Chapter Text
When the Jiangs, Lan Xichen and Wen Qing step outside, they are not prepared for what they see. They come out of their prison building on a wooden landing a couple floors up, which turns out to be a great place to observe the horrific melee below.
Jiang Yanli presses A-Yuan’s face firmly into her shoulder the moment she realizes what she’s seeing, telling him to stay there. “Li-jiejie’s got you, baby, just stay right there.”
A-Yuan does as he’s told because he can hear the chaos and the screaming and he knows he doesn’t want to see whatever Li-jiejie’s trying to hide from him. He clings to her and hopes it will be over soon.
Undead in numbers unlike what any of them have ever seen before flood the streets, crawling over each other in their frenzy. They run people down and feast, push past each other in endless waves. They leave carnage in their wake.
“Where did they all come from?” Jiang Cheng breathes, uncharacteristically quiet. “They’ll kill everyone.”
Jiang Yanli hisses a warning noise at him, nodding towards A-Yuan. Before he can apologize for using the word ‘kill’ in front of a child who frankly knows more about death than he should already, Lan Xichen interrupts.
“They’re not.”
“What?”
“They’re not attacking everyone,” he picks his words to avoid the same scolding Jiang Wanyin got, gesturing out towards the crowd. “They’re...discriminating. Look.”
It’s easy to miss when first overwhelmed by the absolute chaos and horror below, but the horde isn’t slaughtering everyone in their path. In the flurry of movement and screaming and panic, there are small groups of people huddled up in the only corners they could reach before they were overwhelmed, curled into each other in terrified little balls and hiding their faces like it will grant them clemency from the hungry jaws of the undead. It does.
Or perhaps it’s not their behavior that saves them, but their nature. The corpses swarm and attack and devour anyone who fights back, anyone who is armed and fighting. The old, the young, the non combatants are passed by, allowed to quiver and scream and try to become one with the walls they press themselves into.
It’s not normal. It’s not natural.
“Is this Wei Wuxian’s doing?” Wen Qing asks. Nobody has an answer. Well, maybe Lan Wangji does.
“Brother.”
Xichen whirls around, lighting up in relief and joy at seeing his younger brother climbing the stairs to the landing they’re on, far too calm for the current situation.
“Wangji!” he exclaims, taking three swift steps forward to embrace his sibling. “You’re alright! Thank goodness. Is Wei Wuxian…?”
“He is well.”
“Is this his doing?” Wen Qing asks again.
Lan Wangji simply nods.
“Where is he?”
“He is-” Wangji’s eyes dart to A-Yuan for a moment. “-speaking with Wen Chao.”
The severity of that ‘conversation’ is likewise understood by just about everyone.
“And my brother?” she asks, a hint of desperation in her voice. “If you two got out, he must have. Right? Where’s Wen Ning?”
Lan Wangji hesitates. That’s all it takes for her panic to skyrocket.
“Tell me! Where’s A-Ning!”
“Wen Qing,” he tries to start.
“Don’t Wen Qing me! Where’s my fucking brother?”
“Jie...jie.”
Wen Qing gasps, whirling around. She’s not sure how he got behind them without anyone noticing - nobody is - but she knows that voice, it’s A-Ning’s voice and-
“Oh, no…” Wen Qing presses a hand over her mouth, all of her hopes coming crashing down at the sight of her brother. “Oh, A-Ning, no…”
Jiang Yanli hears echoes of herself in Wen Qing’s voice, and it hurts.
Wen Ning stands before them, eyes glazed and skin too pale, hair hanging loose and unkempt. Standing. Swaying. Staring. Dead.
Wen Qing collapses to her knees, howling her grief into both hands clasped over her mouth.
“Jie...jie…” Wen Ning says again, as if to try and comfort her, but she simply wails again, mind racing and struggling to come to grips with her worst fear becoming reality.
Wen Ning falls clumsily to his knees in front of her, and while the rest of them reel still at the idea that his heart no longer beats, Lan Wangji suspects that Wen Ning is sluggishly trying to figure out whether he should reach out to his sister or not.
