The tired look that slides to Lan Zhan is bright eyed, shimmering, not tears but something that would have been, once upon a time. Your son, like it's a brokering between them, and his grip tightens, he holds, and he doesn't look away.

He's never had trouble steeling his face, lying to the world about anything he felt, because he knows the ease it grants others. Sizhui will never see the depth of his aches, now grown; he'll remember little of it from his childhood, because the pretense was all that saved Wei Wuxian at times, the need to give anyone else the ease he wished he felt more deeply than he did.

I am proud, and, This too shall pass. That scars are badges of experience, or like the mass of them across Lan Zhan's back, badges of your choices. Regrets or otherwise. Learned, earned, silent burdens.

He swallows, licks cracked, dried lips. Tastes salt and copper, though they haven't bled. The proximity of Lan Zhan's open wound, perhaps, to sate Bichen in ways that the long absent Suibian may well have forgotten, in her grief.

"Where is our son?" Child, young man grown, facing battles so unlike the particulars of what he should be, but a credit to himself again, as always. Wei Wuxian wishes his eyes were sharper now, but they see shadows in the breaking light, and his vision swims, unreliable.