Of course Lan Wangji remembers, vividly, the fear and loneliness that had Claudius so frozen as a child, his tears and his terror of rebuke. He remembers Claudius struggling to ask his god how to be good, because he had no one to tell him that he already was. He doesn't think that a lapse into outsized sympathy would be appreciated, but he can hardly restrain the tiny frown that draws his brows together. He is silent for a stretch, retreating into his thoughts, before he says, very serious, "Whether or not he intended to, this lord chamberlain raised a fine man in you as well."