wangxian-brainrot - Tumblr blog

wangxian-brainrot · 2 years

Note

Prompt: Wwx and LQR get deaged. They keep their memories, but have the mental age of theor bodies

Wwx is a genius 5 yo who keeps falling into cookie jars bcs he forgets they're taller than him and LQR is disgruntled to discover that, as a 13 yo w no impulse control or experience to hone his anger, he's still the oldest person in the room

Sonata no. 159 in C Major - ao3

(series: Variations on WWX & LQR in Assorted Keys)

Wei Wuxian knew what had happened the second he opened his eyes and felt the urge to start crying in embarrassment. Putting aside embarrassment, which wasn’t exactly an emotion he was all too familiar with, he hadn’t had the urge to simply burst into tears and mindlessly sob since he was very young.

Even in the worst moments of his life – the fall of the Lotus Pier, Jiang Yanli’s death, his own death – he’d retained his rationality as he wept, his too-quick mind repeating all the possible consequences over and over again; it had never been an urge to cry simply to vent his frustrations. He hadn’t done something like that since before his parents had died, when he had learned the hard way that crying didn’t necessarily mean you would get help from anyone.

But Wei Wuxian felt like crying now.

Not just crying, but that pointless ‘someone come help me’ crying that all children did until they learned that wasn’t the way to get what they wanted…and that meant that the array he’d been fiddling around with had worked.

Worked too well, even.

He’d only been trying to figure out what it was that Wen Ruohan had used to keep his appearance in his mid-twenties for such a long time – whatever else might be said about the man, mad and bloodthirsty tyrant that he was, he had been incredibly powerful, brilliant at both swordplay and arrays, an offensive powerhouse capable of flattening armies entirely on his own. So when Wei Wuixan had found some books stamped with the Wen sect’s seal in the Lan sect library, real books and not just propaganda copies of those awful Wen sect utterances, he’d been intrigued enough to smuggle them back to the jingshi and start picking his way through them.

They were all written in a beautiful flowing hand by what must have been an array master: the designs were drawn out in full but the accompanying explanations were sparse and abrupt, full of assumptions that the reader had sufficient underlying knowledge to fill in what was missing. Wei Wuxian wasn’t actually enough of an array master himself to do that, but he thought he knew enough and he didn’t especially want to have to ask one of the Lan sect’s array masters for help, lest they ask him what he was up to. He was clever and good at deduction; he figured that could figure out some of the inferences, extrapolate the rest, and he’d been more or less hoping for the best as he put the final touches on the array…

At first, nothing had happened.

He’d poked at it – again, nothing.

He’d been just about ready to give up on the whole thing when there had been the sound of someone right outside the door – he’d called out a welcome automatically, his mind mostly focused on the puzzling inertness of the clearly active array – and then, the very moment they’d walked in…

Boom.

And now Wei Wuxian was young again. Too young, even: Wen Ruohan had skillfully kept his age firmly at his early twenties, looking even younger than the dissipated louts he called sons, but Wei Wuxian…

He looked down at pudgy fingers.

He was five at best, he concluded glumly. At least he hadn’t lost his mind –

“What just happened,” someone said emotionlessly.

Wei Wuxian looked up. There was a thirteen-year-old Lan sect member in front of him, vaguely reminiscent of a young Lan Wangji – he had the same handsome features, though not quite the right ones, but unfortunately that meant this could be any of Lan Wangji’s relatives. The clothing, of course, was useless for identification, classic Lan sect robes, but there had been an unusual accent to the words that gave Wei Wuxian a moment of pause; he didn’t know if he knew anyone who talked like that. Like all those born and raised in the Lan sect, the boy spoke with an accent faintly reminiscent of the sweet tones of Gusu, inescapable no matter how harshly the sect sought to corral their speech into something more respectable, but his voice was also strangely atonal and flat, lacking something of the normal melody of speech and making the words a little more difficult to understand.

Wei Wuxian had no idea who this was.

