Nie Mingjue wakes, and he is not within his guest rooms at Koi Tower.

Perhaps this should concern him, and yet, it does not. Certainly, months ago, it may well have, but— times change. It is no longer so strange, for him, to come to without the knowledge of when or where he has gone from. Nie Mingjue’s memory frays and fades with the passage of days, and with it goes, every now and then, his awareness of the time he still inhabits. A moment of anger, here; an hour of black, there. It is not the first morning he has found himself in an unfamiliar place, with the undesirable task ahead of him to piece together that which he’s left behind.

Nie Mingjue looks up at the thatched roof overhead, feels the flat wood of the bed against his back, and grounds himself, a between to an above and a below. The tree, rooted in the soil, stretching to the sky. He permits himself to be calm; prompts himself to be steady. The morning is quiet, for now, and has no apparent need of him.

Nie Mingjue sinks inward, and sifts through himself, exactly how he was taught to, long before he even first held his sabre. He seeks out the body of the man beneath the blight of the malignance. It takes long minutes; longer than it ever once did. But Nie Mingjue is yet fortunate, and finds what he reaches for, draws it back to his surface, drapes it over his skin.

The morning is still quiet. Nie Mingjue sits up slowly, feeling his muscles stretch and shudder, as if shaking off a stiff disuse, and sets his feet down on the hang tu floor. His wrist clicks when he holds out his hand; his fingers twitch and tense when he tries to fan them.

It is only when Baxia does not answer his call for it that Nie Mingjue feels the first stirrings of panic, the scales tipping towards unseating his precariously held balance. It builds; burgeons, and— laughter peals into the room, slipping in underneath the door to sever Nie Mingjue’s nascent dread. Though its shrill edge is dulled by distance, he would recognise that voice anywhere; adrift in a sea of uncertainties, it is the only familiarity Nie Mingjue needs to settle the storming swell arising around him, to stem the tide of his unease.

He rises the rest of the way. He’s slept, it seems, in his clothes, but there is nothing he can do about his hair without knowing where any of his possessions are. And, well, it is no longer so strange for him, anymore, either, to appear unkempt before more than his family, both by blood and brotherhood. Whoever Nie Huaisang is laughing with, out in the yard or field or whatever it is that lies beyond ramshackle mudbrick walls and rotted wood, will not be the first to see Nie Mingjue as more of a shadow than a self.

Nie Mingjue has to stoop to slide out beneath the low arch of the doorway, and again for the thatched eaves overhang. The sun is high in the blue-washed sky, and he squints against the sting of its light for the seconds it takes for him to adjust. The ground is warm beneath his bare feet. It is not hard to find Nie Huaisang; his silhouette a splash of silver and black against a backdrop of roaming grass green and boot-flattened dirt brown. His robes are trim, tailored tightly against the slip of his frame, no swimming skirts or draping sleeves to snatch around his ankles and wrists. His head is tilted, as if in thought, and Nie Mingjue can see the point of the black monture of one of his fans protruding from the slope of his arm.

There are two men with him, clad in Qinghe Nie grey. Nie Mingjue does not recognise either of them, but this, too, is not new. It has grown increasingly harder for him to retain the faces of the younger disciples, and even the older ones, now and again, ones he has taught and trained with, ones who have stood by him for years.

The hills do not roll like this in Lanling, but they do in Qinghe. How much time has he lost, that he can sleep in one province and wake up in another? He takes a step forward and starts down the winding garden path, hands flexing idly at his sides.

He is noticed by the disciple to his brother’s left, first, who stiffens, eyes drawing wide. “Sect Leader Nie!” He snags Nie Huaisang by the elbow as he shouts, overtly and overly familiar, and Nie Huaisang startles out from beneath the touch, whipping around to cast a searching glance over his shoulder.

Their eyes meet, and the shift in his brother’s expression is enough to stun Nie Mingjue into stillness. For a breath, Nie Huaisang looks— barely describable. Barren, broken open, wounded and wronged, before it is swept aside, smoothed over into something settled and sure. Nie Huaisang’s fingers drum against his fan, almost in thought, three short alternating taps before he’s sliding the remainder of the way out from beneath the hand that has snared him and scurrying up the short slope to meet Nie Mingjue partway.

It catches, the sight of it, somewhere nestled deep in Nie Mingjue’s head and deeper still in his chest, taking root, but he cannot tend to it at this very moment, and so it must be left.

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang greets him, his lips twitching around his smile as his voice scrapes out, strained. He touches his fingers to his throat, tracing the bob of it as he swallows, his other hand snapping his fan shut and stowing it in his belt. There is a peculiarity to him that Nie Mingjue can’t place, and he cannot tell if it is borne of his own inherent imbalance or if it is something insurgent in Nie Huaisang.

He is too tidy and too angular under Nie Mingjue’s scrutiny. Jagged around his edges in a way he has never been when both of their rages rest quelled; almost as if the beast of their sect that sits beneath his skin has pulled itself up to the surface in a mirror of Nie Mingjue’s.

“Huaisang.” His brow furrows at the sound of his own voice, dulled by desuetude.

Nie Huaisang, unshaken, reaches for him, and Nie Mingjue allows himself to be taken in hand. “Come back inside,” he says, brushing past. His other hand rises, as if to flatten against his arm in insistence, but he stops mid-motion, fingers tapping absently against the air instead, thinking better of his initial intent. There is movement behind them, and Nie Mingjue feels himself tense, instinctive, a half-second before Nie Huaisang’s thumb circles the flare of his pulse, the cuff of his fingers flexing.

Nie Mingjue breathes in; out; in again. He closes his eyes; opens them; and allows himself to strung along at the wrist by slender fingers and a soft smile, back to where he started.

The unspoken promise that Nie Huaisang will apprise him is not unkept. The moment they are back inside, Nie Huaisang releases Nie Mingjue’s wrist and inclines his head, slowly, towards the bed.

This, too, is familiar, now, in ways it once wasn’t. Even between them, there were new duties of care to uncover and undertake, as Nie Mingjue began to rapidly deteriorate. This is but one of many: Nie Huaisang knows him well and knows him best, and so it is his hand that is the deftest at leading Nie Mingjue back to himself when the need arises for him to lend it.

Nie Mingjue sits himself down on the lip of the wood, folds his hands together within the cradle of his lap, and sets his gaze on the slope of Nie Huaisang’s spine as he unties his belt and wraps it around his fan.

“What is the last thing you remember?” Nie Huaisang asks, when his fingers are pinching the neck of his sleeveless outer robe, gathering it up to strip it back from the slopes of his shoulders.

“Koi Tower,” Nie Mingjue answers, steady. “When we retired to our rooms.”

He does not miss the way his brother flinches, or the way he so seamlessly stitches it into a surreptitious stutter of his fingers, his breath sighing out of him. “We’re in Qinghe,” he says. His voice is too even; deliberately pitched, convincingly controlled. “Near the border of Gucheng.”

Even if they had left expediently, the morning after their arrival, it is a half day’s flight from Lanling to Qinghe’s outskirts. Nie Mingjue is missing, then, at least one day, though it is far more likely he is missing at least two.

Nie Huaisang flicks his outer robe out across the low-slung table and turns back towards him, fingers hooking in his sleeves. There is little give in them, from what Nie Mingjue can see, with how his nails scrabble and scratch at the embroidery, but he gets them up to his elbows by the time he has ambled with no apparent hurry across the room to join Nie Mingjue at the bed. The lush silver-lined koi scale pattern of the fabric is a stark shock of colour against his paler skin.

