Contains spoilers ahead, for those who haven't finished watching "The Untamed." It's also a mix of Mo Dao Zu Shi, whether it's the book or in anime. All of them are pretty much a mix of all three versions.

This is two deeply emotional scenes pulled from Ep.45, and I just just about cried when the truth about Sizhui surfaced.

This will also be part of my own series AU called "How Our Ghosts May Linger." I'll let you guess why, since they'll be subtle hints from a fan-based theory of my own.

The sound of the flute started to dance through Sizhui's ears.

An eerie, high-pitched note that drew the corpses to Senior Wei while Hanguan-jun sliced them down with Bichen before they could touch the man. The dizi player had this dark determined look of concentration on his face, eyes sparkling red when they opened to find the Ghost General.

"Wen Ning," he paused between his playing and ordered, "get them out of here!"

The fierce corpse, with an aura as cold and dark as iron stone, immediately leapt from between Lan Sizhui and Jin Rulan on the steps to the ruined temple, until he landed and fought the reanimated corpses, creating a barrier between them the trapped cultivators in the cave.

He kicked and punched with fluid martial skills that didn't cost him a single breath, a strong emphasis of his undead preservation.

As he fought back, the cultivating sects started streaming swiftly out of the cave and across the ground to safety.

Even while knowing that his clan and friends among them were close to safety now, Sizhui lingered with worry for his father and Senior Wei, who just only yesterday he thought had been Mo Xuanyu.

He knew his father was more than capable of holding his own, as well the one he was protecting, but there were so many! Even the powerful Ghost General had eventually needed some assistance.

The Ghost General, Wen Ning, who was standing in between him and the battle, long hair swishing with resentful energy that he could feel licking at his skin, suddenly looked so familiar. A strange sense of dejà vu nagged at him, combined with the sound of the flute that pulled his attention to the man who played it.

That sound...He knew that tune.

The dizi, ebony with a red tassel...

...a tall figure in black robes and a ribbon in his hair...

...a fierce shadow in a raining thunderstorm, stalking and beating down monsters in gold with a loud, vengeful roar...a creature of vengeance...

…two large hands cupping his face, thumbs wiping his tears away…a sad smile speckled with blood before pressing lips on his forehead...

'...A-Yuan…' a breathy whisper, '...don't be afraid…'

He shivered.

Two nightmares.

Two protectors.

'...Xian-gege...'

The lost voice of a small child whispered from the back of his conscience. His heart twisted in his chest.

It couldn't be...

He stepped forward––

"What are you doing? Are you crazy?" He felt Lan Jingyi grab one of his arms while Jin Rulan frantically shoved at his back to get him moving. "Let's go!"

I can't leave them!

"Huanguan-jun!" Sizhui shouted.

Father!

His voice was drowned out by the mix of corpse cries, the cultivators' frantic voices, and the echoing pitch of the flute that haunted his thoughts like a long-lost dream. Something he was strangely drawn to more than he feared. Where did he hear that sound? Who...

A-Yuan…Don't be afraid...

Sizhui reluctantly allowed himself to be pulled away into the forest along with the crowd, but not before glancing back one last time to catch his father's eyes for a brief second.

Only a second—finding those familiar hard golden eyes that softened with reassurance as they found his (to his son, or to himself, just in case he didn't make it)—before it broke while cutting down another puppet.

In it's place, Senior Wei's gaze found his. Even from the distance he could see their sparkling red instead of their glittering lavender that took his breath away.

Go, they pleaded with a touch of fear that Sizhui thought he imagined. But not for himself.

Senior Wei...

He could feel Jin Rulan being tugged away by Sect Leader Jiang from having paused alongside Lan Sizhui in hesitation, before feeling Jingyi pull him away into the forest.

Not for one moment did Sizhui find any relief or any peace of mind, even as he and the sects have made it to safety in the rotting forest of ash-covered trees.

How could he while his fathers were still in the middle of danger?

What if they died? What if at this moment they needed his help?

Wait—fathers? As in, plural. Sizhui frowned as he touched his temple. Did he just refer to Senior Wei as a father, or a father-like figure?

Once everyone was within the safety of the trees, catching their breath from the fear and the running, someone announced that they started to feel twenty percent of spiritual energy returning. Another bemoaned about only getting ten percent.

Sizhui was barely paying any attention. He started searching for any sign of Hanguang-jun, Wei Wuxian, and the Ghost General.

Where were they? His heart rate increased. They weren't––

"Everyone!" shouted Sect Leader Yao. "As far as I'm concerned, until all of our spiritual level is back to eighty percent, we should find a safe place to recover."

As everyone starting nodding and voicing their agreement, he could feel Jingyi looking at him with a similar look of paled disbelief that Sizhui himself felt.