“I made a mistake,” he said, trying to keep from sniffling while also wracking his brain to figure out who this was – the resemblance to Lan Wangji, now that he looked at it, was very strong; could this be Lan Xichen? Well, it didn’t really matter, as long as it wasn’t…

“Of course you did,” the boy said, voice completely flat. He closed his eyes and pinched the brow of his nose in an extremely familiar gesture of irritation.

Well, crap.

Wei Wuxian’s shoulders went up to his ears as he ducked his head. “…m’sorry, Teacher Lan.”

“An apology is worthless if it is not backed by action,” Lan Qiren said, and maybe he was trying for stern but for some reason it just came out as flat again. Had Lan Qiren had some sort of speaking impediment when he’d been younger? “If you do not stop what you are doing, your apology is meaningless. And if you will not stop, you would do well to at least take care to minimize the harm inevitably caused by your behavior.”

Wei Wuixan felt tears welling up in his eyes. Horrified, he tried to scrub at them, but it was no use: as far as his body was concerned, he was five years old, and it was time to cry.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” he tried to explain, noticing that Lan Qiren was looking at him as if he were doing something extremely strange – understandable enough, sine Wei Wuxian wasn’t exactly a crier. “I just wanted to try something out…”

“Harm doesn’t have to be intentional for it to be harm,” Lan Qiren said, his voice still flat. He didn’t look quite so sour, though; now he looked more nervous than anything else. “Please stop crying.”

“I’m trying,” Wei Wuxian wailed. “I can’t help it! My mind’s the same as ever, but my brain’s a five-year-old brain!”

Lan Qiren grimaced. “Is there something that would help you?”

Wei Wuxian tried to think through what felt like unbearable desolation. When he really had been this age, had there been anything that had helped? He didn’t remember – curse his terrible memory!

Well, something more recent, then. What had helped A-Yuan, when he’d been at the Burial Mounds?

“…a hug?”

Lan Qiren flinched.

Wei Wuxian was nearly startled out of his tears.

A moment later, though, Lan Qiren resumed his regular expression as if nothing had happened. “Very well,” he said stiffly, and knelt down, holding out his arms.

Wei Wuxian intended to resist, at least until he figured out what that bizarre reaction of Lan Qiren’s meant, but found himself lunging forward at once, too eager for comfort to be able to hold back. He could feel Lan Qiren flinching again, but his arms were warm and comforting regardless, and children were always a little selfish.

After a few moments Lan Qiren began to awkwardly brush his hand over Wei Wuxian’s hair, smoothing it down, and that was even better.

“Didn’t you do this when Lan Zhan was a kid?” he asked, voice muffled by Lan Qiren’s sleeve.

“Just as you are affected by the transformation, so too am I,” Lan Qiren responded. “At this age, I had not yet learned to overcome my aversion, as I had by the time my nephews were born.”

Overcome could mean many things, from actually getting over to simply learning to endure, but Wei Wuxian didn’t ask. It seemed like it would be rude, and he really had been trying not to anger Lan Qiren more than he already had – the old man had a tendency to cough up blood just from looking at him, and while at first Wei Wuxian had felt it was merely exaggeration and unnecessary dramatics, he quickly noticed how worried the other Lan sect disciples were over Lan Qiren’s health.

“That must have been terrible,” he said instead, thinking of how much he enjoyed contact with others – the casual touching in the Lotus Pier, and even now his tendency to snuggle up with Lan Wangji whenever he could, hanging off of him like a monkey. Even in the Burial Mounds, all the others were careful to welcome him with hands on shoulders or friendly, and he had at least had A-Yuan to pick up and hold whenever he felt lonely…and he had so often felt lonely. “Did you always react like that every time people hugged you?”

“People did not hug me,” Lan Qiren said. “So it was not an issue.”

“I meant your family,” Wei Wuxian clarified.

“As did I,” Lan Qiren said. “We were not close.”

Wei Wuxian stared at him.

“…it is not a secret,” Lan Qiren said, blinking down at him as if surprised by his surprise. “Anyone would be able to tell you.”

Wei Wuxian’s mouth moved – he wanted to say something all of a sudden, wanted to blurt out how could they not hug you, they were your family. If he hadn’t known it would be making it worse, he would try to hug Lan Qiren again the way he used to hug Jiang Cheng when he was upset over his father again.

