Those who fear darkness have never seen what light can do
One-shot DMBJ fic by me and @xantissa!
Summary:
When Wu Xie was seven years old, he snuck away from his guardian during one of the digs that Sanshu took him to. Only things went wrong, the entrance collapsed, and it took a week to dig the child out from the near collapsed tomb.
They expected a body. They prayed that the child had somehow survived, but seven days without food or water for an adult would have been deadly, a child had no chances of survival at all.
They found Wu Xie deep in the tomb, sleeping on his little backpack. He was warm and healthy, confused at why the adults were yelling, looking like he’d just stepped into the tomb five minutes ago.
Wu Sanxing crouched down beside the new hole that his people were digging out despite the pouring rain and darkness. It had already been four days since his seven year old nephew had slipped away from the tent that he was supposed to sleep in and wandered into the newly opened tomb. The note he’d left, written in a green crayon, was burning a hole in the pocket of Wu Sanxing’s jacket.
He buried his face in his hands and tried to believe that there was still a chance that the boy was alive despite so many days without water or food, and facing god knows what kind of dangers in the tomb. Wu Sanxing was intimately, painfully, aware of what monsters and traps filled unopened tombs like this one. Zombies and shibie were just the start of it, and his mind shied back from the images of a small body riddled with arrows or stripped to the bone by shibie teeth and claws.
Even worse were the nightmares he’d started to have of breaking into the tomb, only to be greeted by a zombie that barely came up to his waist and looked at him with accusing eyes.
It had been pure bad luck, a coincidence that a mild earthquake had struck just after Wu Xie had snuck into the inadequately guarded tomb. It hadn’t been a big one, just some tremors that didn’t do more than cause some things to fall off tables. But that was on the surface. The newly dug entrance to the tomb, on the other hand, had only been intended to let people and things through, and wasn’t meant to survive more than a few days. It hadn’t been reinforced to withstand any sort of tremor and it collapsed, the heavy rain from the storm that rolled in almost immediately afterwards then flooding the holes and making everything slippery and muddy.
Wu Sanxing’s people had been exhilarated at the fact that they’d finally found the tomb after a week of searching, and that they’d found a good entrance. It was late and people were tired from digging so they’d had a party, relaxing with some booze and hot food.
Wu Xie was supposed to be asleep in bed, so no-one noticed the boy packing his tiny backpack, taking his favorite toys and some sweets, and going exploring - just like his Sanshu. Nobody had noticed that the boy was missing from his bed until after the quake had passed and Wu Sanxing had decided to go and check that the weak tremor hadn’t scared his nephew too badly, only to find him gone and the wretched note on his camp bed.
Wu Sanxing had frozen, the first of many terrible scenarios flashing through his mind, before he raced for the entrance of the tomb - only to find that it had collapsed and that the rain had already turned the holes into dangerously deep puddles. From there, it was undoubtedly seeping into the tomb, and they hadn’t had time to go in and start exploring it yet, they had no idea if the floor sloped, or it there was anywhere for the water to drain away, or if the continued rain would slowly fill the stone chambers that a seven year old who couldn’t swim had gone to explore.
They’d tried to dig their original entrance back out, but between the tremors and the rains, the whole front part of the chamber collapsed, layers of bricks and stone filling the space, making it impassable. The stone and soil hadn’t even finished settling when Wu Sanxing had set people to clearing it, looking for and dreading finding a tiny body. Thankfully, they found nothing, and Wu Sanxing had never been so happy to have nothing turn up. The weather didn’t get any better, but they kept searching anyway for a different access point to the tomb. They had no luck, though, as they kept hitting thick rock or already collapsed parts of it, not finding a place to enter. Wu Sanxing organized his people into three shifts and had them working around the clock, fear and guilt choking him with every hour that passed as he worked with them, listening as they worked, hoping to hear a small voice calling for his Sanshu, and dreading that he might instead hear screams and pleas for help while he was trapped outside, unable to do anything except frantically dig.
Read the rest on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28792140
