Chapter Text
He rubbed his left face because somehow it had begun to ache. He looked in the direction of a physical presence coming towards him but not before its voice reached him.
“Oi! Sizhui! You should have ducked that!”
His friend and sometimes charge—yes, perhaps responsibility was a better word here—ran up to him, a ball made of something he could not discern in his hands. Lan Jingyi frowned at him, his usual jovial features masked with worry.
“You didn’t really hit me with that, did you?” Sizhui asked the other boy.
Jingyi rolled his eyes and for a moment Sizhui wondered how much time Jingyi has been spending with Jin Ling and his uncle, Jiang Wanyin of Yunmeng, both experts in the art of eye rolls. He’d been doing this strange gesture—more like a tic, actually—for days now whenever he’s displeased or being disagreeable…which was often.
“I was aiming at you alright, assuming you’d be your usual self and catch the ball! But you’re not your usual self, not for days now. Or at least you’re even more quietly weird than usual. What’s wrong?”
Sizhui had been pondering some things, which was possibly the reason why he was so distracted recently. But can he tell Jingyi what was on his mind? Even thinking about it made the hairs on his body rise.
Jingyi gave him a knowing look, which often preceded something damnable coming out of his friend’s lips.
“Trembling hands, red face, much redder ears…I’d say this is about the birds and the bees, eh? Who’s charmed you to distraction? Anyone I know?”
If Sizhui’s jaw could have dropped to the ground, it would have already. Perhaps seeing the aghast expression on his face, which felt about to burst with heat, Jingyi had the wisdom not to laugh but kept on with the subtle teasing.
“We’re roughly the same age and Wei Wuxian once said this is just about the right time boys start asking questions about things that fly and drop from the sky. Quite late, if you ask me. We should have asked for the talk years ago.”
Jingyi comically waggled his eyebrows, this time a definite acquisition from Wei Wuxian himself and inexplicably, something akin to jealousy surged in Sizhui’s heart.
“Oh, yeah? And what else has the great Wei Wuxian told you?” Sizhui asked curtly. Wei Wuxian, his acknowledged father, talked more to Jingyi about very personal things than he did with Sizhui. It was an unfair verdict but for an unknown reason, it felt acceptable to think about it. The realization burned a forbidden hole in his gut.
Somehow, the biting tone did not register on Jingyi and his friend benignly replied, lazily passing the ball from one hand to the other. “Nothing I don’t already know. I mean, I’ve seen some things before I got sent here to the Cloud Recesses and even more when we started night hunting on our own. My parents can be loud, if you know what I mean. Wei Wuxian always said we can learn more outside the mountains if we choose to.”
What he was feeling could be aptly described as seething and Sizhui knew he was on the verge of violating a Gusu Lan sect rule. That someone as un-Lan like as Lan Jingyi could know more than him, Lan Sizhui…
Then again, Lan Sizhui wasn’t really Lan. Lan Sizhui was something else.
For all these years, he’d looked to Lan Wangji as the father he never knew. The affection between them was implicit and he felt it always despite Lan Wangji not being much of a demonstrative parent, unlike Wei Wuxian. Then, when Wei Wuxian returned, Sizhui thought the family that was taken away from him as a child was finally going to be complete.
And yet—
There was a distance he could not cross. Was it because he often saw Lan Wangji as a teacher in the classroom setting or as a superior on night hunts? Was it because Wei Wuxian was this legendary antihero that both damned and saved the world? The two of them so part of the world but also so apart from it…
Was it a secret shame instilled in him after years of memorizing and living the three-thousand and more rules on those stone walls—a shame so secret despite the very un-secret nature of Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian’s relationship?
But he was not ashamed of them, no. It was nothing like that.
It was not shame.
He felt Jingyi’s eyes on him and his friend, strangely, was uncharacteristically deeply quiet.
“Whatever it is, I think you should talk to them,” said Jingyi. “It’s not good keeping these things to yourself. That way you make more mistakes you’ll regret later.”
Lan Jingyi spouting words of wisdom made Sizhui feel more out of sorts.
“Another snippet from Wei Wuxian?”
Jingyi shook his head. “Actually, remember that teacher who’s like a hawk-eyed spirit and made us break a rule a day? He said that. But you weren’t there at that time so maybe that’s why you’re asking. You’d gone off with the Ghost General doing whatever.”
Sizhui did recall that young teacher whom they—flouting one of the thousands of Gusu Lan rules—nicknamed “The Observer”.
“I haven’t seen him for quite some time now,” he said, a momentary diversion from the thoughts in his head. “Where is he?”
Jingyi laughed. “You really are out of it, Sizhui! He just got transferred to Golden Carp Tower as an in-house mentor for Princess Jin Ling. You don’t know?”
Truthfully, Sizhui found he was becoming less and less updated about the goings-on in Cloud Recesses. Going on night hunt after night hunt and accompanying the Ghost General have somehow isolated him from the world...maybe even from himself and that's why he's being like this.
And now these inconvenient thoughts and questions suddenly decided to spring up.
He felt Jingyi’s comforting hand on his shoulder. “Friend, whoever this person is that’s bothering you, you have to take care of this before you lose it. We can't cultivate properly when we aren't feeling in any way proper.”
Sizhui nodded absentmindedly as he blindly followed the ever-chattering Jingyi back to their living quarters, thinking that perhaps, the only person bothering him was only himself.