“What happened?” Nie Mingjue asks, as he untangles his fingers and holds out his hand, palm upturned, for Nie Huaisang to take.

Nie Huaisang touches the tips of his fore and middle fingers to Nie Mingjue’s bared wrist, and Nie Mingjue feels the anticipated caress of his spiritual energy as it cascades through the conduit of their contact.

“Missing settlement,” Nie Huaisang explains. He sinks down, sits astride Nie Mingjue on the bed, the flow of his energy stalling as his fingers stumble up Nie Mingjue’s forearm, beneath the draping fabric of his wide-brimmed sleeve. “A nearby village noticed it before we did. The first two men we sent found nothing, so we sent five back.” He straightens, shifts his hand, and rights the flow of his energy, makes it better. He doesn’t meet Nie Mingjue’s eyes, focusing the narrow point of his gaze on the furl of his fingers instead. “Six, with me.”

The oppressive sense that nothing is correct only compounds the more he speaks, until Nie Mingjue feels as if his turmoil has become a rift in itself, writhing in the pit of his gut. Every new step speaks to days behind it; of having such a report reach them, of sending men, of debriefing them, of sending more. We, he says, but if any of the five other men were Nie Mingjue, he would have made it apparent. No matter what else is happening here, no matter all the days Nie Mingjue is missing, it is undeniable that Nie Huaisang has come without him; that Nie Mingjue’s presence, while not unwelcome, was both unexpected and unanticipatable.

It is not that Nie Huaisang is lying. Nie Mingjue knows many of those tells, more of them than Nie Huaisang realises. It is that Nie Huaisang is telling the truth without disclosing the parts of it with graver hefts, avoiding the admissions that carry with them consequences.

“Huaisang,” Nie Mingjue presses, “what happened in Lanling?”

Nie Mingjue watches as Nie Huaisang’s eyes dart away, beneath the dark swoop of his eyelashes. Watches as his expression shutters on the parts of his face not shrouded by the dip of his chin and the fall of his hair.

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang says, quiet, but then he stops. The look on his face, the one that he has brought to rest over his features, turns distant. Far away. He opens his mouth; closes it. Takes his time, between seconds, as though he is considering the sum of both a dismissal and a lie before he settles on the honesty that Nie Mingjue deserves. “Do you really— is that all you remember, from that night? Nothing else, after we parted?”

There is—

There is— something, clawing around the edges of his mind, murky and mordant. Something surely important, skirting shy of the span of his reach.

Nie Mingjue nods in answer.

“I see,” says Nie Huaisang. His mouth curls into something wan, troubled as much as it is troubling, and Nie Mingjue— knows, within some sense of himself, what it means before his brother even parts his lips again to continue. “I thought I was beginning to understand all of the tricks of… ah, well.”

He trails off, lifts his fingers from Nie Mingjue’s wrist to dam the pour of his energy between them, and turns Nie Mingjue’s hand over between both of his own, cupping his palm around his knuckles. Nie Mingjue curls his fingers, lets them curve around the side of Nie Huaisang’s hand, holding him, in turn, an anchor as much as he is himself anchored.

“I did not come with you,” Nie Mingjue states, aloud and at last. The question is inherent in it, why and why not; it needn’t be asked.

“You didn’t,” Nie Huaisang tells him. He takes a breath, tightens his grip, then, “You couldn’t. You’re— dead.”

Dead.

It is not the blow of it that Nie Mingjue feels, but the rend of its resound, a breath later. Of course. Of course, how could Nie Mingjue be anything but dead? What else could have kept him from Nie Huaisang’s side, kept him from guarding him on such a venture?

Their time left together was to be brief. He’d admitted as much to his brother, in Suoxian Pavilion, how he had damned himself to his own early death. Had accepted it wholly the moment they had stepped out from their ancestral halls, the spirit banished, their souls bereft. Had tried, of course, to forestall the foretold for Nie Huaisang’s sake, but he had always doubted there was a way back from the depths he had already traversed. Had known he’d sealed his fate the first time he’d raised his hand to Nie Huaisang, who trusted Nie Mingjue far more not to harm him than Nie Mingjue could trust himself.

That blow hadn’t come, then, but the fear that it would remained. It had made the inevitability easier to cope with, in its way, but harder, as well. He could not hurt Nie Huaisang if he was gone, but he could not protect him, either.

How different Nie Huaisang looks, now, beneath an appraising eye. Too different for the stretch of days, but not for the span of a death. It makes so much sense, slides back into place what was set aside in his awareness, off-centre, since he awoke. He is still his brother, only more something changed, now, than something the same. Eyes a little colder, expressions a little stiller. Like the shift of the season; an autumnal pond, no longer a summer spring. Not quiet, but quieter; nothing grand and sprinting out of bounds, a naivety and brightness left unchecked, but something honed to a fine edge, wielded steadily and surely and well.

A body bent beneath the burden of a mantle his shoulders were never meant to bear. Sect Leader Nie. It was not Nie Mingjue that the disciple called to, out in the yard, but Nie Huaisang. Nie Huaisang, who he had reached for with such an accustomed gesture, one meant to pull his charge away from an encroaching unknown.

Nie Mingjue does not need to know how he met his end. Not yet. A dead body is no less dead for the knowledge of how it came to be. He wonders, still, if that was all there was to it, that he burned bright until he burned out. He suspects it was brilliantly and brutally blinding enough that it robbed them both of the opportunity to properly prepare for what was meant to come after it.

But, well. It doesn't matter. It doesn’t matter, not however violently he left, not when he is here again, and there are more important things to be done than pondering on the past and the purpose of his presence. There are more important questions that he still must ask.

“How long?” Nie Mingjue asks, voice tight. Then, “Huaisang.” A warning; he knows how his brother will try to dance around it, what he is truly being asked, if he is left unchecked.

Nie Huaisang’s hands clamp down around his, the sweat beading up in the cups of his palms smearing on Nie Mingjue’s skin. He watches Nie Huaisang’s bottom lip catch on his teeth as he sucks in a whistling breath.

“Fifteen years,” is Nie Huaisang’s answer.

Fifteen years. Fifteen— Nie Mingjue grits his jaw; feels the bone creak more than he hears it, his teeth grinding together. Nie Huaisang swipes his thumb against his straining fingers, his blunt nails scratching down the back of his wrist. Almost the entirety of the time they had with one another, Nie Huaisang has now been without. An age; an eternity.

A lifetime.

Very well. There is nothing that can be done about that and then, and everything that can be done about this and now. So. Nie Mingjue bids his heart to settle, blinks away the wet sting hemming his eyes, and swallows, harsh, to slacken the thread of tension tied around his throat.

“Tell me what you know,” Nie Mingjue instructs. If his voice shakes as he speaks, so be it.

The command breaks through Nie Huaisang’s trepid guard, and Nie Mingjue observes him as a gentle gladness slips into its space and settles on his features. It is a reprieve, for now, from an unpleasant obligation. They will have to speak of it. They both know they will have to speak of it. They can speak of it later.

His fingers twitch around Nie Mingjue’s hand, but he makes no move to untangle their clasp. “Ah,” he starts, though it comes out more as a breath girding a laugh. “It’s less than what I thought I did, hours ago.” His smile turns rueful, as he admits it. “Now that you’re here.”

“I would still hear it,” Nie Mingjue insists.

Nie Huaisang’s fingers begin to drum against the back of his hand as his head tilts, his mouth pursing in thought; his features and frame both adopting a countenance of pointed focus. It’s a sight to behold, the way his brother’s very visage shifts when something seduces out of him the hard-won prize of his interest, and one that Nie Mingjue has always found all too rare a fortune to witness.