Wei Wuxian had long ago guiltily admitted to himself that Jiang Fengmian might have been the best uncle in the world but was far from the best father; it hadn’t been a realization he’d been capable of making when he was younger, too blind and arrogant and reassured by Jiang Fengmian’s love for him, and it had only been when he’d been caring for little A-Yuan and listening to Wen Qing’s scolding on how important touch was to a child of that age that he’d realized the depths of how unfair it had been to them both. Even back when he was young, he’d known instinctively that it was his job to make up for how little Jiang Fengmian touched Jiang Cheng – to make up for being there, for being the one who was loved so much and so clearly when Jiang Cheng was left behind.

But…

“Didn’t you have anyone?” Wei Wuxian asked, voice small.

Lan Qiren shrugged and did not answer. “You seem to be feeling better,” he observed, and Wei Wuxian found that he did. Lan Qiren released him. “What was it that you used to cause this, and can we reverse it?”

Wei Wuxian scratched his nose. “I found a book on arrays,” he said. “It was marked with the Wen sect’s seal.”

“Ah,” Lan Qiren said. “Wen Ruohan.”

“Exactly! I wanted to figure out what he did – how he stayed young. I thought these books might have some insight…why do you have Wen sect books, anyway? Were they left behind by the Wen sect when they invaded?”

“No. They were part of my personal collection, which was not burned.” Lan Qiren paused. “In fact, I suspect it was not burned because it included these books. Wen Ruohan has always prized the works of his hands above all other considerations, however illogical.”

“Wait,” Wei Wuxian said. “Those books were Wen Ruohan’s? As in, by him? He was the array master that wrote them?”

At Lan Qiren’s nod, Wei Wuxian marveled a little: he’d known the murderous madman was a genius in his own way, but really, wow. Those books were seriously impressive – he would’ve thought they’d have been written by some great ancestor. Not to mention the fact that they were all painstakingly handwritten, which he couldn’t imagine Wen Ruohan doing so lightly.

“How did you manage to get ahold of something like that?” he asked.

“They were a gift,” Lan Qiren said, and his face twisted a little with pain he did not seem able to suppress. “‘From one sect leader to another’, he liked to say. Later, when things went badly for him, he preferred celebrating the date of my investiture as interim sect leader over my date of birth.”

The date of Lan Qiren’s investiture? But Lan Qiren hadn’t been raised to be sect leader following a hand-off from the prior generation, the way it had been for Lan Xichen, or even following the suitable mourning period reserved for the death of his predecessor – he had been named interim sect leader because of what had happened with Lan Wangji’s parents.

Which meant that Wen Ruohan had had a habit of sending gifts on the anniversary of Lan Wangji’s parents’ disaster.

“…ouch,” Wei Wuxian said. He’d never gotten the impression that Lan Qiren had particularly enjoyed the role of sect leader, and that wince just now suggested that his elevation to that position had been even less welcome than he might have thought. “That’s bullshit.”

“No profanities.”

“That is definitely not a rule!”

“You are currently too young,” Lan Qiren clarified. “Although your mind remains that of an adult, your appearance does not. It would serve as a bad example for others if you were seen or heard.”

That made a certain amount of sense.

“Our first priority is to figure out how to reverse the effects of the array,” Lan Qiren declared, his voice still flat and unmoved, something that became even more apparent as he continued to speak at length. “I do not know if the array was deliberately designed incorrectly as a means of punishing the reader, which is possible, or if you erred in the creation thereof. Do not touch anything. I will ask one of the disciples to fetch the sect’s array masters, as well as clothing –”

“Why do you talk like that?” Wei Wuxian blurted out, fascinated.

Lan Qiren stopped, and his cheeks slowly flushed red. “You are young and controlled by your impulses,” he said shortly, and it took Wei Wuxian a few moments to realize that he was angry because his voice still did not change in tone. “But your mind is intact. You are capable of not being rude, and should manage yourself better.”

With that, he shook his sleeves – an effect ruined by them being far too big for him – and went outside to flag someone down to go get help.

