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Wei Ying had thought he had died before.
When he'd been brought back to Lotus Pier, a feral half starved child, it had felt as though the kid he'd been - the kid Jiang Fengmian obviously thought he had rescued - didn't exist anymore. In his stead stood some kind of pitiful beast, wearing the face of a human boy that was long gone.
The thought has lingered in the years after. Maybe he'd been a lie all this time. Maybe the face he could see reflected in the still waters of the lake hid the snout of a carnivorous being and he'd merely taken the place of the original Wei Ying. Maybe one day he would feel his canines elongate and grow into fangs, and he would tear into everything and everyone he'd come to love and call home.
Wei Ying had thought he'd died before, but as Lotus Pier burns, as he rips out his golden core, as he's thrown into the Burial Mounds, he knows he hadn't, not then.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t so much walk out of the Burial mounds as he crawls out. It’s exactly as undignified as it sounds.
He crawls, unthinking and unrelenting, like the corpse he is. He seethes, and groans and whimper, like the spirit he’s become.
He’s out of the burial mound, but he doesn’t come out alive, and when he stands, it’s to look at his grave and promise his return in its clutches.
When Wei Wuxian comes out of the Burial Mounds, he carries something else out, something that isn’t entirely him, but that isn’t anything else either.
He leaves something too, and even at that moment, he doesn’t exactly know what it is. Simply that he will never have it back. By the time he’s out, he’s already forgotten all about it.
Resentment no longer lashes at him. Instead it cajoles him, warps around him lovingly, whispers in his ear. He can feel it bubbling inside of him, viscous and cold.
Wei Wuxian has never been a good person. He knows that. He doesn’t mind the swirl of hate and resentment clogging his throat, pulsing in his veins, pushing under his eyelids.
He can see them, hear them, clamour for blood, for flesh, for revenge, for justice. It’s only fair, they’re saying. After all the pain, and all the strife, we deserve to feel their blood flow, to hear their bones crack.
My revenge, they say.
My blood, they say.
Mine, they say.
Wei Wuxian is theirs, now, but he is also one of them, and his soul sings just as they do, chanting for the blood of Wen Chao and all the Wen dogs, claiming for revenge. In a corner of his mind, he thinks of Jiang Cheng, his home, and of Lan Zhan, his dream, and of A-Ning, his adorable little play thing, and the ravenous beast inside him, only made bigger and meaner by the resentment filling him screams silently inside Wei Wuxian’s now cavernous chest: Mine.