A-Yuan has been wriggling in Jiang Yanli’s hold from the moment he heard Wen Ning’s voice. “Uncle Ning?” he says hopefully, trying to lift his head from where it’s tucked into Yanli’s shoulder. “Uncle Ning? Uncle Ning! I wanna see Uncle Ning!”
It’s finding Uncle Ning that they embarked on this journey for in the first place, isn’t it?
Yanli glances hesitantly at Lan Wangji as she tries to wrangle the squirming child, and sets him down with slow, unsure hands when Wangji nods quietly at her. She worries about his reaction, worries more that he’ll try to look at the maelstrom below, but A-Yuan only has eyes for Wen Ning and is unfazed by his ragged looks. Uncle Ning is Uncle Ning, and his little legs carry him to the dead man without hesitation.
“Uncle Ning, Uncle Ning! Found you!” He whirls with all of his childish enthusiasm towards Wen Qing, holding Wen Ning’s stiff, cold fingers in one tiny hand.
“Auntie Qing! Auntie Qing look, it’s...Auntie Qing? Auntie Qing what’s wrong? Don’t cry!”
“He’s dead!” Wen Qing wails, sensibilities lost to grief. Nobody knows what to do, what to say, to break her out of it. Nobody knows if they can. Nobody knows if they have the right to try, as pressing and bewildering a situation as they find themselves in.
“I know,” A-Yuan says. “That’s okay.”
Wen Qing chokes on shock and disbelief, wet red eyes turning up towards the child with disbelief. “What do you mean it’s okay? He’s dead!”
A-Yuan blinks at her, knowing despite his youth that she doesn’t normally talk to or around him this way, always choosing her words and using a gentle tone. Her distress couldn’t be more evident, but he doesn’t quite understand why Wen Ning’s death should be something of such gravity.
“Dead is okay,” he says, blinking at her. “Xian-gege is dead too, but he didn’t go away. Uncle Ning didn’t go away like mama. He’s just dead.”
His honesty is chilled with the ever disturbing lack of understanding he has on the nature of death. Nobody knows how to tell him that people aren’t supposed to die and stick around, and so nobody has. It needs to happen soon, but perhaps that very lack of understanding is a blessing right now.
A-Yuan’s tragic cluelessness and unintentionally brutal honesty throw Wen Qing right off the rails of her grief. They make her look at her brother, as hard as that is. Really look at him, past the pallor of death. He looks back.
“Jie...jie,” he says again, and Wen Qing sucks in the kind of breath that razes a person’s airways, painful and desperate. One shaking hand comes up to reach slow and trembling towards Wen Ning’s dirt and blood streaked face.
“A...A-Ning?”
The skin under her palm is horrifically cold, but no teeth snap at her fingers. Instead, Wen Ning’s hand comes up to cover hers. His is slow too, but not by choice. His motor functions are simply still too stilted when he’s not molded to the tune of a flute.
“ A-Ning,” Wen Qing wheezes. “Oh God, A-Ning. Is that really you?”
Her gaze sharpens suddenly, along with her tone. “ Did Wei Wuxian -”
“Wei Ying did not kill him,” Lan Wangji interrupts with steel in his tone.
Wen Qing falters in the face of that audible warning. “I didn’t mean-” she falters. She didn’t what, mean to sound like she was making an accusation? But she did, didn’t she? Did Wei Wuxian do this, she was going to say, and she and Lan Wangji both know it wasn’t going to be an innocuous question.
Guilt hits her immediately. She knows Wei Wuxian, how could she even begin to ask such a question? She knows him better than that. He looked her in the eyes with conviction that left her with no doubt that he’d tear these walls down for Wen Ning, and now he has; except he’s done it to save Wen Qing , she and the others.
And yet, her brother looks at her with a still heart and a cold body and calls her jiejie. So how…?
Lan Wangji answers the question she never says out loud. “He was already infected when we found him. Wei Ying asked his permission to try.”
Looking at the second instance of a conscious corpse they’ve ever seen, he needs not say what it is they agreed to try.
Wen Ning squeezes her hand slowly and tries his best to smile. It goes about as well as can be expected. “Jie...jie. Just...dead. Not...gone.”