“We’re within an array,” Nie Huaisang recounts. His words are concise; his tone clipped. “Something about the three of us that were trapped distinguished us from the three that were not, but it’s not obviously determinable what. I don’t think it is random, or requires a minimum of… people, to trigger.” He pauses for a beat, flicking his eyes up towards the thatched roof as he tongues at the swell of his bottom lip. “The spellwork either induces some level of meditative state, or imprisons within a dreaming state. Given that you are here, and you’re— it is more than likely the latter.”

Even kept brief, his summary of it speaks to a complex intricacy of the spellwork in play. Daoist magic has always been Nie Huaisang’s strength, but it is commendable that he has confidently determined so much from so little. Nie Mingjue doubts, for all his sudden arrival and everything it could mean, from the proposed duality of this place’s stakes to the potential foe beyond its veil, that his imposition will be an impediment.

The immediacy of his concern, then, is better pointed elsewhere: not to why any of them are here, but to what being here will do to any of them the longer they stay. There is always a catch, after all. Nie Mingjue is certain it is not so simple as to be merely a complicated cage; if it were, there would be no challenge in it for Nie Huaisang.

“How long have you been here?” Nie Mingjue asks. Nie Huaisang halts the rhythmic patter of his fingers, and the back of Nie Mingjue’s hand begins to pang, dull, from the echo of his tapping.

“Three weeks.” Nie Huaisang hums, and his eyes flick down to their joined hands, gaze tracing the line of Nie Mingjue’s arm, from wrist to elbow to shoulder, considering. “I’m not certain if time passes the same between both points. Three weeks is too long for someone not to come looking for us. But it’s possible, too, that the array can maintain more than one state.”

Nie Mingjue’s hand feels hot, heated to near-scalding from the vice of Nie Huaisang’s palms, the press of his warmth into Nie Mingjue’s skin. He shifts slightly, seeking to abate it, and feels the tremor in Nie Huaisang’s fingers in turn, sees the flit of something— complicated, cross Nie Huaisang’s face. He decides, easily, that any discomfort can be endured for the sake of not seeing such an expression take root.

Three weeks. Even if time has not passed at the same clip beyond the array, that does not change how it has been experienced here; that it has been lived through, hour by hour, by Nie Huaisang and his men.

“What have you observed?” It is an inadequate question, in many respects, but Nie Mingjue is unsure how else to put it, and so it will have to do.

The drum of Nie Huaisang’s fingers resumes, fluttering, against the back of Nie Mingjue’s hand. “There’s only so far we can travel in any direction away from this farm before we seem to loop back in a circle. Twenty-eight li is the limit to the south. Wencheng is mapping the east today, and Yongrui the west.”

He pauses, brow furrowing, lips parting around his exhale. Neither of those names mean anything to Nie Mingjue, and Nie Huaisang seems to have caught himself on the thorn of that realisation. Nie Mingjue circles his thumb against Nie Huaisang’s palm and reaches between them with the hand left idle in his lap. It skates his brother’s slim thigh, and comes to settle, sturdy, across the span of it, squeezing down.

It's enough: Nie Huaisang takes a breath and resumes. “Ah, right, right.” He clicks his tongue, the corners of his mouth twitching around his smile. His knee judders, once, sharp, and Nie Mingjue feels the shift of his thigh beneath his skirts as he tenses. “Everything is— convincing, as well. What happens to the body feels real enough to suggest, uh, a permanence to what happens here.”

He doesn’t elaborate, but he doesn’t need to. It stands to his reason that there is a connection, a bridge between the places that is secure enough to make the risk to them grave, to mean that a death here will carry through to waking.

If Nie Mingjue has a body left, it is no longer one he can call his own. It is a crude thing to think, most especially when the actuality of it for him is still so raw, but— if it will be of use in keeping his brother safe, well. There was already no sacrifice too great for that. Regardless of whether or not he is a spectre or a shade, as long as he has something to give, it is his duty to ensure it goes to Nie Huaisang.

“The dream damages you,” Nie Mingjue presupposes. It is a blind swing, but an enlightened one.

The blow lands; strikes true. Nie Huaisang tenses, muscles drawing impossibly tauter, beneath Nie Mingjue’s hand, his fingers clawing, snapping shut around his hand like a maw.

“It— yes,” Nie Huaisang admits, concededly compunctious. “Spiritual energy replenishes, but the pool erodes.”

Nie Mingjue recalls the join of their hands, the wave of his brother’s energy as it wreathed through his meridians. “Huaisang.” The reprimand rips out of him, ragged. It is beyond hope or help; the thought of Nie Huaisang coming to harm reflexively rouses his not-quite-rage, makes the edges of his sight blur red. Even if the hurt is by Nie Huaisang's own hand; especially when it is for Nie Mingjue.

“Da-ge, it’s okay,” Nie Huaisang assures him. He shifts again, shuffling forward, closer, his boots scuffing along the dirt floor. “I promise. Even with my weak constitution, I'm not in any danger yet.”

For all he sounds certain, Nie Mingjue knows it could be his sheer wilfulness backing the assertion instead of surety. He flexes his hand between Nie Huaisang’s, and lets it take over the urge to speak the protest that comes more instinctually to him.

Nie Huaisang’s hands are still soft to the touch. Fifteen years without Nie Mingjue, and he’s kept himself safe in ways that have not firmed his figure, have not roughened his fingers. That was all Nie Mingjue had ever wanted for him. And yet, to see it— it settles something in his heart, but stirs something worse in its place.

“I had to be sure,” Nie Huaisang continues, just as the quiet is on the cusp of drifting into silence, “that it was you.”

He meets Nie Mingjue’s gaze, his fingers stilling once again. So few words said, but their multitudes hang so heavily between them.

“That I was real,” Nie Mingjue manages. He had considered it, the moment he’d learned he was dead, so why wouldn’t Nie Huaisang, who already knew that to be true when he turned and saw Nie Mingjue?

“No,” Nie Huaisang replies, the word spilling out in tandem with the squeeze of his fingers, “no. I knew that when I saw you. I just, uh, wasn’t sure how… much, of you, you were.” His laugh seems to surprise even him, his eyes widening at the note of it, short and sharp. “It sounds strange, now that I’ve said it.”

While Nie Mingjue may not see the sense in it, he thinks he understands the sentiment. Hope often begets hesitation; it is one thing to be certain and another to have confirmation.

He’s not sure he would have been able to tell if he was real or not, here, given how he struggled with it while he yet lived. He’s glad that Nie Huaisang still can.

“It does,” he says, soft, and Nie Huaisang’s nostrils flare as he snorts.

“You’re teasing me.” The corners of his eyes crinkle faintly as he beams. “Even after I worked so hard. Shouldn’t you be praising me?”

Nie Mingjue’s own small smile comes without consideration. But that is not such a terrible thing. “You did well,” he says, with absolute sincerity.

Nie Huaisang’s expression contorts into a muted lour, his vulnerable vibrance hewed at the neck. “Thank you.” His voice cracks around it; his face falls. Nie Mingjue’s hand rises from Nie Huaisang’s thigh to catch him by the chin, fingers circling his jaw as the first sob shakes out from between his clenched teeth. “Ah.”

“Come here,” Nie Mingjue says, because there is nothing else he can. Nie Huaisang’s grip tightens all the more impossibly around his hand, until the skin pulled taut over his knuckles turns sallow, his fingers shaking with the strain of it. As though he knows he is powerless to do anything to stop Nie Mingjue from slipping away again, but he must still pour all of himself into the trying.