Wei Wuxian initially wondered if they would listen to him, given that Lan Qiren didn’t look like himself, but apparently ‘Wei Wuixan has done something’ was all they needed to hear before they were willing to listen to instructions from just about anyone.

Rude.

…as his question had been, yes. He slunk over to Lan Qiren, finding as he did that being next to the older boy made him feel reassured and less nervous – even if it was clear that Lan Qiren was still fuming.

Several array masters arrived swiftly, as did new clothing in their current sizes.

Not far behind them were a set of doctors.

Wei Wuxian reluctantly submitted to being poked and prodded, his only consolation being that Lan Qiren was suffering from similar treatment, and handling it notably less well.

Maybe it was because of that touch aversion.

“I’m fine,” Lan Qiren finally barked after a few minutes, clearly pushed past the point of endurance. “There was nothing wrong with me at the age of thirteen!”

“But Teacher Lan –”

“Enough!”

“Teacher Lan, we need to see –”

Lan Qiren looked like he was about to have a fit.

“Cease,” a stern but welcome voice rang out from the door, and the doctors abruptly scattered like a flock of quail.

Lan Wangji looked like a terrifying god as he swept into the room, glaring. Wei Wuxian was happy to see him, overjoyed to the point of wanting to giggle, but also felt the abrupt urge to duck behind Lan Qiren and hide his face – it was a strange mixture of glee and shyness, none of which made the slightest amount of sense as a reaction to seeing his husband be awesome.

Being five years old was the worst.

Lan Wangji handled the whole thing quite well, keeping his face impassive. The only sign of surprise he let on was the fact that he looked for a long moment at Wei Wuxian, who waved jauntily at him, and then at Lan Qiren for an equally long moment.

“Shufu,” he finally said.

“Wangji,” Lan Qiren responded, and put his hands behind his back in proper Lan sect fashion. Or, well, it would have been proper Lan sect fashion, only Wei Wuxian was standing behind his back and could see how his hands were shaking. “Now that our health has been confirmed, we should examine the array. The sooner this is reversed, the better.”

Lan Wangji nodded and turned his gaze on the doctors, who crept out with their tails between their legs, ashamed – as they should be, for upsetting Lan Qiren like that. Wei Wuxian made a rude gesture after their backs, or tried, anyway; Lan Qiren grabbed his hand without even looking and covered it up.

Lan Wangji didn’t smile, but he looked amused, to those who could tell such things. The expression soon passed, however, and he went back to looking serious.

“Shufu, I can supervise the array masters in reviewing the array and starting to determine how to reverse the effects,” he said. “You are welcome to stay if you wish, but do not feel as though you must.”

Wei Wuxian expected Lan Qiren to stay, but instead he nodded and said, “I will leave the initial work to you. Feel free to consult me if you have any questions.”

And then, using the hand he already had on Wei Wuixan, he started walking out, dragging Wei Wuxian behind him.

“Hey, wait,” Wei Wuxian protested, noticing that no one, not even Lan Wangji, was making any move to help him. “Don’t they need my help? I’m the one who set it up! How will they recreate my process without me?”

“You take notes,” Lan Qiren pointed out, and Wei Wuxian pouted: he did, and good ones, too. “Anyway, do you really think you will be able to maintain focus and not distract them?”

“I could. That’s how I do things, I’m frazzled and distracted right up until I focus, and then I focus really well,” Wei Wuxian argued, although he stopped fighting to stay and started walking with Lan Qiren instead, giving in implicitly. And maybe Lan Qiren had a point, actually, because he felt much better now that they were in motion – he’d forgotten how much he thoroughly detested sitting still as a child…

He had the sudden memory, coming out of nowhere, that his mother had once called him her little wild monkey, climbing on everything. The thought made him smile. He’d thought he’d forgotten everything about her, given his poor memory, but it seemed not everything was lost.

They walked in silence for a little, with Wei Wuxian fiddling as they went with the many layers of a Lan sect robe, which was a little less complicated for a child but still more than what they’d used in the Jiang sect. After a while, though, that restless urge came upon him again.

“Soooooo –”

“Are you truly incapable of silence?” Lan Qiren asked. He did not sound angry, merely curious. “Does it cause you discomfort to refrain from speaking? Or is it merely that you dislike introspection and wish to avoid it whenever possible?”

