and ask someone else to please, please help him. After all these years, asking had become a habit, because as long as his father was around, he knew he would always get an answer. When his fingers got cut by Guqin strings, he watched Hanguang-jun gently patch them up until he learnt to do it himself. When he had nightmares, he always had a bed to crawl into. He could cry endlessly into Hanguang-jun’s arms with a promise that someone would dry his tears. Like this, it was easy to learn to scream for help, and easier to realise he didn’t have to scream.
Seeing Hanguang-jun nod at Senior Wei when asked if it was natural to scream and shout and cry was strange, and it is only now that Sizhui sits in tranquil quiet with his father and thinks on it again that he realises why.
Those thirteen years behind them, all the moons that passed, the snide comments, the mourning, the loneliness… Did it not hurt at all?
Sizhui must have jolted suddenly at this realization, because Hanguang-jun’s eyes flick quickly over to him in worry. He smiles in reassurance, “Sorry, I was just thinking of something.”
“Mn.”
He bites his lip.
“Hanguang-jun, is it natural for people to scream and cry when they are in pain?” Sizhui asks, and he watches his father closely. Hanguang-jun seems to want to respond immediately, lips forming a reply before he swallows his words. There’s a short pause.
“Yes.”
Sizhui nods in response. A few days back, when Senior Wei— Xian-gege had asked the same question, Hanguang-jun had taken a while to respond. Obviously, he had been telling the truth, but Sizhui guesses that it is probably easy to feel like you’re lying if the truth you state doesn’t really apply to you.
Hanguang-jun’s eyes are fixed on him, curiosity and love and unfathomable things saturated in his gaze. There are still so many things he doesn’t understand about his father, some things he will never ask, some secrets he has no right to.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Mn.”
Sizhui takes a breath, “Did you ever cry?”
“Mn?”
“In the past thirteen years, have you ever cried? Were you ever scared? Did you ever want to shout for help?”
He bites back harsher questions. He’s already pushed enough. Hanguang-jun’s brows raise just slightly, and Sizhui sees his eyes widen a fraction, as the questions wash over him. He tries to keep his regret at bay until the reply comes. He knows it will. As long as he asks, he knows his father will do his best to answer, every question he poses like a promise to hold.
Still, the silence taunts them both for a while.
He knows that Hanguang-jun is ready when he sits up straighter and folds his hands over each other.
“Yes, I have cried,” he starts. “I have been scared.”
Sizhui does not know why, but he is surprised, and it must read clearly on his face as well. Hanguang-jun gives him a small smile, and begins to explain.
“There was a world that was happy to move on from the man I had loved, happy to heal from him like his existence had been a wound. Crying… was a natural reaction.”
Sizhui shuffles closer to where his father is, and leans his head on his shoulder. Hanguang-jun takes his hand onto his lap, and continues, “Sizhui, I was so scared to raise you.”
“A-Yuan,” Sizhui starts when his father calls him by his birth name again. “You were so small, and I didn’t trust the world not to break you.” As he says this, Sizhui watches the muscles in his father’s hands flex. Hard as it is, Hanguang-jun continues to answer, because he will always answer.
His father speaks again, “I didn’t trust myself not to. And you trusted me so much. I was scared of hurting you.”
Somehow, Sizhui had never considered this possibility. Hanguang-jun had chosen to raise him as his own, against the wishes of his elders. He had been distanced from his own parents from a very young age, and had had no one teach him how to be one.
The father and the son rest their heads on each other for a moment more, both lost in the future and the past.
Despite himself, Sizhui murmurs, “Did you ever shout for help?”
“Shouting is not allowed in Cloud Recesses.”
They both laugh at that, and Sizhui thinks that that is the end of the conversation, until Hanguang-jun says, “But I did, in my own way.”
“Sometimes, I’d play Inquiry until my skin tore. Even knowing that he wouldn’t respond, I kept calling for Wei Ying. Instead, Xiong-Zhang answered. Always.”
He pauses to take a breath, “Some days I’d forget how to go on, and I’d wander into the disciples’ dorms. All of you would always smile at me.”
“When I had nightmares, I’d wake up to you crawling into my bed. Knowing that you felt safe around me made me feel safe too.”
Oh.
Sizhui feels his throat tighten. His father is so strong, had been so strong, for so long. Even at this moment as he bared his vulnerability simply to answer Sizhui’s questions, he is a man who had been carrying so much. Sizhui clasps his hand tighter.
“Sizhui, did that answer your questions?”
Sizhui pushes himself closer to Hanguang-jun and gives him the slightest nod. The silence claims them again.
It’s nice.
- Himself.
He has been A-Yuan, Wen Yuan, Lan Yuan, Lan Sizhui.
To hope and to long for, and now that the dream he’s been wished upon has been fulfilled, A-Yuan hopes , Wen Yuan, Lan Yuan, Lan Sizhui longs to be selfish now.