Nie Mingjue slides his hand along the jut of his jaw, the column of his throat, and draws Nie Huaisang in by the latch of his fingers around his nape. Nie Huaisang goes to him without even a primal resistance, flows into him like water, his knees thrown over Nie Mingjue’s thigh in the service of crawling in closer, half into his lap, his face nuzzling in through the curtain of his hair to tuck against his neck.

“So much for being worthy of your praise,” he jests, and though his voice is light, Nie Mingjue can feel the way his lips twitch around it against his skin, the blade of it turned back onto himself, poised to flay. Nie Huaisang’s heart thunders against the brush of Nie Mingjue’s fingertips, brought flush to his brother’s sternum by the desperate clutch of his hands. The beat of it so loud it is almost as if it means to bludgeon through the bone of his ribcage and break free of him. It drowns out even Nie Mingjue’s, the sensation beneath his fingers subsuming the sound strumming in his ears.

“Don’t be foolish,” Nie Mingjue chides. There is no way to mellow his tone enough to not make the words cut, on their own, no matter how kindly he means them. And so, he smoothes over the sharpest edges of it with the knead of his palm on Nie Huaisang’s nape, the press of his chin into his hair, his cheek grazing the band of his silver guan.

Nie Huaisang’s laugh gusts across Nie Mingjue’s throat, breath damp-hot. “Sorry,” he says, and, “ah, this was not— sorry.”

He lowers his hands to his lap, slow, almost absent, and Nie Mingjue’s fingers, still ensnared, follow the downward slope, trailing his stomach and the laddering creases of his robes. He does not return to the half spun thread of his thought, and so Nie Mingjue can only guess at what he may have intended to say: what I expected or what I wanted you to see; something too telling, something not telling enough, more and less and anything in-between.

Don’t be, he thinks, but does not manage to say, even given the long minutes Nie Huaisang takes to gather himself back together before he straightens, demure. Nie Mingjue lets the weighted words fall away, and curves his hand back around Nie Huaisang’s throat to cup his jaw in their stead. He swipes the pad of his thumb across the beaded tear that Nie Huaisang has not managed to surreptitiously smear into the collar of Nie Mingjue’s robe, and he feels Nie Huaisang’s jaw shift underneath his palm in tandem with the tender bloom of his smile across his lips.

“You’ve been well,” Nie Mingjue says, “these past years.” It is a question, no matter how he states it, how he turns it over, in his thoughts and on his tongue. A question that he does not want to ask with an answer he knows he must hear. If Nie Huaisang can say— can give Nie Mingjue any averment, no matter how arduous its actual attainment, it would be—

Nie Huaisang’s lips twitch ever-so-slightly. It shades his smile with something private, balanced in the intermediate where fondness first begins to bleed through falsity. “I’m all right, Da-ge.” An agreement; an allowance. “I’ve been well.”

It is as genuine as Nie Huaisang seems capable of being, at this moment, without obtruding on vulnerabilities he is yet unwilling to unveil. His brother’s reservation is not a recoil, but a reluctance borne of recognising the paths between them that must be retreaded.

There were to be no more secrets between them both when Nie Mingjue died; a promise dissevered by their parting, but no less portended for it. They are brothers, and so all will be laid bare between them, in the end, be it in this life; the after; the next.

It does not bring Nie Mingjue the relief it rightfully should.

“I’m glad,” Nie Mingjue says. If nothing else, he is that.

It is for the best that they both ignore the glint in Nie Huaisang’s gaze, like a dagger half-unsheathed in the dark, thought better of, swiftly stowed back away. Neither of them are capable of unsnarling it just yet; both of them are culpable for what will come of freeing it. He releases Nie Mingjue’s hand; Nie Mingjue releases his face; the spell breaks. Nie Huaisang permits himself to rise, out of Nie Mingjue’s lap and off the bed, the unsteady shudder of his legs shrouded by the spill of his skirts as he smoothes them straight.

“Well,” he says, “I,” and then he huffs, his fingers twisting themselves into his robes. He dips his chin towards his chest, but does not avert his eyes from the pry of Nie Mingjue’s gaze. “There is a village to the south. I intended to go there today.”

“We’ll go together,” says Nie Mingjue. It’s unnecessary; his company is rightly assumed.

“Of course.” Nie Huaisang tilts his head, and the undisguised way he lets himself look Nie Mingjue over is— calculated. “But not looking like that. Let me braid your hair for you.”

His smile broadens and brightens all at once, sparked by an indulged mischief, and Nie Mingjue does not resist the one that comes to him so naturally, in turn. Feels it gentle as he watches Nie Huaisang turn, his fingers in his sleeves, tugging them back down from his elbows to his wrists as he steps away.

It is all too simple. That has not escaped Nie Mingjue, not once, as the morning has unravelled itself. But there is only Nie Huaisang, here, to mire him, amidst the slow encroach of a subtle danger, yet unknown and unseen. With proof that his brother is taking the matter seriously, and without the other trappings of his life, it is difficult to needfully complicate the rest. Easier, wiser, to sink into the flow than to struggle against it.

Nie Huaisang returns, qiankun pouch in one hand, the gilded shaft of a peachwood comb in the other. He discards the pouch on the bed with a flick of his wrist, and braces himself with the fetter of his palm on Nie Mingjue’s shoulder as he begins to kick off his boots. Nie Mingjue cups his elbow, evening his brother’s weight out between the both of them, and effortlessly lifts him upright when he cocks his knee and makes to climb.

Nie Mingjue is a practical man, aware of his power and how it determines his place; of what it means he can and cannot change. Dead and here, he has neither. He reminds himself of that as he feels Nie Huaisang’s knees slot in along his flanks, the press of his thighs to his hips as he kneels up.

If one cannot exert, they may bide, but they must capitulate.

“Let me see,” Nie Huaisang muses, his voice a murmur, his lips ghosting the crown of Nie Mingjue’s hair, “if I remember how to do this.” He brushes Nie Mingjue’s hair back, pooling it all together between his shoulder blades, and Nie Mingjue feels the scuff of his fingers and the comb as he strokes up the column of his throat, dancing over unmarred skin.

“Whatever you do will suit, Huaisang.”

Nie Huaisang laughs. Then, he shifts, draws back, spreads his thighs a fraction wider. It’s an anticipatory accommodation for the way Nie Mingjue draws his legs up, how he opens his own hips to cross them at the ankles, feet tucked up on his thighs. He rests the backs of his wrists against his knees, slides his shoulders back, and lets his eyes sink shut at the first scrape of the comb’s teeth across his scalp.

“You may regret that,” Nie Huaisang warns. “I don’t have clasps to do it right. But I know how many braids you need, so. We’ll see.” His hand dips beneath the curtain of Nie Mingjue’s hair, and the backs of his knuckles skim his nape. He separates the strands, gentle, and starts to feed them through the comb’s teeth.

Nie Mingjue pinches his fingers together, and pulls himself back, part by piece, until the stretch of his focus is no longer a span but a sliver. Until there is nothing in his head but the way his body feels as his chest sprawls with each inhale; sags with every exhale; the sound of their breaths. The slide of the comb; the scratch of Nie Huaisang’s nails; the sting that streaks across his scalp with every snag in his hair. All of it dulled, muted down. The tempest tamed for the first time since— since.

Since when? When did Nie Mingjue’s body last belong to him and him alone? When did he last look within himself and not find something nested there, looking back?

Nie Mingjue stiffens, eyes snapping back open, and Nie Huaisang hisses, something astray but apologetic. He twists the hand at his nape enough to allow him to clumsily knead the pad of his thumb against Nie Mingjue’s jaw.

