Nie Huaisang is the last thing Nie Mingjue sees, truly sees, before the last shard of himself falls away.

Bent to breaking and bemired in his own blood, it is all Nie Mingjue can do to bring Baxia up, to point its edge at the heart of the damn simpering snake who has wrought this upon him. That has snared Nie Huaisang in his grip, is keeping them apart in this moment, the final one they will have, the one where he and Nie Huaisang need to be with one another the most.

The price of his sabre has now been paid, and it has collected its due all too soon. Nie Mingjue hopes what is left in him is enough. That, for all else he’s shown and all else he’s become in the unmaking of himself, over the long years and hastened in the short months, Nie Huaisang will untangle the truth Nie Mingjue fights to tell.

Seconds are all he is allowed. Nie Mingjue takes them, every one, until he is gone and it is done.

Nie Huaisang is the first thing Nie Mingjue sees, truly sees, when the last shard of himself sinks back into place.

Nie Mingjue opens his eyes, and his vision blurs over as the sights overlap, past and present. The warmth of the first has been tempered in the second; the Nie Huaisang of now is harder to look upon, made colder from more than simply growing older. In both of them, Nie Huaisang weeps, but his tears, here, are subdued, their sorrow serving a greater apparent purpose.

Nie Huaisang looks at him, and sees, at once, that Nie Mingjue is looking back. His lips part in surprise; his brows raise in alarm. Slowly, surely, the remainder of his surroundings are painted in; dark wood flanks him at either side, doubtlessly paired with the plank pressed flat to his back. Candlelight filters in from above, smoke wafting up towards a high ceiling, strung with silks.

He is in a coffin, but he is not in the Stone Castles.

It is sound that follows next. First, Nie Huaisang’s shallow, shuddering breaths. The crackle of flame; the spatter of melted wax. Pouring rain; clapping thunder. Voices, close and far away.

Jin Guangyao speaks, and Nie Mingjue makes to rise, driven by the hate that cleaves through him, sudden and sundering. It is Nie Huaisang’s fingertips grazing his knuckles that stops him still, stays the course of his instinctual march for his revenge. He flicks his gaze back to Nie Huaisang, and Nie Huaisang does all he can beneath the blade of suspicion held to his back; he shakes his head, the motion slight, easily spurned as something blooming from the shivers rattling his frame.

Nie Mingjue understands Nie Huaisang, if nothing else. No matter what time has passed, and what else has happened, this remains true, and will always be the same. And so, he closes his eyes again, and he waits.

And he waits.

The voices wax and wane. Time pauses, passes, pauses again. Nie Huaisang, after an eternity, after an age, shifts his hand beneath the drape of his sleeve. He squeezes down on Nie Mingjue’s wrist, once, and then he draws his touch away.

“Jin-zongzhu,” comes a voice, “have you ever thought that while you may be the mantis, tonight, there is an oriole in wait behind you?”

Behind Jin Guangyao, Nie Mingjue — the sage, the keeper, the forgotten part of the tale — stands, stretches out his hand, and snaps his neck.

A dead silence falls over them. Nie Mingjue knows at once that it is not the will of the temple, or the makings of the living within it. The candles are still burning, the wind is still billowing, and all of their mouths have begun to move, urgent and gaping. It is as if becoming upright has unseated his grasp of himself, sent him outside the bounds of the tentative space the shape of him is still carving out in a world that is no longer meant to be his.

Nie Mingjue seeks out the sight of Nie Huaisang, and uses the touchstone of his brother to reorient. There is still a trepid tension threaded across Nie Huaisang’s shoulders. There is still something in this temple denying him his ease.

Nie Huaisang holds Nie Mingjue’s gaze, then casts a single glance, pointed, towards another body in the room. It is easily mistaken for fear for anyone who is not Nie Mingjue, who knows with grave certainty that Nie Huaisang trusts him all too dearly to be terrified of him.

