swear on the blood that branches

That night, Nie Mingjue dreams of Qinghe, but it is a Qinghe that is far from home.

The winter sun that bakes his skin is the same that always hangs in the sky; the wind that sounds through the willowing branches the one that always sings. The mountains jut ever-eternal from the maw of the earth, closed around the breach of his body. But Nie Mingjue understands it is wrong from the explanation that is so bone-set and blood-deep that it cannot leave his tongue, it can only be known.

This is the fate of all things that return: there is no coming back from wronged as anything but unwhole. Deviation splintered Nie Mingjue; death shattered him. Parts have been lost in the piecing. In sleep, where the veils run sheer and the lines draw thin, Nie Mingjue's own vacuity compels him to walk out in search of the rest of himself.

It is a dangerous journey he lacks any choice in making. It is less a possibility as it is an intended inevitability that he will step out too far. He is an insignificant cost for a cosmic rebalancing, and one day he will be tendered as due.

Today was not that day, so tonight will not see it paid. So long as there is a tether, it will draw taut. So long as there is Nie Huaisang, Nie Mingjue will remain.

Nie Mingjue stands in place, static, and the dream shimmers around his intrusion. It is simple in its clarity and monotonous in its familiarity. There is no Baxia. There is no reliving. There is only him, the world, and waiting.

When the thread that binds has unspooled, Nie Huaisang finds him.

Sometimes, here, Nie Huaisang looks like any number of his selves, and other times he does not, but he is always, without question, Didi. Nie Mingjue could find him in the blindest dark, no matter his face or form. Here, tonight, now, Nie Huaisang is resplendent in his brightest recognition: torched by Sunshot, yet unascended from Koi Tower. Steel, once-folded. Heel-turned and half-forged. He wears the clothes he killed in, the paired marital vestments to the ones Nie Mingjue died in.

"What do you need?" his brother asks, with a voice too sharp for his soft mouth.

What does he need? What is there left that he doesn't? If Nie Mingjue split himself from throat to belly, he would be measured and found hollow, wanting; if he opened Nie Huaisang up at the door of his ribs he'd spill out overflowing with Nie Mingjue's lacking.

How can I belay you? is always the question Nie Huaisang is truly asking. What do I have left to give to keep you?

Nie Mingjue does not know. He is not sure if he did that he would be allowed to say.

"All right," Nie Huaisang says, taking his answer from the unsaid. The warmth curling his smile does not climb to the cold peak of his eyes. This is how Nie Mingjue knows him to be real. As real as anything else here, as anything else could ever be. "Okay, Da-ge. Kneel."

Nie Mingjue does. His feet leave dirt; his knees meet stone. Distance crosses instantaneously; the shift of terrain ephemeral. It is not so strange to be beyond the gates of the Unclean Realm in one beat, then held abreast in its throne room the next. He will be moved regardless.

"Put your hands behind your back," Nie Huaisang tells him. He is too close to touch. Nie Mingjue does; elbow to rib still dressed, forearms folded parallel now naked. "Hold them there."

Nie Mingjue does not need to be told. He wants nothing more but. Before him, silk sleets off Nie Huaisang's skin, cascading him bare, until all that is left is unbound sable hair framing his porcelain face. The corner of his mouth lofts higher, edging preyful. He steps around Nie Mingjue to the throne, until he is gone from one sense, left spanning in all the rest.

A hand finds Nie Mingjue's hair, then another, another, another— their fingers stitching in, pulling the tresses tight to tensing. The rest of Nie Mingjue's breath heaves out of him, hissing threadbare. Nie Huaisang combs the claw of them all through until they are freed, then returns them, blunt nails to scalp, knots snared.

"Count them," Nie Huaisang tells him, settling in somewhere above him, a parapet looming a battlefield, his presence all at once pointed and pervasive. Nie Mingjue's cock twitches between the splay of his legs and starts to swell. He feels denied of his body; detached of this pleasure. It is happening to a him that is elsewhere. Happening to the him that is all the more deserving. Happening to the him that needs it less than the broken thing that is here and brought to the tender cradle of his own brother's heel.

Nie Mingjue counts the braids as Nie Huaisang's slippery slim fingers separate them; calls them as they are given shape. He turns their names over on his tongue until his mouth can no longer hold anything but raw noise, too unrefined in any aspect to speak to language any ancient approbation. He cannot breathe for the choke of Nie Huaisang's hands in his hair. He cannot die for the ache in his cock as it drips down onto the stonework below.

"Da-ge," Nie Huaisang husks, dual-toned, clotted animal. Something brushes the dip of his spine, ghosting like an exhalation. Then, Nie Huaisang's foot strokes up between his thighs, smearing sweat, toes pointing up snug behind his balls. It is just the tip of a pressure, and it is all that Nie Mingjue needs to be pushed over. He comes violently, slammed into and shouting, head throwing back as his spend splatters up his chest and sucked-in belly. He thinks Nie Huaisang speaks to him, but he cannot hear it to be sure. There is only ringing silence in his ears and white behind his wide-shut eyes.

It goes, it goes, it goes, then— it stops. Sweat stings his eyes and bloodies the taste in his throat. He swallows thickly to whet its appetite. The last of his pleasure crests, its molten boil build snuffing out. He does not know how long it has been. He does not know how long is left. Time moves slowly in sleeping, to stillness and then stagnation. Only on waking does it take its ugly, rattling breath, and forge back on again.

Every night such as this is another small death; his unmaking and his restitution.

"Again," Nie Huaisang demands, low. There is no making plainer his affectation; purer his affection. His foot falls away from between Nie Mingjue's legs. There is only the clutch of his hands grounding Nie Mingjue to root and soil again.

Nie Mingjue starts again. And again, and again, until he is turned over into morning, waking with his hand tangled in his hair, scalp stinging; with his cock flushed thick and throbbing, pinned between his thigh and the bed. Until he is back. Until all it takes is the feather fleeting brush of the heel of his palm to his shaft and he is spilling, filthying wet the overused mess he's already made of himself.

He stays, held, until his spend sticks to cotton and skin and cools dry. Until the discomfort straddles punitive. Then, slowly, he rises: first to knees, then to feet; shaking free the stone-set stiffness of his limbs. And then, surely, he riles: willing blood to run, breath to take; preparing to live for another day yet.