“Almost,” he promises, as though he thinks himself the perpetrator of Nie Mingjue’s spike of discomfort. His hand withdraws from Nie Mingjue’s neck, and Nie Mingjue can see in the play of the shadows how it reaches, vaguely, backward and upward, as his other hand gathers Nie Mingjue’s braids high against his skull.

He realises what his brother is doing in the same second that he hears the snick of a clasp sliding free. “Huaisang—”

Nie Huaisang simply shushes him and fastens his guan in place. “There,” he says. “All done.” Then, “It’s probably passable.” He sounds too breathless for his play at impassivity.

Nie Mingjue uncrosses his legs, plants his feet to the floor, and reaches up to trace the engraved silver of the guan with a finger that he tells himself does not tremble. When he looks over his shoulder, he sees Nie Huaisang, sank back in his kneel, both hands wound in his own hair as he threads a grey ribbon around his braids.

“It’s fine,” Nie Mingjue tells him, for want of something to say that isn’t anything that’s dangerous, rising too close to the surface of his thoughts. Nie Huaisang hums with satisfaction, combs the tails of the ribbon into his hair with his fingers, and clambers past him, off the bed.

“It’ll do,” Nie Huaisang agrees, looking him over. Nie Mingjue makes to stand; completes the motion when Nie Huaisang doesn’t protest, gaze only lifting to follow his rise. “Ah, wait, wait, you haven’t got boots. Do you know where they are?”

His laughter chirrups out of him when Nie Mingjue shakes his head. “Of all the things for this place to be concise about, it would be that detail,” he complains to himself. Nie Mingjue steps out of his way as he reaches down for his own boots, pulling them away from the bed so he can better step back into them. “Wait here for me, I won’t be long.”

He straightens, and then he goes, casting a watchful eye over his shoulder back at his brother all the while. Nie Mingjue waits, but the moment Nie Huaisang has rounded over the threshold, has had his line of sight cut by the wall, Nie Mingjue ceases to be idle.

Nie Huaisang is not gone long. When he returns, the perfunctory sweep of his gaze catches on what Nie Mingjue has put his hands to in the minutes he’s been left: what has been straightened, stowed, and set aside.

“Here,” he says, holding the boots out for Nie Mingjue to take. Nie Mingjue watches him take a half-step, after, towards the bed, before he readjusts, goes for the table instead, where Nie Mingjue has put his qiankun pouch with his outer robe, his belt, his fan.

Even with nothing to hide, even when it is only them, it still feels natural to turn away. To put just enough of their backs to one another to cover something inexact, but no less exposed for its intangibility.

Nie Mingjue is the first to finish, and so he is the first to turn back. For it, he is able to watch Nie Huaisang finish cinching his robe at his waist, the drawstrings of his pouch looped through his belt.

Nie Huaisang’s gaze sweeps him again when he turns, the monture of his closed fan pressed to his chin. The swell of his bottom lip grazes the leaf as he opens his mouth, but it is a moment before his voice follows through. “You should take this, too.”

He holsters his fan, and reaches into his pouch. Nie Mingjue recognises the black pommel of his sabre from where it protrudes from the circle of his fingers the moment he lifts his hand back, shoulder hitching.

“It’s not your Baxia,” he says, deprecatory, as he readjusts his grip, lowers it to the throat of the scabbard. “But it’s something.”

He shrugs stiffly, and then extends it, out into the expanse of space between them both. It is a slight thing, sleek and elegant, nothing like the sabres of the other cultivators of their sect, but no lesser for the difference. Something forged to fit Nie Huaisang, instead of something Nie Huaisang was forced to fit.

Nie Mingjue takes the step forward he needs in order to wrap his hand between the bars ribbing the scabbard, pinning the band beneath his palm. It is light, even after Nie Huaisang relinquishes the full weight of it to him. He can adapt to it.

“There hasn’t been any need for it yet,” Nie Huaisang says, as Nie Mingjue lowers it to his side. “Better for you to have it, though.”

He returns his fan to his hand, wrist pivoting neatly as he unfurls it to waft, lazy, against his chest, the painted mountainside flipped outward. There is a gentleness to his expression, but an expectance to it, too, as of yet unestablished.

There is no need for Nie Mingjue to ask what Nie Huaisang will protect himself with, not when the answer will be his brother’s smile and some manner of a softly spoken You. That is, at least, as it should be. And so, he inclines his head towards the door instead in silent direction, and though there is no question that Nie Huaisang is leading the way, they step off as one, and fall in together.

“No birdsong,” Nie Huaisang says, some minutes later, as if to explain the eerie silence that follows. “I noticed that, first.”

When Nie Mingjue turns his head, Nie Huaisang’s gaze is already lifted up to meet him, fan drifting the slope of his sternum.

“No animals at all,” he continues, when he’s the sole beholder of his brother’s attention, “but there’s meat.”

The walk to the village is not a far one, for where Nie Huaisang has told him it sits, just shy of the southern range they’ve found they can traverse. An hour, if that; longer, for them, for the pace Nie Huaisang has set. Paradoxically harried but unhurried; insistent but idle.

Nie Huaisang is filling the quiet, but the disruption is, by its nature, a diversion. Meant to deflect and disaffirm the way the silence is playing out and over him, the way his body has clutched itself around an expectation. As though he hopes he could deceive Nie Mingjue, could convince him that Nie Huaisang does not now know, intimately, how to brace, blind, for a blow you only know will come, with no sense of when or where to guide you.

How long was Nie Mingjue dead, before Nie Huaisang learned how to chart such a dread, felt it enough in his own skin to put words to it and learn to move against it? Was it years, was it months, or was it less?

Nie Huaisang does not rush to either thread or tear the strand of his thought that he’s left loose between them. Nie Mingjue does not fill the quiet that blooms and burns up again around it. He looks forward instead, leaves it to join the clap of their boots to the dirt, the muss-scrape of their clothes, layers rustling over layers rounding limbs. Listens to it settle underneath the hush of their breaths, scuffed by exertion yet smothered by solicitude.

Unease rakes its fingers down the rungs of Nie Mingjue’s spine. It is not unendurable.

“I have been thinking,” says Nie Huaisang, quiet, at last, “on what it could mean.”

His nails rap against the black iron guard of his fan, once. Swift, sharp. Nie Mingjue looks at him again, and Nie Huaisang looks back.

Nie Mingjue speaks his mind knowing his words will be inapt and inadequate. “It’s magic.” A tool. “It could mean no more than that.” The purpose it serves.

“Maybe,” Nie Huaisang accedes, “but I’m wary of overlooking the symbolism of it, all the same.”

Nie Mingjue does his best to give such things their due respects, but he cannot pretend to understand past what his eyes can witness, what he can wrap his hands around, what he can war against. What he knows of the world in the words the world has told him it works. He thinks himself just, and hopes himself considerate, but there is a luxury in being afforded the time to ponder and interrogate meanings without and within the outright. Theirs is a forthright Dao by its necessity: a soldier would bleed out sooner than a gentleman could reach a decision. Nie Huaisang, with his appreciation for beauty and his propensity for patience, was always more suited to scholarly indolence.

Each of them has always been comprised of what the other most lacks, in that sense. They are two to a whole; competent as independents, but unparalleled when interconnected. This is not a realm where Nie Mingjue’s strengths shine through, but it is one where Nie Huaisang transcends.

“Tell me,” Nie Mingjue says.