He raises his hand a second time, and Baxia comes to him, just as called. The moment he wraps his fingers around the hilt is the moment he finds what is missing, what he didn’t realise was yet to be returned: his restless, ruining rage. The resentment ripped from him by his sabre’s spirit, by the severing of his head— all of it comes screaming back, and Nie Mingjue screams with it, eyes flooding red. He brings Baxia down on Su She’s clavicle, and feels the sweet satisfaction of flesh and bone giving way to unstoppable force. In one moment, his blood sprays out; the next, it has long since spattered the stone beneath Nie Mingjue’s boots and the crumple of Su She’s body. Nie Mingjue does not blink, but he moves between snatches of darkness, losses of sense.

Everything shifts around him too quickly, swimming, like coloured ink spidering through water. Underneath the red of his rancour, Nie Mingjue sees Nie Huaisang, again, as still and clear as a cloudless night sky. The wildfire possessing him sputters, only to surge, again, when he sees Lan Xichen’s arms wrapped around Nie Huaisang’s shoulders, holding him back.

The temple falls away, and the steps of Koi Tower rise to take its place. Now, it is Jin Guangyao who keeps Nie Huaisang from him once again. Only: now, Nie Mingjue has the power to change it. Distantly, he hears music, fogged out and faded, as though it is flitting out from behind closed doors and folded silk screens. It is a struggle to even take a step. But the trial of his task does not matter, and the time spent achieving every foothold is of no consequence.

Nie Mingjue cannot be stopped. His prey will not be spared.

Jin Guangyao descends the steps, his small body half curved over the front of Nie Huaisang, as if to shield him. A pitiful display, and an absolute affront. The music grows louder; an irritation, now, but no matter. Nie Mingjue backs Jin Guangyao to the next terrace, and though there is more of a retreat left for him to take, he stops, resolute, his arm outstretched. As though he can hide Nie Huaisang from him, behind the shroud of his sleeve. As if he dares to keep Nie Mingjue’s brother from him again.

Nie Mingjue swings his arm back, the arc of his shoulder thrown wide, and he drives Baxia down towards Jin Guangyao’s neck. All at once, everything that has slowed and stopped starts again. Nie Huaisang surfaces from behind Jin Guangyao and pushes Lan Xichen away, and he falls to his knees in his stead, taking his place.

A shout wrests itself from the pit of his ribs, all fright and fury, and Nie Mingjue throws his other hand out to catch his blade. His bones splinter and snap beneath it, blood welling up from the slash to sluice the steel, and Nie Mingjue collapses into a staggered kneel from the brunt of his own blow.

“I told you.” Nie Huaisang breathes out, shaky. The point of Baxia, a hair’s breadth from his throat, brushes his jaw as it shifts around his swallow. “It’s okay, Xichen-ge. Da-ge would never hurt me.”

Nie Mingjue tears Baxia free, careful, and drops it to the ground. His hand is bent back at a strange angle, but it is not cleaved through, and it does not fold entirely in on itself. He is still able to flex the fingers of it, though it coaxes more of his blood, blackened and brackish, to weep from his wound. The hint of bone, grey-tinged, peeks out from the parted flesh.

He flinches, and lets the hand drop, limp, to his lap, palm downturned towards the silk of his robe. It’s a mechanical motion, borne of muscle memory. A trembling hand curls over his knuckles, and Nie Mingjue follows the line of it from the wrist to find it is Lan Xichen’s, not Nie Huaisang’s.

“Mingjue-xiong...” Lan Xichen’s whisper is wet, raw. His expression crumples in on itself, agonised, when Nie Mingjue tries to meet his eyes. When his hand falls away, and he slips back, spiriting himself out of the edges of Nie Mingjue’s sight, Nie Huaisang remedies the loss.

More join them within the temple; and more yet begin to speak. Nie Mingjue hears them; how they check over themselves, and then the dead. He can’t quite seem to listen, even when the unfamiliar man in black makes a comment that provokes a wan smile to cross Nie Huaisang’s lips. It is as if he is not truly here. As though he has slipped through a rift, and planted his feet on either side of the threshold between this place and the next.

A dream, perhaps, that he will soon wake from. Or worse: a second life that he will soon die for.

It is that thought that gets Nie Mingjue’s feet back beneath him, bidding him to rise. His unbroken hand wraps again around Baxia’s hilt, and his other turns over in his lap to take Nie Huaisang by the wrist. If he has only moments left, he will not waste them here.