Fresh tears spill down Wen Qing’s face, swallowing the lump in her throat as the grief and shock start to turn numb. “Not gone...okay. I...I can work with that.”
“Where’s Xian-gege?” A-Yuan asks, ever the ice breaker they all so desperately need. “I wanna see Xian-gege!”
Lan Xichen turns to his brother, silently questioning. Lan Wangji nods quietly to the clock tower. His face warns them that should they venture that way, what they find inside is not likely to be pleasant. All the faces looking back at him say that getting to Wei Wuxian is far more important to them than whatever gory scene they may find him in.
Good, Lan Wangji thinks. Such unwavering love and care for Wei Ying is the only thing he wants to see. Anyone else need not turn their eyes on him; they would be unworthy of the sight.
A-Yuan is lifted back up and has his face tucked back into Jiang Yanli’s shoulder before he can even think about turning towards the balcony and seeing the horror below, but he seems to have a problem with that.
“Rich-gege, I want Rich-gege!”
Jiang Yanli huffs a tired laugh, stress taking its toll. “Well then,” she says. “I guess I know where I stand.”
She’s not truly hurt. A-Yuan has been worried and asking after Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian ever since they were reunited with the others in their cell, after all.
Lan Wangji takes the grabby toddler without hesitation, seamlessly making sure that his eyes don’t have so much of a chance to set on the corpses - walking and otherwise - still littering the street below.
A-Yuan clings to him and buries his face in his shoulder like there’s no place in the world he feels safer. “I dropped Mr. Bunny,” he murmurs, shy and still a little nervous about delivering such news.
Rich-gege’s chest rumbles against his as he hums an affirmative noise. “I know.”
A-Yuan gasps. “You know?”
“Mn. Who do you think told us where to find you?”
Lan Xichen turns his head away from the pair because he simply can’t hide the smile on his face. He thinks of everyone who ever called his brother cold. Fools.
----
The corpses part around Lan Wangji like waters around a stone, and they don’t bother anyone in the group that follows him. It’s eerie, unnatural, and though it’s far beyond what they knew him to be capable of, it’s obviously Wei Wuxian’s doing.
They weave around and step over countless mangled corpses that the army of dead wreaking havoc in the Wen compound left behind after feasting, but none are so horrible to look at as the one that hangs from a noose on the gallows.
It’s horrible. It’s nearly unrecognizable as human. The patchwork of blood and flesh that hangs there speaks not of mindless feasting, but of calculation. An intention to cause suffering. It looks as if it were a victim of lingchi, not by blade but by teeth.
They walk on towards the clock tower, the image of it burnt onto the backs of their retinas.
----
There is nothing but eerie quiet behind the closed doors that Lan Wangji leads them to at the very top of the clock tower. Not a whisper, not a hint of life reaches their ears. Only each other’s breathing.
Wangji knocks. “Wei Ying.”
There’s no answer.
“Wei Ying,” he repeats, and the silence echoes back.
“Wei Ying. I’m opening the door.” He glances at Jiang Yanli as he says it, and she’s already stepping forward to take A-Yuan back and stand along the wall, out of sight of whatever they’ll find inside.
A good woman, Lan Wangji thinks. He truly likes her.
The door creaks open with Lan Wangji’s push, and a few of them swallow back bile. There are bodies against the walls, but they look as if they were killed quickly. None could have made the sticky blood carpet that spreads nearly from wall to wall.
Whoever was the source of it is no longer there, only the streaked patterns in one area of the floor - they scream of desperate thrashing, animal suffering and futile attempts at escape - betraying that the blood did not simply rain docilely from the ceiling to make a placid puddle.
The figure that sits on the windowsill in the very back of the room certainly looks like it was caught in a blood rain.
Wei Ying sits on the edge of what used to be the stained glass window, back turned to them and figure hunched like he’s trying to hide. He’s a tapestry of blood almost as horrific as the one that hung from the gallows, save for that his flesh is intact.
His clothes are stuck to him and dyed dark, his hair matted with blood and gore and sticking to his back and face, though that face is resolutely turned away from them.
