Chapter Text
Lan Sizhui had been too young to remember the heat of a broken soul mark, the way the words on his skin had heated up like tiny furnaces on his little legs and then, with deadly quickness, became ice-cold as the bonds in them fractured and became ghosts upon his flesh. He’d been too young to remember that once, he had burned for it; but now he could only cry as his fathers’ words turned black, as their blood bathed his face and his hands tried to, uselessly, stop the bleeding from their wounds, where he tried to heal them the way Wen-Shushu had taught him.
It was pointless. Critically, a rational part of Sizhui’s mind knew his parents would die, that the wounds were too severe, but his heart refused to believe it; even as his marks heated up, even as the rest of his black marks glowed in pale orange in an attempt to comfort him.
Even when the Burial Mounds screamed inside his and his Baba’s brain, calling for its children, begging them to live.
He could not lose them! He could not lose his Father! He could not lose his Baba again! Tears fell from his eyes and paved ways across the blood staining Sizhui’s cheeks.
It was not fair.
If only he’d been faster, if only he’d been stronger to reach them in time, to guard their backs as they had guarded him his whole life.
“Sizhui.” His Baba’s voice was raspy, every word forcing air out of his lungs. Blood dripped from the corners of his mouth. Sizhui held back a sob and reached to hold the trembling hand Wei Wuxian was extending towards him, to cradle those slender fingers into his calloused palms.
“A’Niang.” He sobs the old nickname, the longtime joke that always seemed to cheer his Baba. “I’m here. I’m sorry, please hold on! Help will be here soon.”
He knew so, he had shot the flare the moment the ambush had begun. His uncle and JingYi should be here anytime now. They should be able to help where Sizhui is useless. Uncle Ning will save his parents and uncle Xichen will make sure the culprit faces the wrath of Gusu Lan, Sizhui just has to keep giving them both spiritual energy, even as his Baba keeps saying incoherent words and his father’s wrist has gone deadly cold. Even if there is pain ripping his soul apart, he must endure, he must keep pushing. His fathers' lives depend on it and Sizhui is not going to fail them. He is not going to let them go.
In the end, Baba takes that decision for him. The pale hand that used to be fisted around Lan Wangji’s robes raises to cup Sizhui’s face, to caress the tears and blood away with his thumb.
“It will be alright, little radish.” His Baba was about to say more when something caught his eye above Sizhui’s shoulder; in an instant, Wei Wuxian was moving, using what’s left of his strength to defend his son. Demonic energy pools around them and surges to strike, Sizhui turns around in time to see his attackers be torn apart by his Baba’s power, to hear the screams and the vengeful song of Wei Wuxian’s ghosts.
It is still not soon enough to stop the arrow that impales on his shoulder. Nor the way Wei Wuxian’s eyes widen in despair when he sees more enemies beyond the fog of his power. With a galloping heart, Wei Wuxian makes his choice. He gets on his trembling knees and rests his forehead against his son’s; the flickering demonic shadows cocooning around them, protecting them. Allowing them to steal time from fate’s hand.
“A’ Yuan,” he begins, words forcing past his dry throat and blood-stained lips. His hands wander to Sizhui’s shoulder where the arrow is protruding, its sharp tip exposed just above Sizhui’s collarbone.
It could have been a fatal wound, it could have killed his precious boy.
Wei Wuxian can’t let that happen, he knows as surely as he is certain that he is dying, that Lan Zhan is gone; that Sizhui must live. That no matter what their son must survive.
It is the same feeling that rushed through him during the first siege of the burial mounds, when he hid A’Yuan away. When he begged to their murderous home and all deities above to spare his little radish.
The world can burn itself along as his boy gets to live.
“Baba…what?”
Before his son can object, Wei Wuxian tears his robes apart and draws a quick talisman under Sizhui’s wound. Blood covering the strange runes and twisted characters, the talisman flashes white and Sizhui screams as Wei Wuxian smiles.
The last thing Lan Sizhui saw was Wei Wuxian’s blooded smile and resigned eyes. The last thing he ever saw were his Baba’s poisonous red eyes and his father’s empty golden orbs, fixed on where the first attack had come from.
Lan Sizhui landed on the edge of the burial mounds with a loud crack that scared the ferocious corpses at the edge of the mountain. His feet caught on an exposed root and he landed on his injured shoulder with a scream; except his voice got swallowed by hundreds of different voices roaring at the same time as they marched up the mountains of Yiling, and up to the lair of the cultivation’s world greatest enemy.
“Kill the Yiling Patriarch! Death to Wei Wuxian! Dead to the Wen Dogs!”
Sizhui’s blood froze. With dread, he raised his eyes and paled. There’s an army of cultivators marching to besiege the Burial mounds, an army led by a younger version of Jiang Wanyin, less wrinkled but equally bitter as the one Sizhui remembers.
Somehow, his Baba had sent him back through time; his attempt to save him had landed him in the middle of the first siege of the Burial mounds. On the day he lost his family, on the day that made him the last Wen.
Sizhui’s knees feel weak as he looks up to Luzhang hill, to the small huts and tents barely visible in the distance. There is an edge around the mountain, a dangerous aura ready to crack, a power his Baba had used the first time to destroy one half of the stygian tiger seal; to commit suicide after so much loss in hopes of giving the Wen remnants one last chance to run, of allowing his younger self the chance to live.
Uncle Ning had once told Sizhui that he’d not been surprised to wake up and find out everyone was dead, he’d told Sizhui, with a sob stuck on his dead larynx, that his family would have preferred to go down fighting alongside the man that saved them than to live running away in fear.
“We are Wens,” had shrugged the Ghost General with a mournful smile. “We live and die by our terms, we stand together in life and death, and” he’d added with a chuckle as if remembering days long lost, “we are too stubborn to run away twice.”
Lan Sizhui pulled his guqin out of a qiankun pouch-- sword long lost in the attack that killed his parents-- and with a black mark of overlapped words burning cold against his shin, with ghosts screaming in his brain and rage burning on his core, he made a choice.