“Huaisang, we’re leaving,” he says, in answer to the question resting just past Nie Huaisang’s parted lips. Nie Mingjue looks away from him only to cast a glance over the others, measuring them. It is an eclectic gathering. Nie Mingjue recognises most of them, and can guess at some of the rest. None of them have drawn their swords on him, but Nie Mingjue is ready to bring a fight to each and every one of them all the same.

It is Sect Leader Jiang who moves first. Though the tightening furl of his fist is faint, Nie Mingjue hears the shift of Zidian’s chain as it is drawn taut, and he cocks his wrist in turn, bringing the flat of Baxia’s blade to face out in its hang at his side.

“Da-ge.” He feels his hand being turned over slowly, the tentativeness of the gesture falling away when it meets with no resistance. Nie Huaisang, uncaring of the flay of his flesh and the tacky, congealing blood, laces their fingers together and squeezes down. “Let’s go.”

They go. The crowd does not part wide for them, but the sky does, overhead, as Nie Mingjue leads his brother out past the courtyard’s gate. He untangles their hands only to shake his shoulder out from the sleeve of his coat, and Nie Huaisang gathers himself tightly against his side as he draws the threadbare fabric over his head, keeping it aloft to catch the worst of the rain.

The streets are barren; the windows of every home they pass stripped bare of light or signs of life. Shouts sound out, from the alleys astride them and the temple behind them both. “Where are your men?” Nie Mingjue asks, and Nie Huaisang’s fingers scrabble as they hook into his robe at his hip.

“They’re close by,” Nie Huaisang replies, “but we’ll have to leave the city to find them, I told them not to come back to Yunping until morning—”

“You sent them away,” Nie Mingjue berates, brash and brittle, “and you came unarmed—”

Though it is useless now, he cannot help but feel the panic that such a revelation was owed long ago. There is always panic, with him, when it comes to Nie Huaisang. It is one of the last things he remembers ever feeling. It returns to him the easiest.

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang gentles. “Da-ge, please, I was careful. I was always safe.” He tugs on his robe, tentative, tender, insistent without imposition. “Please come. Please come here.”

Nie Mingjue lets the urgency leave his strides, for just a moment, and allows Nie Huaisang to take their lead. “Were you, Didi?” he asks, quiet, as Nie Huaisang shelters him beneath the overhang of a roof, his fingers unlacing from their clutch in Nie Mingjue’s robe to start on the clasps of his own belt.

“As much as I could be,” Nie Huaisang answers, and there is no softening that honesty. Without the need for his coat to cover them, it — and Nie Mingjue’s hand — have fallen to a lifeless disuse at his side. Nie Huaisang gingerly takes him by his wrist and turns his palm over.

In however long they have been parted, he has become such a starker contrast to Nie Mingjue, somehow, impossibly. His thin fingers are so soft and pale, so elegant and erudite, so denigrated when brought down to the dirt to level with Nie Mingjue’s. There’s a coarseness to them, but it is slim and slight; callouses notched in by the rote wield of brushes and pens, fans and sumptuous fripperies, not from the habitual heft of a sabre.

It should relax Nie Mingjue, the confirmation that Nie Huaisang has not had to— defend himself, so desperately and so straightforwardly, without his brother’s protection. That, surely, hopefully, he has had others who have filled that need, taken up that place.

It does not.

Nie Huaisang wraps his sash around Nie Mingjue’s hand, binding it, before he reaches for the neck of Nie Mingjue’s inner robe. He hesitates only for the second it takes him to seek out Nie Mingjue’s gaze, and then he is dipping his fingers past the hem, the backs of his knuckles skimming Nie Mingjue’s chest. It is still under his touch, the only life there an echo of the pulse in Nie Huaisang's own hand. No beat, no breath. An unwholeness yet wronged.

"I did not think it would work," Nie Huaisang admits, here, within the confessional of their gathered bodies, beneath the privacy of the drumming rain that has swept all life away, the blue sea to their mulberry field. He does not look at Nie Mingjue. Not in the eye. Not in any way that lets Nie Mingjue glimpse at the real truth and soul of him. "You have been dead for so long, and…"

What he's done is sacrilege. What has called him to it is love. Both are just as terrible as each other. And there is only use in speaking of the one.