Sizhui is the most mature, and Sizhui is the most obedient, and Sizhui will fill in the blanks in the conversation when his parents have lapsed into silences, but sometimes Sizhui wants to be a child, and he wants to want to be a child after so long of chasing all the adults in his life that he never will reach. He will never catch up to his fathers, to his seniors, to his ancestors and his long-dead family, and he wants to be okay with that.
Lan Sizhui is tired of chasing. Lan Sizhui is tired of running.
Lan Sizhui wants and wants and Lan Sizhui wants, and now that he thinks about it, he’s always wanted, and he’s always wanted to want. He wants to own things that he gets to keep. He hadn’t realised until he got Senior Wei back how wonderful it was to have something that would last, and how much losing it hurt. He had tasted loss before he knew what love really was. But now he’s older, he knows, and he’s not letting it go anymore.
Some things he gets to own. Most of all, himself.
It’s hard, when duty ties him to bloodlines and ancestries and a lifetime of people he doesn’t know. He will always “smile like Lan Xichen”, he will always be “as expected of Hanguang-jun’s son!”. He will always be the child that was born from a mountain of ashes.
It’s okay.
-
11pm, Cloud Recesses, Date Unknown:
Sizhui should not be doing this.
The setting that surrounds him makes his crime all the more deplorable, as he sits among snow-white rabbits, delicately holding a bottle of Emperor’s Smile in both his hands.
Shame .
The stars that sit above in the cloudless night do not pass judgement on his sin. Sizhui relishes in their calm presence, stretching his legs into the soft grass below. A rabbit pads over and nuzzles into his robe as a cool breeze passes through the night.
Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing.
He knows he should have brought Jingyi along for this first rule-breaking, but with how beautiful the night is, he thinks he made the right decision in keeping just this one for himself. Besides, Jingyi was sleeping peacefully when Sizhui had snuck out, his eyes breathing steady and deep, his posture definitely out of the Lan sleeping pose. It would have been cruel to wake him.
He traces the constellations with his eyes, resting back with his elbows in the grass. To an experienced eye, the story of the world would be written clearly. Sizhui is untrained, but if he gets to sit with the future and a soft breeze, he’s happy to stay there too. He raises the bottle to his lips and sips the cool wine, relishing the burn as it passes down his throat. Ah. He’s not going to make it sober through the night.
Lan people infamously have bad tolerance. This is not due to genetics, as once thought, since Sizhui has been following this trajectory, despite not being biologically related to the sect. The reason is simple. It is simply due to the fact that they had no practice, being forbidden from alcohol, and having no easy access to it until they are too old to build up a good tolerance. (Jingyi has been eager to break this bad Lan tradition, but is too scared of disappointing Hanguang-jun to actually make any real moves.)
It feels… nice, to sit here alone, having a silent conversation with the galaxies above. To his best knowledge, the rest of Lan Sect is asleep. They are all resting from their days, enjoying their dreams. Sizhui is lost in a dream of his own, wide awake. He befriends the emptiness around him and relishes in the company of the rabbits he has grown up with.
The Emperor’s Smile burns nicely in his stomach, and gives him a sense of grounded-ness. He’s never known peace like this. It’s nice. If it wouldn’t be an insult to the art, he might even say this is a kind of meditation too, watching the leaves falling, admiring the water as it rustles with the passing wind, its surface breaking from its previous calm, feeling the rabbits’ soft fur and steady heartbeats under the brush of his palm.
He sighs in contentment.
It’s been awhile since he’s had a moment to himself. Really thinking about it, he might never have consciously taken time to be alone before. He takes a few more sips from the bottle. Sorry, Hanguang-jun. The alcohol is relaxing, spreading warmth throughout his whole body in the cold night. He’s not really that sorry.
There had been no reason to sneak out hours past curfew, brave the barriers, head down to Caiyi Town and back up, just to drink idly by himself with only excited rabbits for company. If he was caught tomorrow and dragged to kneel before his Grand-Uncle, if the strict man stared angrily down at him and asked him why he had done this, he would have no answer. It had just felt right.
Because he wanted to?
He smiles into his next gulp of wine, his free hand stroking a small rabbit. Above him, the stars twinkle like let-loose parents smiling down upon him. The grass is soft beneath him.
Yes, because he wanted to.
-
There is a thought he rolls over once, twice, occasionally in his head— a flash of pleasant surprise in someone's eyes, some kind of confusion. When he’s asked how he’s doing, how he’s been, he’s never realised how arresting his replies were.
“I’ve been doing well! I’m really happy!”
He had never realised how rare and beautiful it was to be so assured in such a thing. Now he thinks on it, and he thinks on it again, and he sometimes fears that if he thinks on it too much the surety will chip away but it never does. He only has to feel for his white headband lined in clouds, intertwining his life with those who have wrangled the past to create something like a history. He only has to turn his head to see Jingyi smiling by his side. Behind him, there is a trail of his friends all in white who look to him; he only has to look forward to lead the way. His future, his past, and the people by his side; the universe smiles at him, how could he not smile back?
I’m really happy.