Senior Wei and Hanguang-jun were still out there, risking their lives just so that they would all get away to safety, and already the people around them were talking about leaving them behind without a second thought?!

"What about Lotus Pier?" spoke Sect Leader Ouyang. "It's the closest!"

Sect Leader Jiang, however, looked at each of the other sects surrounding with just as much outrage in his eyes as his nephew, who stood right next to him. After all, this was his own sect they were talking about taking refuge, and they didn't even bother laying the request for permission directly to him before the decision was made.

That, however, didn't seem to be the first concern on his mind. "Sect Leader Yao," he growled, "are we just going to leave like this?"

If one didn't know any better, it seemed like Jiang Wanyin couldn't stomach the idea of leaving his saviors behind, especially when one of those saviors was his former older brother.

"So what if we do?" Sect Leader Yao burst out. "What if those puppets come back?"

"They haven't come back yet!" shouted Jingyi, though it wasn't the puppets he was referring to.

"They won't come back!" someone else declared, while another added, "Yes! Why should we wait for them?"

Finally, Jin Ling seemed to find his speech, his hazel eyes lighting with a fire similar to his uncle's. "They saved our lives!" he spat.

"So what?" another spoke from the crowd. "If anything, Wei Wuxian'll finally get the death he deserves!"

"If they're not already dead yet––"

"Nonsense!" snapped Jin Ling, before glancing at his uncle for supplication.

While everyone continued debating on saving their own necks versus waiting for their saviors to show, Sizhui had enough. Before anyone could stop him, he started running.

"Sizhui?" shouted Lan Jingyi, echoed by Lan Qiren, "Sizhui!"

Everyone shouted after him as he pushed his way through the crowd of cultivators, but he didn't care. His seniors were in danger, and he was going back to help them, even if no one else will!

Finally breaking free from the crowd, Sizhui continued running across the hills through the trees. Fear pumped through his veins, his vision blurring with unshed tears he tried so hard to hold back...

Please be alright! Please be alright! he thought as he ran, gripping the hilt of his sword. Father, Senior Wei, I'm coming! Hold on!

Then he spotted them. His eyes widened when noticing Hanguang-jun supporting Senior Wei in his arms, and seeing the crimson streaks all over his white shirt, the first thought that came rushing to his mind like a panicked bolt of lightning was He's hurt!

Senior Wei looked weakened, the bloodied marks staining his white shirt more distinct with their angular slashing interconnecting the talismans of a Spirit Luring Flag. His face looked white as a sheet, damp with sweat. Even Hanguang-jun looked visibly worried.

Torn between relief and worry, Sizhui called out to him, "Senior Wei!"

After taking a moment to recognize him, Senior Wei seemed to relax more in relief at the sight of the young Lan desciple and smiled faintly. "Sizhui," he breathed. He seemed to lose his strength after that, collapsing to his knees with Hanguang-jun slowing his fall.

Panicking, Sizhui charged forward and fell to Wei Wuxian's side, while Lan Wangji held him upright. "Senior Wei! Are you alright? Are you injured?"

"Sizhui," whispered Wei Wuxian with a weak smile, looking at the youthful face before him with fogged eyes. The boy looked so young when he showed such fear. This wouldn't do. So his hand gently brushed his, which was trembling.

"I'll be fine...Don't be afraid," he told him breathlessly.

"I'm-I'm not...I-I just––" Tears shimmered in Sizhui's large eyes, filled with despair and worry...and a deep confusion, as though he were lost in the midst of a growing panic attack and he was searching for words to say. His breathing increased. "...I-I-I don't know why...but I just..."

Gray eyes, thought Wei Wuxian, as he quietly gazed at Sizhui more closely, and wished he had the strength to pat the boy's head in comfort. His face...his eyes...they reminded him...they were so like his...

My A-Yuan, he thought with fond sadness, would be this boy's age...if he were still alive...

Wei Wuxian's vision blurred. His chest hurt with that familiar anguish he could never escape, and he felt so drained. So tired.

"Lan Zhan," he murmured, "has this boy...gone numb?" He meant to tease the other man, or scold him, he wasn't entirely sure how he sounded.

Lan Zhan didn't answer. There was a strange light in his golden eyes, something other than worry. Surely it wasn't guilt?

Wei Wuxian felt darkness hovered over his consciousness, and he started to surrender to it.

This place...the cave, held too many memories that came rushing back. A child's laughter...his cries...calling for him with joy and love...afraid of him...his baby...

'Xian-gege!'

The memory of his child's face lingered, smiling up at him, giggling cutely, crying in front of him, playing with him, haunting him...The child he treated as his own. The child...he had frightened with his anger...and had left to die. He failed. The pain in his heart became too much.