Nie Huaisang glances away, eyelids hooding. He scrapes his teeth down the swell of his bottom lip, then tongues, absently, at the worried skin. Even when he parts his mouth to speak, he takes another moment, as if to gather his thoughts, before he lets his voice follow. “The need is filled without the death it is meant to necessitate,” he observes. “I don’t know what is supposed to hold more weight; that it means there is no killing here that can be justified, or that it means it no longer requires a butcher to be sacrificed.”

He meets Nie Mingjue’s gaze. “But the outcome is the same,” he concludes, “in that it actualises the ideal of purity, otherwise impossible to attain.”

Nie Mingjue has learned there is always something that lies underneath the words the literati choose when they talk their circles around matters. A deliberateness in the ways they do not reach their points, in how they leave some things among others unaddressed. His brother’s considerations are less noteworthy than the way he has chosen to share them.

Knowing this renders him no less helpless when it is used amongst and against him. Nie Huaisang is no less a son of Qinghe Nie for his proficiencies in unorthodox weaponry, and he wields the blades of his words as well as any of their people wield a sabre.

“You could be right,” Nie Huaisang relents. He does not look away, but it is a close thing, for the way his face jerks towards his shoulder, as if to hide. “We could both be wrong. I’ll think on it more.”

They see the village on the horizon long before they hear the noise of it, hitched to the breeze and carried down the road to them. Its heart does not beat like a village’s does; no-one flows into it, no-one spills out.

“The people here.” There must be people, after all; Nie Huaisang has made such a point of it to come, shown such complacent confidence in the fact it is here the things he wants today can be found. If it was only a corpse, three weeks with it would have seen it picked clean. A living place is granted similar respects, but separate considerations. “Are they real?”

Nie Huaisang hums, clicks his tongue, bites his lip. “I don’t know,” he replies. “I don’t believe so. They might have been, once.”

Nie Mingjue tips his head, mouth pursing.

“They don’t answer questions,” Nie Huaisang elaborates. “They’re not afraid.”

Nie Mingjue contemplates this. Then, carefully, considering the curl of Nie Huaisang’s mouth and the crimp of his brow, he asks, “Do they bleed?”

His brother’s answering flinch cracks his expression wide open before it crumples back in on itself, the set of it contorting. “Yes,” he admits. He pitches his voice around it to something that's remarkably close to indifference.

The unease digs its claws into Nie Mingjue’s back, breaks skin, draws blood. It’s enough. It’s all he needs to know. It needn’t go any further than here.

“Do they die, Huaisang?”

That Nie Huaisang must tear his gaze away from him is in itself too much and too telling to bear, but Nie Huaisang does not leave that knife half-buried between the notches of Nie Mingjue’s ribs. A small act of resolve, but in no way one of mercy. “They— yes.”

Nie Huaisang slows to match the way Nie Mingjue’s steps have begun to drag, but neither of them stop, nor do either of them look anywhere but ahead.

It’s thorough, in the way Nie Mingjue ultimately expects of Nie Huaisang, but cruel in the way he could never have envisioned him being, not for any sake. Even if they are not real, even if they do not fear, surely, they would have been— the village lies within Qinghe. They’re unarmed innocents. They’re theirs.

Nie Mingjue thinks of how Nie Huaisang stood before him in their ancestral halls and the bravery that spurred his open condemnation. Thinks of his rage, borne of such a reverence for life and a love for all of them that he could feel nothing but betrayed by the truth kept from him, and how Nie Mingjue had bent the knee to it and accepted its cost as fair.

Nie Mingjue had protected Nie Huaisang from much, from most, but he’d never been able to shield him from how inhospitable the world was to him, how inhumane. And yet, for everything he’d seen done and had done to him, Nie Huaisang had retained a gentleness that was itself his innocence. To raise a hand in defence of one’s self or another when threatened with being struck, or to preempt a harm you know with surety will come from one who can be safely called an enemy, they were one thing; to be the hand that struck the defenceless was another. Nie Huaisang had struggled with the former; it’s inconceivable to Nie Mingjue that he’s now become capable of and complicit in the latter.

How can he arrive at the point of the blood on his brother’s hands, then, when he struggles to acknowledge the blade in it first?

Had it been by Nie Huaisang’s own hand that he’d seen the deed done, or had he ordered one of his men to make the blow?

Nie Mingjue’s breath shakes out of him, stuttering and sharp. He tightens his grip on the scabbard in his hand until he feels as if it will give way under his power, will snap and shatter and send the bare blade of the sabre up through his flesh. He must come to a stop, sometime between one thought and another, across breaths, because he sees Nie Huaisang in the corner of his eye circle back to him from the steps he’s taken ahead.

“I’m the only one,” he says, measured, “who comes to the south.” He waits for a moment, lets that implication sink in, set to stone. “They were back, the next time I came.”

It suspends, aloft, between them. Not justifying, not penitent, but something terrible, something cold and other.

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang whispers, after a wait, his breath fraying around it.

He does not say anything else. Nor does Nie Mingjue, even long after they have fallen back into step, have carried themselves far enough down the weave of the path for the sounds of the village ahead to finally blanket them.

Nie Mingjue thinks on it again once, and only once, as they wind their way through the marketplace.

Everyone they pass and meet and speak with behaves as Nie Huaisang intimated they would: they move through the few motions they have with some believable degree of natural fluidity. Young children brush past their knees as they dart through the crowd, knocking them with their elbows. Merchants hawk their wares, beckoning them over to stalls and up to doorsteps. There is the music of merging conversations, the percussion of movement.

There is only so long it all can remain strung overhead before it snaps and slams back to the soil, shattering its own illusion. Answers to questions come, but slowly, and at a spate that seems practised. Answers come, but not for the questions asked, if the questions are the wrong ones, or not asked in time, as if they are a recital, not a recognition.

Nie Huaisang navigates it with the fluency of the well-versed. Every word is punctual, polite, precise, as though he is holding court, not purchasing goods. He knows where to go, what to say, which stalls he will be stopped at and offered wine and fruits to try, and when to step away from the beaten path.

There is a moment— there is a moment, where it all falls out of harmony. Nie Huaisang cannot predict with irreproachable accuracy how the villagers will move around Nie Mingjue, when Nie Mingjue was never meant to be accommodated. And so, it happens like this: within a small shop, where they lack room to do much more than stand between shelving and roof-strung draperies, Nie Huaisang steps to him. He holds a linen robe up to his chest, considering it against the rest of Nie Mingjue. His other elbow is tucked to his ribs, his hand carelessly swung outward, fan balanced between the crook of his thumb and the cup of his palm.

The shopkeep pushes past them. The meat of his arm catches on the point of the iron monture, and Nie Mingjue watches Nie Huaisang’s hand jerk, fingers clawing down, as it tears through fabric and flesh, blood spattering across the leaf.

Nie Huaisang pulls away all too late. The man continues to press on past them, unfazed, blood sleeting down his sleeve. There is no change to his face, there is no hiss to his breath.

Nie Mingjue wonders, then, if that was how it had started. If that had been what Nie Huaisang had seen to set him to the course of his conviction to see that spark of an idea brought to its bitterest conclusion. If it would have been easier for him, or harder, to take the life he did, for the absence of fright, of suffering, when he could fill those voids for himself as much or as little as he liked.

Nie Huaisang’s next inhale shudders, just slightly, just so. He closes his fan and stows it in his belt, giving both of his hands, instead, to the task of holding another robe up against Nie Mingjue, mouth thinning.

Nie Huaisang has become what he himself most reviled, Nie Mingjue realises. He has become what he feared had become of Nie Mingjue.

And— well.