Though he perches on the precipice of dropping from the tower, the height doesn’t seem to scare him. He cowers from their silent presence behind him instead.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji murmurs, and for the first time Lan Xichen is almost afraid of the creature his brother has fallen for. That doesn’t look like a friend right now, perched in the window and dripping with gore. It looks like a monster.
Wei Wuxian’s hunched back seems to flinch at the address. He doesn’t respond.
“Wei Ying. It’s alright. Everyone is safe. It’s done.”
Looking at his brother, Xichen sighs. Wangji’s face holds nothing but concern and care, no different than if they were sitting around a fire with a meal back at the home they’ve made with the Wens. Fine, then. With his brother’s unwavering faith in Wei Wuxian to still be himself, Xichen can only stand silently supportive behind him. He too knows Wei Wuxian, he reminds himself. He trusts his friends, and he owes Wei Wuxian that faith just as much as any living companion.
A slow sigh drifts over from the window. “Lan Zhan, ah, Lan Zhan. You’re not going away, are you?”
Wangji’s brow furrows. “No. Why would I?”
Wei Wuxian barks out a startled laugh, bitter and wavering. “Shit, Lan Zhan, are you looking at me? Do I have to turn around so you can see the skin in my teeth too?”
Jiang Wanyin swallows an uncomfortable lump in his throat at the thought of that, skin - meat, human meat - in his brother’s teeth. Nobody is totally in the dark to what must have happened in here, but it’s sickening nonetheless.
“...I was not under the impression I was leaving you here to have afternoon tea,” Lan Wangji replies. He smiles at the small victory that is drawing a laugh out of his Wei Ying with his words.
“That’s...different than having to look at me afterwards,” Wei Ying murmurs quietly, so uncharacteristically subdued.
Wangji considers the words quietly, and nobody else dares say a word. They don’t know what to say.
“He left through the window, I imagine?” he asks while he wonders how to soothe the discomfort he can see writhing just under Wei Ying’s skin.
“Fun people would call that defenestration, Lan Zhan.”
“Mn. You hung him?”
“No. Didn’t have to. He fell on top of all my little helpers.”
“Mn. Do you regret it?” he asks.
“No.”
“But you feel shame. And fear.”
“...I just don’t want you to see a monster when you look at me,” Wei Ying whispers. “I was angry enough not to care, and now I worry you’ll see a monster. I see a monster right now.”
“I cannot change what you see, Wei Ying. I can only hope to convince you that what I see is not the same.”
“And your brother? Wen Qing? Jiang Cheng? My shijie? A-Yuan -” Wei Ying moans mournfully and puts his head in his hands. “Oh God, Lan Zhan, what would A-Yuan think of me?”
“A-Yuan need not see this. He won’t.”
“But everyone else does. I don’t need to turn around to know. You wouldn’t believe how loud all of your heart beats are to me. I know the smell of every one of you like the back of my hand. I can sniff each one of you out and tell who’s standing next to who without ever looking, like a predator. A beast. Is that all I am now? A beast? What do you think, Wen Qing?”
Wen Qing starts a little where she’s standing, unsure what to say.
“You said I’m ‘something new’,” Wei Ying continues. “But maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m just a beast, maybe that’s all there is to it. Just an animal, but worse. It was good, Wen Qing. I loved it. I loved it so much it was hard to take it slow. So what does that make me? Am I better than the mindless ones, or worse? Is something that knows what it’s doing is fucked but enjoys it anyway more or less of a monster than them?”
“That’s enough, A-Xian.”
Jiang Yanli’s voice makes Wei Wuxian startle so hard he nearly falls out of the window. Lan Xichen is already where she used to be, holding A-Yuan and safely out of sight of the bloodbath.
“You know I can’t stand hearing you talk about yourself like that,” she says, and her brother’s blood soaked figure ripples with a disbelieving laugh.
“This is different, shijie. This is - can’t you tell? I’m different. I could pretend before, but now, how can anyone act like I’m the same as I used to be?”
“You’re exactly the same as you used to be,” she sighs, walking into the sticky carpet of blood without showing distaste. “You’ve thought the worst of yourself since we were kids. How many times have I had to scold you when you spoke about yourself like this?”
