"Waiting doesn't mean without motion." Patience in holding position he had, for a year and more if he needed it, but it wasn't the same thing. Patience for him is balanced against an earlier life of rashness, of being unable to hold still before injustice, and then holding himself so carefully still to walk that narrow path of survival with his Wens. The ones that Lan Zhan recalls now, one people to save after another, but doesn't he remember how that ended?

Wei Wuxian is no saviour. No hero, but clever, and curious, and alive, those are things he is, and hopeful in a way he hadn't been when he woke up in the Mo Manor, when he'd been a cursed man trying to understand a world that'd flown by him, happily tarnishing his name while using his tools, and wanted him still, chewed and worn in their fetid jaws.

"Then no pledges to you, but there is one I have to make. To our children," he says, and their daughters, for future paths, the convergence of two living beings with their talents and their failings, "That we both will know their growing. I lost that chance once. Not again, please. I don't want to miss it all again."