It would not be the first time that Nie Mingjue has set something aside in the alcoves of his mind and left it unassessed, unaddressed. He had learned to move himself around many such matters in his short life, for survival if not necessarily for convenience. Not all things seen and done could be afforded acknowledgement, not when you were born into a world where the fire had already burned up to the doorstep of your home. Not when every sunrise brought another enemy over your borders, and every sunset brought more bodies back over your threshold.

Better to be blind to some horrors than to be broken by them. Nie Mingjue has restrained himself countless times over to the cage of his own forward march in aid of seeing his promises fulfilled, and he can do it here, now, for the promise that has always mattered most to him.

So, Nie Mingjue does not look at the blood drying on the dirt, but at Nie Huaisang, who does not look at him. He takes a steadying breath, watching the backs of Nie Huaisang’s hands rising with the crest of his chest as he wets his mouth and swallows against the dryness of his throat. “Is this necessary?” he asks.

Nie Huaisang tenses, almost imperceptibly, across moments. Then, the press of his lips shifts from pensive to prim, and he lifts his eyes another fraction, bringing his gaze to rest on Nie Mingjue’s throat.

“You have one set of robes,” Nie Huaisang says. There’s a fragile twinge of playfulness to it. “Unless you want to spend the day bare when they have to be washed?”

“Then choose.” It’s not too difficult, to get his hands around his own discomfort, to twist it enough that it can temper his tone with an exasperation that is fonder.

Nie Huaisang’s bottom lip twitches, and his gaze glances higher, setting itself back down just shy of Nie Mingjue’s eyes. “I’m working on it. If they don’t suit you, you might as well stay bare, since you’ll look just as ridiculous either way,” he fusses back, childish. “This is why you could never be trusted to style yourself.”

“Huaisang,” Nie Mingjue prompts, and Nie Huaisang glances up the rest of the way, meeting his gaze. “There are not enough hours of daylight left.”

Nie Huaisang scoffs, the sound whipping into a sharp snap of laughter. “I— yes. Fair! All right.”

He hangs the robes in his hands over the brace of his arm before he turns away, poring more expediently over the fabric. Under Nie Mingjue’s supervision, the last few pieces are chosen swiftly, and when he approaches the counter to set down payment for them, neither he nor Nie Mingjue spare more than a glance at the shopkeep’s arm, still bleeding sluggishly from its gash.

Nie Mingjue’s hastening of Nie Huaisang is, ultimately, for very little. The sun is already well into setting by the time they depart, and no light follows them from the village as the sky darkens above them. Even with Nie Huaisang filling the cup of his hand with conjured flame to help them see, they still must slow the clip of their steps, wary of the way the terrain reshapes in the gloom.

The night brings with it no new noises, but it is more calming, almost, for it to be so unnaturally silent when the dark follows it. Certainly more expected, if nothing else. They talk little, but Nie Huaisang preoccupies the lulls between their words with humming, which soothes the worst of the pervasive malaise.

Time warps in the twilight, even without the interference of trickery. Though they take longer to return, they seem to arrive all the quicker for it. The moon is only a sliver in the sky, but there is a beacon of light on the horizon, a smudge that spreads out with every further forward step, but falls short shy of the outcroppings of the farm’s few buildings, which jut from the hillside like blunted teeth.

Nie Huaisang’s humming fades, the taper punctuated by a sharp inhale, then followed by a sharper whistle. A shrill, spinous thing, slicing at the distance.

A low whistle swings back, the note of it longer, dragging. Nie Mingjue watches Nie Huaisang’s lips crook upward, the stark play of the shadows over his face making the line of his mouth all the more jagged. “They’re back,” he says, loud enough only for the both of them. When he turns his face to Nie Mingjue properly, the false flame in his hand drowns his eyes out, leaving only pooled black. “Oh, you’ll need to be— you should be introduced.”

Nie Mingjue supposes he should. He’s introduced himself innumerable times before, but never as someone so akin to a ghost. Nie Huaisang, at least, looks as similarly lost as Nie Mingjue feels, if only for the moments he allows it to lay bare on his face before he gathers it up behind his smile.

The dual pearls of light begin to sweep down the slope to meet them, bringing with them the shimmer of dark robes and the slow shaping of both men’s statures, their frames given form. There is no guardedness in the way either of them approaches, even though Nie Mingjue yet remains a stranger; it seems it is enough for both that he is at Nie Huaisang’s side.

“Sect Leader Nie,” calls the first, the closest, as he brandishes his lantern. The one who called for him this morning, who reached for him. Nie Mingjue takes stock of him, and the other, as they salute, hands cupped around their knuckles.

Nie Huaisang snuffs the flame in his hand and reaches for his belt, the pad of his thumb tracing the rivet of his fan absently before he grasps it and pulls it free. “Jia Wencheng,” he says, turning the point of his closed fan onto the man closest. The bleed of the lit flames through fogged glass glints off the black iron of the monture, making it look sleek within the coil of Nie Huaisang’s thin fingers, slippery. He lets his wrist curve, languid, drawing the trail of it over to point at the other man. “Yu Yongrui.”

Their eyes all turn to land on Nie Mingjue, almost as if they are as one, near-seamless. Nie Huaisang flicks his fan open with a dainty pivot of his wrist, and brings the leaf of it to rest against his chest. Even in the dim light, Nie Mingjue can see the flecks of blood, dried into the cliffside. “This is my brother,” Nie Huaisang tells them, with a nonchalance that is so perceivably forced that it all but leaves his mouth as something tangible.

The moment freezes for long seconds, then thaws in a snap as both men drop to their knees, arms crossing before them in supplication, lanterns discarded carelessly at their sides. It shocks even Nie Huaisang, whose yelp nearly washes out an awed Chifeng Zun, the utterance itself half lost to the bow of their necks as they press their heads to the ground.

Nie Mingjue reaches, one-handed, for the man closest to him — Yu Yongrui, a lanky thing, all limbs in length — just as Nie Huaisang stoops low and swats Jia Wencheng’s elbow with his fan.

“You show him more respect than you do me!” he exclaims, amply indignant, but the airy lilt in his voice through his blatantly fond smile gives it away as empty of heat, as does the bid within it for both of them to rise. They do start to return to their feet at the prompting, though it is with less haste than what they left them with in the first place, and in Yu Yongrui’s respect, less grace.

“Sect Leader,” Jia Wencheng ventures, once he’s straightened, “that’s simply not true.” There is a tint of reservation to his voice for the casualness of his address of Nie Huaisang in Nie Mingjue’s presence, and Nie Mingjue watches on as Nie Huaisang proceeds to meet it by rolling his eyes like an ill-mannered child.

For what it is, it works: Nie Mingjue can see how it plucks the seed of uncertainty from the ground between them all before it can sprout; how the clench of both Yu Yongrui and Jia Wencheng’s shoulders unravels as the tension lets off the worst of itself.

They seem very comfortable with Nie Huaisang, as Nie Huaisang seems comfortable with them. They seem somewhat— unsurprised, by Nie Mingjue, though Nie Mingjue does not know how surprised they should be. Each of the three observations plait and knot together, their mangle resisting his scrutiny.

“So you say,” says Nie Huaisang, folding his fan and tucking it under his arm. He reaches for his pouch and begins to rummage through its apparently nigh-endless contents, further worsened by the gains of his day with Nie Mingjue, as Jia Wencheng chuffs out a laugh. If there ever was a limit to what any qiankun pouch could hold, Nie Huaisang would be one of the few to consistently butt up against it. The click of his tongue signals his success, and Nie Huaisang wriggles his arm back out, another sack in hand. It is less thrust towards either of his disciples as it is thrust away from himself, and it is Yu Yongrui who catches it, arm snaking out between the jumble of their bodies as Nie Huaisang’s fingers begin to unlatch from the neck of his hold.