I want to see my son...please...

He heard Sizhui cry out his name as the world tilted and he let himself fall into darkness.

I want my son...

He could feel the warm, smaller arms of the teen, his head landing where he could hear his heartbeat. He could faintly hear the echoes of his voice calling out to him frantically, becoming muffled...but he heard a child's trill squeak in his dreams, 'Baba! Xian-baba!'

"A-Yuan..."

'Baba! Baba!'

I'm so sorry...so sorry...Baba loves you...he loves you so much...

'Xian-gege…'

...He'll never let you go...Never again...Just don't disappear...

'Xian-baba...'

...Don't leave your Xian-baba…please...A-Yuan...

"Senior Wei!" cried Sizhui as he caught the man, who fell limp in his arms. So worried for his senior that he forgot any lingering fear or doubt he had for that made him openly express any true concern. Even with Lan Wangji and everyone else watching from down the slope, Sizhui no longer cared what they thought or what they felt seeing them together like this: the protege of Hanguang-jun screaming in panic like a lost child over his master's supposed mortal enemy.

He felt so frail and weak, his breath so faint and energy so alarmingly low, that Sizhui had a terrifying thought that Senior Wei would actually die, right here in his arms.

If this was same the Yiling Patriarch that everyone was claimed was so powerful he took down armies in a single battle, then that was clearly no longer the case. It had clearly taken much out of Senior Wei to use his powers to lure the corpses alone. If he hadn't had his father and the Ghost General defend him, he was have been demolished almost instantly.

Blood...gore...fire...screaming...crying...a mutilated hand reaching out...a bloodied smile streaked with tears...a flash of light...

"Don't be afraid."

Those words again.

They once comforted him. They once became a mantra he would repeat to himself throughout the years that would often be spoken by Hanguang-jun since he was little.

Now those words now filled him with heavy dread. Because rather than encouragement and comfort––rather than words of inspiration and motivation that he hoped would someday make him into half the cultivator his father was––they now sounded like the parting words of someone he cared about. Like an apology full of deep regret, knowing they would likely be gone from his life forever, leaving him behind. Leaving him alone to fend for himself.

Everyone leaves you, a tiny voice hissed at the back of his mind.

Abandonment. His very worst fear, stemmed from the knowledge that his father often went away at long periods of time, only to come back just when Sizhui thought he had disappeared from his life forever.

He didn't even know why he had this fear. Many cultivating parents had to leave their children behind to go on dangerous night hunts, including Jingyi's...so Sizhui could only assume it came from a forgotten memory of his parents, who were likely dead.

Of an old woman who was probably his grandmother.

Of a man who was probably his father...or his brother...he couldn't be sure.

Of a family he didn't remember, but still mourned for deep down in his heart, where the wall in his memories still blocked his way.

"Senior Wei! Senior Wei, wake up!" Sizhui frantically shook the unconscious man he held onto, whose head rested limply against the base of his shoulder where his heart pounded in his chest. "Senior Wei!"

"...A-Yuan..." a quiet mumble escaped from Wei Wuxian's mouth.

As Wei Ying's eyes started to roll at the back of his head, Lan Wangji knew he was going to pass out. Wei Ying had simply used too much demonic energy. Even though there were no physical injuries by the end of the fight, Mo Xuanyu's frail body was not built for so much exertion.

That, and combined with the curse he was still under, he was going to need more spiritual energy.

"...A-Yuan…"

Wangji felt his heart give a jolt when hearing the young disciple's birth name slip out of Wei Ying's lips, barely a wisp of breath only the three within proximity would hear.

Sizhui stopped trying to shake him awake, his glistening eyes widening in surprise. Speechless, he looked up to meet the older Lan's, open with worry and confusion.

"Hanguang-jun…?" Though the question was left unfinished, he could read the rest of it in his son's expression, clear as day: 'How did he know my name?'

The lodge of guilt that he kept buried deep within him threatened again to resurface. The longer he looked at his son in the eye, the more it grew. He could only hope that whatever expression of worry he failed o school was interpreted solely towards the unconscious man in their arms.

Did Sizhui still not know, he wondered, even after Wei Ying's identity was revealed, that the weakened man he was holding unconscious in his arms had been his father first?

Wei Ying.

Wangji looked down at the unconscious necromancer, who features slackened more peacefully as though he were caught in a good dream. Wei Ying muttered the name again, "A-Yuan," his eyelids flickering and brow furrowing, as though in pain. Gasping, Sizhui drew his attention back to his senior with deep concern.

Do you still not know that that the boy who looks up to you, thought Wangji as he watched them, the young man to leads the young group of disciples, the one who you seem to favor with praise, is the same child whose name you uttered? The child you loved and lost? Don't you both know yet that you have both found each other at last…yet it is only I who knows it?