Wei Wuxian disliked this conversational topic, that’s what he disliked.

Besides, there was something he needed to ask. He tugged on Lan Qiren’s hand, which he had not released and from which Lan Qiren had not shaken him off.

“Why were your hands shaking when you saw Lan Zhan?” he asked. It was a rude question, he knew, and overly blunt, but if there was one thing that he wasn’t willing to compromise on, it was Lan Wangji. If Lan Qiren was still angry at Lan Wangji, whether over what had happened all those years ago or for his role in Wei Wuxian’s presence in the Cloud Recesses, that was something Wei Wuxian wanted to know right away so he could deal with it. “Are you angry at him?”

Lan Qiren was silent for a moment, and when Wei Wuxian snuck a glance at him, he seemed to be thinking the question over thoughtfully.

After a moment, instead of responding, he turned off the path they were following and led them both off into a less-frequented part of the Cloud Recesses.

“If you’re bringing me here to silence me, I want you to know that I can be really loud,” Wei Wuxian said, smiling a little – he wasn’t actually afraid Lan Qiren would try to drown him or anything like that, even if it was mostly because he knew the old man wouldn’t break the Lan sect rules like that. No taking lives within the premises. “There’s nowhere you can take me that people won’t hear me if I try hard enough…”

“I would appreciate it if you would not try,” Lan Qiren said, coming to a halt near a small garden. “Similarly, I would appreciate it if you refrained from mentioning what you saw to Wangji.”

“What I saw…you mean your hands shaking?” Wei Wuxian frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Lan Qiren was silent for a few moments.

After a while, he sighed. “It was not anger that caused my hands to shake, but fear.”

Wei Wuxian stared at him.

“Not at Wangji himself, of course,” Lan Qiren said, and the world, which had momentarily gone off its axis, resumed spinning in the normal course of things. “And as mentioned, of course, part of the issue relates purely to the physical side effects of being this age, as well as the mental regression involved. Despite that, I would prefer, if possible, to avoid Wangji being aware of – of the fact that there is – a certain resemblance –”

Wei Wuxian might have the brain of a five-year-old, but he had been a genius even then.

“He looks like his father?” he asked, and Lan Qiren looked upset enough that he knew he’d guessed right. “Was he older than you? By how much?”

“Ten years, give or take,” Lan Qiren said, and seemed relieved not to have to explain further.

Wei Wuxian nodded, and wondered how bad, exactly, the relationship between Lan Qiren and his older brother had been. No matter his sudden burning curiosity, there was really no point in asking; there was nothing he could do about it – Lan Wangji’s father had died long ago, and Lan Qiren wouldn’t appreciate the reminder. But at the same time…

Well, despite everything that happened between him and Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian wouldn’t have reacted like that to seeing him.

“Wangji is not unaware that he has the family features,” Lan Qiren said, filling the silence. “And Xichen as well. It has not bothered me in the past, and I do not wish for them to think, incorrectly, that I have harbored any sense of revulsion towards them previously for something like this, which is wholly out of their control. Not only is it incorrect, it could cause them undue distress.”

“I won’t tell,” Wei Wuxian said, thinking to himself that Lan Qiren was probably deluding himself if he thought Lan Wangji hadn’t already noticed, “but even if they know, I don’t think they’d take it to heart. You raised very perceptive, thoughtful nephews.”

Lan Qiren looked pleased by that, even if it did look like it was a little despite himself.

“Maintain your own self-discipline,” he said regardless, then started walking again. “I will repair my conduct. In the meantime, what can be done for you?”

“For me?” Wei Wuxian asked, surprised. He wasn’t the one stuck in some sort of childhood nightmare – he’d been quite happy at the age of five, since his parents hadn’t died until he was seven. “What about me? I don’t need anything.”

“Mm,” Lan Qiren said, and somehow they ended up in the Lan sect kitchens visiting what is, apparently, their secret cookie stash, something Wei Wuxian had not known about and was, quite frankly, shocked and appalled at the horrible oversight of him not having been informed about this earlier.