"You did not think it would work," says Nie Mingjue, carefully, as careful as he can be, for all the man he is, and the hollows of what he isn't, "and yet you tried it?" Nie Mingjue does not know what it is, but method is, in the end, not what is important. Perhaps Nie Huaisang will tell him. It is just as likely that he will not.

Nie Huaisang does look at him, then, at that; a dagger-glint of a glance flashing out from under the shade of the spidering shroud of his hair. His fingers twitch on Nie Mingjue's chest, blunt nails scraping bare skin. "How could I not?" he asks him. "How could I not, Da-ge?"

How could he not, indeed. Nie Mingjue is, or was, a noble man. Honest. And he would have put the throat of the very heavens under his heel if it meant bringing his brother back to him, whatever morbid maladaptation that might be, in its very damned practice, if things had only been different. If it had been Nie Huaisang who was taken from him.

"What if I've pulled you from the cycle?" Nie Huaisang whispers. For all it carries as far as the two of them, Nie Mingjue does not think it is meant for him, no more than anything else is, by blood and bond and birthright. It is admission, penance taken aloud. "What if you go and I never see you again?"

Nie Mingjue cannot leave this unremarked upon. "Huaisang," he interrupts, touching his hand to his elbow, ginger, mindful of both it's mangle and his brother's attempted mending. "I'm here. I will always be here to protect you."

Nie Mingjue feels Nie Huaisang tense in how he sees it, the ripple of motion between the water-drape of his sleeve. "You can't make that promise to me," he retorts, too quick, all hard, voice jerking around it with the force he is not using and would never use to pull himself away. "Not when you've broken it once already."

It's unfair, but that makes it no less true. Nie Mingjue pulls in a breath he doesn't need, deep, then sighs it out, just as his body remembers to. "Huaisang—"

Nie Huaisang's mouth twists in contrition, and Nie Mingjue stops, spilling them sharply into a jagged, confronting silence. The rain has slowed, between the seconds that they have been suspended aloft, here, time stood still and in flight all at once.

Then, "I should have protected you," Nie Huaisang confesses, aching.

Nie Mingjue lets the lace of his fingers around him draw tighter, firm. He may not know his strength, anymore, but that he could never hurt his brother with it— that constant remains certain. "That was not your burden," he tells him. It was never the life he wanted his brother to have, to caretake his devolution, to witness his downfall. He deserved better than the fate of the sons and brothers who came before him. He needs Nie Huaisang to understand that, again, as he understood it once before, as he seems to have since forgotten in Nie Mingjue's absence.

"It was my duty." Nie Huaisang drops his hand, the swoop of his arm slipping out of Nie Mingjue's fingers. "You protected me for a lifetime. Where was I when you needed me?"

You were where I needed you, Nie Mingjue thinks. It sits heavy on his tongue, but he dares only to speak around its weight. "How could you have known, Huaisang?" Nie Mingjue had not, not until it was too late. Nie Huaisang is a different wit, his brother's complement, and Jin Guangyao was something else again entirely.

"I should have," Nie Huaisang says simply, as if that is that. But he is not speaking of how he should have known Jin Guangyao was behind it, Nie Mingjue realises. He thinks he should have known something was wrong with Nie Mingjue. That it could only have been fixed if he'd seen it.

Nie Mingjue takes a breath, again, letting its redundance shape the space he can't bring words to fill. He does not blame Nie Huaisang. He could never blame Nie Huaisang. But he cannot deny himself the wound of it, the span of his brother's belief that he was changed for the worse, irreconcilably, and how much further it sprawls in the last of his living memory than their reharmonisation. Love leaves that scar to run deep, but its mar is a secret that is best kept.

"You can be furious with me after," says Nie Huaisang. "But I need you to forgive me now."

"What is there to forgive?" Nie Mingjue asks.

"What I need to do to keep you here," is all Nie Huaisang answers. He turns his head away from the very sound of himself, and then his body follows, until he has put his back to his brother, his face to the rain.

His debt is indenture, then, if it is not paid yet. Nie Mingjue merely draws his coat back over Nie Huaisang's head, readying it to catch the lazy dribble of the clinging water as they step back out into the street, and does not ask again. He does not need to speak in things he has no choice in. He does not need to think on things where he would choose no differently, asides, in matters where there has only ever been and only ever will be one answer.