"Father?" Sizhui's voice was barely a whisper, but sounded desperate enough to forget addressing him by his title out in the open rather than what he now called him in private. Wangji did not mind in the slightest. It seemed nowadays that he cherished every single time his son could call him 'father' anymore, the older he got.

He wondered if his boy would still want to call him that, if he found out the truth of what his own guardian had been hiding from him all these years growing up. Wangji dreaded that day when it came. If it ever came.

He told himself that he had only done it to protect the boy from painful memories, from the trauma of losing his entire family and his old home to the wrath and corruption of the sects he was surrounded by. From whatever shame or whatever hatred he would rightfully feel, towards those responsible for destroying his home and family, for driving his beloved guardian to his death, and to those who still wished to this day to eliminate any survivor of the "evil" Wen sect, no matter how much they were involved or completely innocent of their leader's tyranny.

Now, it was to also protect him from…Wei Ying. Up until a few nights ago, before Wei Ying had shown any sign of remembering his son, it was a horrible, bitter conclusion, but if there was a chance that Lan Wangji had overestimated Wei Ying's bond to Wen Yuan, that the necromancer did not remember his own child (as he did not remember a lot of things from his old life since he was resurrected), then Wangji would rather Sizhui not suffer such a heartbreaking disappointment.

Too many people that had loved him and had a part in raising him as a child, in only a span of his first three years of living, have left him behind, whether intentionally or not. Even though Sizhui did not remember his early childhood, that type of insecurity, the feeling of abandonment, that childish clinginess, had never fully left the boy, like his body acknowledged the feeling before his mind did.

Wangji knew that feeling all too well. With his mother, the father he hardly knew, and then with Wei Ying.

But now that he no longer worried about whether or not Wei Ying remembered the boy, now he worried about how to break it to either of them whom these two actually meant to each other, and how much Lan Wangji himself had been keeping from them.

But now was not the time to worry about that.

Shoving down his worries and guilt, he reached out and placed a hand on the teen's shoulder. "He will be fine," he said, as calmly as he could manage. "You did well."

"I should have stayed and helped…"

"You did help," Wangji told him. He could feel Wen Ning standing quietly behind, watching them silently. Jin Ling among the others across the hills looked toward them with a worried frown. "You three bought us some time. We would not have made it out in time otherwise."

I'm proud of you, he silently told him, but I would you have you safe, no matter what. Even now, you are my son, my child. Understand?

Sizhui looked at him, a sheen sparkling from his eye, but he did not cry. Instead, pressing his lips together, he bowed his head. That was as much understanding as he was willing to display. The sight softened his heart even more.

"I will take him," Wangji said gently. "We should go."

As Sizhui passed Wei Ying over, the boy looked up in surprise. Wangji followed his gaze, feeling the Ghost General cautiously approach before coming in view. His gray hand twitched

"Young Master Lan…will Master Wei be alright?" his soft, rough voice inquired. "I can carry him…" It sounded distant.

"No need," said Wangji steadily, his eyes not leaving Wei Ying's face. When he stood, he lifted Wei Ying bridal style, Sizhui standing with him. When he started walking, his son kept close to side, struggling to keep his hands to himself, despite his desire to keep them on Wei Ying.

He ignored the rest of the crowd as they rejoined the other sects. He ignored his uncle who gave a disapproving glare at his careful treatment of Wei Ying, and the unreadable frown donning on Jiang Wanyin's. He didn't care in the slightest, except when Lan Jingyi pushed through the crowd with a worried expression to rejoin him and Lan Sizhui.

For once he didn't say much about it.

.

After a long pause, staring after them with a pale gaze, Wen Ning finally allowed his feet to move.

Though his concern for Young Master Wei overwhelmed him, his focus drifted thoughtfully to the young Lan disciple standing by Hanguang-jun's side.

He felt himself go into a thoughtful trance, memories haunting him, as he tried to look more closely at the boy called Lan Sizhui, as he had not done before, when so much has happened so quickly.

A-Yuan...

Wei Ying whispered it. Wen Ning had heard it.

Something alive, and painful, started to tear through his undead chest. The ghost of a heartache, or the scar that remained of the spear-flag that impaled him to near-death. His hands trembled, as did his jaw.

The little boy he carried around and let ride on his shoulders, whom he talked to and fed soup to. Who smiled and laughed and ran and played around. Who lived with his granny, who was spoiled by his relatives. The boy he'd give his life to save. The tiny, fragile, beautiful infant he once held in his arms, the night he had been born…the boy who loved Young Master Wei as a father and brother...

It can't be…it can't...

Why hadn't he noticed it before?

That face…those eyes…looked so like…like her.

A-Yuan?