Wei Ying trembles. Jiang Yanli presses on, ignoring the disgusting sucking sound of her shoes in half-congealed blood.
“Come here, A-Xian. You’ll give me heart failure sitting on the ledge like that.”
Wei Wuxian turns his head very slowly, afraid to look at her but as powerless to totally refuse her as he was when he was just a child. In the mask of blood, his eyes are wide and sad, afraid, and his bottom lip trembles.
Jiang Yanli smiles at him as if nothing is wrong. “Come on, A-Xian. It’s okay.”
She reaches for him slowly, as if afraid to startle, and though he’s reluctant to let her touch the mess of blood and tissue on his clothes and skin, he lets her coax his trembling frame back into the room.
They stand there for a long few moments, just looking at each other, before it sets in for him. She still loves him. His shijie still loves him.
Wei Wuxian crumbles into her arms and breaks.
----
A-Yuan is deeply dissatisfied with the fact that he’s not being allowed to so much as look at his Xian-gege until they manage to wash him, and is quite vocal about it. Xian-gege himself gets him to cooperate, but he can’t get him not to complain.
Lan Wangji can tell that it puts Wei Ying on a tenuous high wire position between feeling loved and feeling ashamed.
Thanks to Wen Qing and Wen Ning having lived in the Wen settlement, they don’t miss the river just outside city borders that serves - used to serve - as the settlement’s main source of potable water.
They make sure to find a suitable change of clothes in a small store on the way there, and Wei Ying all but flings himself into the river. He scrubs himself as if hoping that he can wash the sour self loathing in his heart away along with the blood.
It doesn’t totally work, but it helps.
A fire has already been built and lit by the time he climbs out, the sun well on it’s way to setting.
Lan Wangji intends to intercept Wei Ying before he gets the chance to try to sequester himself away from them as if he’s no longer part of their group, but Jiang Wanyin beats him to it.
Wei Ying barely has a pair of pants on and hasn’t even managed a shirt before he’s pulled into a fierce bear hug that threatens to crack a few ribs. Wei Ying is still frozen in the exact same position he started in by the time his brother lets him go, staring at him with wide eyes like he can’t believe Jiang Cheng would still willingly touch him.
Jiang Cheng sniffs, scowling at him. “What? Like I was going to touch you while you were still fucking disgusting. Stop making that face, you look stupid.”
It’s as good as absolution, and Wei Wuxian’s entire frame melts with the relief.
Lan Wangji at least gives him time to put a shirt on before he coaxes him to his side, giving him no say in laying his head in Wangji’s lap and letting him comb his wet hair out for him.
Wei Ying melts slowly into that too, eventually closing his eyes and sighing before he goes cadaver still to enjoy the drag of the comb. It, too, is something picked up on the way here. That’s all they have for now, until they retrieve what’s left from their camp in the city tomorrow.
Wei Ying is cold, like having an ice cube in his lap. He wants instinctually to wrap him up in blankets, as if he could be hypothermic, but he knows better. It’s simply an already cadaver cold body chilled further by the waters of the river.
A-Yuan wastes no time in finding them, clambering onto Xian-gege’s chest and holding on tight, babbling anything and everything at him and unfazed by how freezing he is. Wei Ying’s hands come up slowly to settle on the boy’s back, and a talking toddler becomes a sleeping one in no time.
That seems almost to be the last puzzle piece falling into place for Wei Ying.
“This is really okay,” Wei Ying whispers, opening his eyes to gaze up at Lan Wangji with a soft, unreadable expression. “We’re really alright?”
“Mn.”
“Everyone’s really just...okay? With me?”
“Mn.”
“Even after -”
“No even after. Wei Ying defended what was dear to him.”
Wei Ying lays silently for a while after that, staring up at the stars. “...I would do what I did to him again. But I still...scared me.”
“Mn. It’s alright.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. It’s alright if you are scared. I’m not. When you’re frightened, you need only come to me.”
“Aiyah, Lan Zhan...saying things like that. You really are going to make me kidnap every bunny in the country for you if you keep it up.”
“If Wei Ying insists.”
A-Yuan nearly rolls off of Wei Wuxian’s chest with the force of his laughter.