“The children are sworn to secrecy, particularly as to those from other sects,” Lan Qiren explained. “It makes them feel good to know that they can be trusted with ‘sect secrets’, and encourages cohesiveness within the sect. Now that you are married in, you are of course permitted to know, only as an adult they likely had no reason to think to tell you, while the children assume you already know.”

Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi certainly seemed to assume Wei Wuxian knew everything. He was going to have to do something especially wicked to them on their next night-hunt together to get revenge.

“I do feel better,” Wei Wuixan said, munching on another cookie. “I don’t know why, it wasn’t that I was feeling bad before, but still…better.”

“At that age you are spending most of your energy growing. It is tiring work.”

That made sense. Wei Wuxian nodded.

“We’re going to keep that thing about me nearly falling out the window between ourselves, right?” he asked, and Lan Qiren nodded, looking amused. “It’s just this body, you know, I’m clumsy now…”

“Is it your body? Or Mo Xuanyu’s?”

“…you know, I have no idea,” Wei Wuxian confessed, blinking. “I don’t actually remember what I looked like at this age.”

He thought about it for a moment, then asked, “Does it matter?”

“I suppose not,” Lan Qiren said. “Come, let us return. Now that you are calmer, if you wish to go assist Wangji, I do not object.”

“No, no, I want to spend time with you,” Wei Wuxian said, and it was even true. Lan Qiren made for an excellent big brother. “I’m surprised you didn’t want to be there, supervising.”

“Mm, it is the nature of the work, and its author.”

“Oh?”

Lan Qiren shrugged and took a bite of his cookie as well, somehow managing to make it seem graceful in a way Wei Wuxian was pretty sure thirteen-year-old boys innately weren’t. “Wen Ruohan was once quite charming. Even in his desire for dominion, he had a way about him that was highly engaging, and once I took the position of interim sect leader, we were obligated through circumstances to spend a great deal of time together, comparatively speaking. I dislike reminders of that time.”

Wei Wuxian could understand that. To go from something that was almost friendship, or at least a little bit of admiration, to something as traumatic as the burning of the Cloud Recesses…

“His work is genius,” he said. “If nothing else.”

“It is that. Those books were from before he lost his mind entirely, when he could still think of things beyond conquering the world…he was never kind, you understand; he was often cruel and selfish, even then. But not – in the same way, as it was after.”

Wei Wuxian’s interest was piqued. “You make it sound as if there were some incident you could point to that marked the shift.”

“Oh, there was, and very specific,” Lan Qiren said. “His murder of the former Nie sect leader, who had once been his good friend. He was never the same after that.”

“Wait, they were friends? Then why…?”

Lan Qiren shrugged.

Wei Wuxian considered it for a moment, then shrugged. He wasn’t really in any position to comment.

“I hope they fix this soon,” he said.

“As do I,” Lan Qiren said. “Better health is not worth going through adolescence a second time.”

“That’s arguable,” Wei Wuxian said, little fireworks going off in his brain: what if they could somehow keep the improved health of the current bodies when they resumed their future selves? Wouldn’t that be a great way to deal with chronic health problems like Lan Qiren’s? Maybe there would be a way – actually, now that he thought about it, maybe Lan Qiren being affected by the array wasn’t just an accident. Maybe the array specifically required two people to be involved… “I think I do want to go join Lan Zhan, actually. I have an idea!”

“I’m sure you do,” Lan Qiren sighed. “Please try not to break it worse this time. You are tolerable as a five-year-old, but I assure you, no one wants to see you when you were an infant.”

“Maybe I was a nice, quiet infant!”

“No infant is nice and quiet.”

Wei Wuxian cackled, suddenly realizing something wonderful. “You can tell me stories about Lan Zhan when he was younger!” he exclaimed, clapping. “Oh, this is wonderful! I don’t know how I didn’t realize it before – I want to know everything!”

He and Lan Qiren were going to be very good friends going forward, he decided beneficently. Very good.

#mdzs #wwx #lqr #fic #OMGOMGOMGOMG #DE AGED LQR #I NEED MORE DE AGED LQR #I LOVE THIS SM #😭😭😭😭😭❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

210 notes · View notes