Wen Xu was mostly acting on orders when he burned the Cloud Recesses. Mostly. His father had not explicitly ordered him to burn the Jingshi, burn Madam Lan's (oh how it hurts to call her that, how it hurts that no one dares speak her name - maybe out of hatred, maybe indifference, how it hurts that the only alternative he has tastes like ash on his tounge - has become unspeakable from the day his father claimed him as his son.) prison.
But here he stands, surrounded by embers and licking flames and watches it turn to ash. Burning gentians, he finds, are beautiful. He does not know if that beauty comes from the sight itself or from the feeling he attaches to it, a soul deep sigh of endless relief.
(She has moved on long ago, glad to escape the confinement of her prison, her only lingering regret leaving her children behind, but he has not. He is still that same little boy who- her death did not free him.)
Someone screams behind him, a scream of anger and desperation and more on instinct than anything else he dodges the sword lunging for his back. Qingheng-zun stumbles past him, likely overwhelmed by his sword's unexpected velocity.
He does not look like the hero the ballads portray him as, nor like the monster Wen Xu had imagined from the tales his Zhuliu-shu had told him of their youth. He is not an enemy, not some misguided hero. Just an old man past his prime who desperately clings to a feeling he has convinced himself was love.
Somehow that realisation doesn't make the bitter hatred the man who has nothing left to call himself but Wen Xu has harboured since he was a small child inside the husk he calls his heart shrivel up or grow. It just stays there where it has always been. He almost wants to laugh. Qingheng-zun is just a person. Just a man.
The sword is swung towards Wen Xu again, unskilled and weak from twenty years of unmoving sollitude. He does not even bother to block it, only makes half a step to the side.
The dark look of pure hatred and weak stab into thin air that greet him in return are quite amusing. Qingheng-zun has no reason to hate him. No, that man his brought this onto himself the moment he walked out of the Nightless City with a bride in his arms and left a five year old behind in a snake pit to either grow scales and fangs or fall victim to an angry dragon.
"I am", he says and smiles, the smile he knows is his mother's from the reaction his father has to it, shrewd and innocent all at once, as he dodges another blow, his sword still sheathed, "no more than a filial son."
The roar that earns him is fierce. The sword swings again, this time with more force. "That dog Wen Rouhan!", Qingheng-zun screams while the blade is still in the air. This time Wen Xu does draw his sword and block.
He swings in kind, draws blood as a silver Lan sword clatters to the ground. He kicks the blade away with his foot. He needs to say it now. He needs to say it now before he never does. "I never said I was being filial to my father, Sect Leader Lan."
"Madam Wen has no grievan-"
"And Madam Wen is not my mother. I am the oldest, but I am not his heir." I was lucky, he does not say.
He makes one step forward, brings his sword to Sect Leader Lan's neck. "My mother died an other man's wife."
Those eyes widen in horrified realisation and he can't help but feel a grim sense of satisfaction at that look. He presses the blade closer into the old man's flesh, deep enough to draw blood.
"You did this to yourself."
He flicks his wrist and slits one more throat in his short bloody life. He feels no satisfaction, no remorse.
In another life this would not have happened. In another life maybe- It does not matter.
In this lifetime he stands in white stained with red, stained himself, so completely soaked in blood that all he will ever be is scarlet red. (The oly way to purge himself is death, but his own hand trembles around the hilt of his sword.)
Later that day he sees that same hatred Qingheng-zun had for him in Lan Wangji's eyes and he knows down to his guilty bones that he was right in dismissing his wishful thinking.
Let them hate him. Let them, he deserves it.
Before he dies he whispers his secret into his executioner's ear. He does not want to die with it weighing him down.
"She was my mother first."
(In an other life children walk across the Lan Sect compound off in direction of their mother's house for their monthly visit.
"Hurry!", A'Zhan calls. It seems to be his favorite word as much as a four year old can have a favorite word. "Hurry!"
"Right, gege, hurry!", A'Huan chimes in. "I want to see A'Niang."
Lan Xu lets them drag him along under laughter, his plain white Sect ribbon fluttering behind him like a war banner in the wind.)
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