“Sect Leader,” says Jia Wencheng, as Nie Huaisang bends past him to snatch up his lantern, “did you want to hear—”

“—No,” Nie Huaisang interrupts, the lift of his chin almost comically churlish. He adjusts his fan underneath his arm then reaches out with his spare hand, pinching his thumb and forefinger around the elbow of Nie Mingjue’s robe. “I’m tired. You’ll still remember it tomorrow, won’t you?”

He gives Nie Mingjue’s robe a small pluck, needling. Nie Mingjue has to tame a reflexive chastisement at Nie Huaisang’s dismissiveness, but he does not miss, as he begins to step back, the way Jia Wencheng opens his mouth before he promptly abandons his words with the reminder of Nie Mingjue’s presence.

Though Nie Mingjue goes first, with Nie Huaisang at his back holding the lantern aloft to light their way, there is no question that Nie Huaisang is leading them. It does not sit right with Nie Mingjue, to delay a debrief in such circumstances, but neither does contesting it, not when it might undermine Nie Huaisang's authority. Foreign as it still is to him, Nie Huaisang is who is deferred to, here, even, arguably, for Nie Mingjue. So, Nie Mingjue exerts the due patience and waits the minutes they take to wander up the path back to the farmhouse, for him to pull the door shut behind them both, for Nie Huaisang to set the lantern and his fan aside, down on the low table.

Nie Huaisang turns towards him before Nie Mingjue is sure of the words he wants to speak. He sees Nie Mingjue’s concern, half phrased in the way he knows his expression sets itself so plainly, and Nie Huaisang’s eyes hood as he reads him, head tilting.

“Wencheng,” he says, realising. “Ah. You think I was— if it was important, he would not have asked, Da-ge, he would have just started to tell. That’s how he is.”

The confirmation — and it is a confirmation, even if it is not quite the one Nie Mingjue intended to seek out — makes something in the pit of him writhe, white-hot. That must show on his face, too, of course, for Nie Huaisang’s gaze flickers with something heated, contorting and inconstruable, before it fades.

“How are you feeling?” Nie Huaisang asks briskly, moving on, hands fluttering at his waist. Nie Mingjue takes his lead, and begins to kick off his boots. What else can he do?

“I’m fine.” It’s the truth, all in all, and requires little reflection. Nie Mingjue lowers his head, and feels the fall of his hair and his braids sweep over the crest of his shoulder as he picks up his boots in his free hand, the other still fastened around the scabbard of Nie Huaisang’s sabre. “Are you?”

Above and across, Nie Huaisang hums, and his pouch clatters against his fan as it is dropped to the table. “I’m tired,” he admits, light. “That was the truth. But that’s to be expected of me.” The smile he graces Nie Mingjue with when he straightens is impish, if delicate, his fingers curling in his belt. “You don’t feel tired at all? No hunger, no thirst?”

“No,” Nie Mingjue says.

“Do those things even need to concern you?” Nie Huaisang asks, but it is not a question for Nie Mingjue, and so it is not a question he answers. By the time they have stripped back to their middle robes, there is the smell of smoke on the air, woody and spiced, curling around from the kitchen outside, almost built up against the furthest wall of the dwelling in afterthought. Perhaps, eventually, it would have been fed through into the room proper, the bed pulled free and a kang built in its place. Everything seems sparse, half-furnished, half-finished.

Nie Huaisang steps to him, and Nie Mingjue lets him take his outer robe, boots, and sabre, to set aside in the space they’re to make do with. He does indeed look tired, up close and under candlelight; paler, thin to a point of harshness. Nie Mingjue watches him put his own order to the clutter; boots to the door, sabre to the table, robes over the headboard of the bed. When he at last sits on the floor at the table, robes flicked out from underneath his thighs, Nie Mingjue joins him without waiting for Nie Huaisang to beckon him over.

“I should have bought wine,” Nie Huaisang muses, as Nie Mingjue flows down to his knees. He busies himself, unnecessarily, with pushing the things on the table further away, making false space out of nothing for Nie Mingjue to rest his hands on the wood. “Ah, but then we might have had to share, and— I can’t believe they both, really—” Nie Huaisang laughs as he jumps between thoughts, shaking his head. His cheek comes to rest on his hand, and he sighs out.

“I’d forgotten the impression you make on others,” Nie Huaisang concludes. Though his tone tries to lighten it, it lands all too heavily. He does not let it lie in the open for long, sweeping it aside before either of them can start to feel the bruise of its blow, the ache of its heft. “Ah, what should they call you? Other than Chifeng Zun.”

Nie Mingjue pulls in a breath, deep, through his nose, and resettles. He raises a brow at Nie Huaisang, which is invitation enough for his brother to continue.

“They’re your men, too,” Nie Huaisang says, cheek pressing more firmly against his hand as he purses his lips. “Shouldn’t they be more familiar? Shishu? Nie-daren? Oh— of course.” His smile broadens. “Lao-Nie.”

Nie Mingjue narrows his eyes at him, at that, and Nie Huaisang laughs, fingertips tapping against his cheekbone.

“No? You don’t like it? Then— Nie-xiong? Mingjue-ge?”

“You’re enjoying this,” Nie Mingjue accuses, amused.

Nie Huaisang’s eyes slide shut, his smile softening. “I am enjoying this,” he admits.

His exhale flutters out from between his teeth as his shoulders sag, frame sinking in on itself. An urge to reach out to him scratches up Nie Mingjue’s wrists, something senseless, and he curls his fingers against the table to stifle it.

“Rest,” Nie Mingjue tells him, and Nie Huaisang blinks his eyes open, slow, brow creasing.

“And then, what—” Nie Huaisang jerks, fingers clawing against his face, the bite of his nails to skin rousing him enough to catch his tongue before the rest of his thought slips free of his mouth. “It can wait a little longer,” is what he chooses, once he’s steady.

For all its guardedness, the blind, desperate flail of his first utterance lies bare between them. Nie Huaisang stopped his words, but could not stop the telling twist of his features, the remnants still strewn in the harsh line of his thin lips and the wetness hemming his eyes.

What if I wake and you are gone? And what can Nie Mingjue possibly say, to that? What guarantees can he give? Is it his right at all, to promise that he’ll remain, at least here, at least now, when he’s broken the promises that have come before?

It is not, he knows, but he must take the risk of promising more and again all the same. With that conviction, he begins to rise and reach in turns, drawing up on his knees as he takes Nie Huaisang by the wrist.

“Up,” he commands. Nie Huaisang startles in the snare of his fingers for the briefest of seconds before he settles and slants into acquiescence, weight sinking into the brace of Nie Mingjue’s strength. With Nie Mingjue shouldering the rest, all he needs to do is get his feet beneath him as they both stand, his arm turning over in Nie Mingjue’s grip so he can clutch his sleeve for purchase.

Words fail Nie Mingjue in the ways they best serve Nie Huaisang, so Nie Mingjue does not say them as he leads Nie Huaisang the half-step around the table, catching him when he stumbles, weariness already well-set in his bones.

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang starts, but whatever else he intends to say is choked on, instead, with a spluttering, stunned gasp as Nie Mingjue efficiently pulls the ribbon from his braids. The hairpins follow, and, freed from the crown of his head, Nie Huaisang’s braids spill down the swoop of his spine.

Nie Mingjue twines the ribbon between his fingers, tucks the pins to the flat of his palm, and has two of the braids unwound before Nie Huaisang grabs his forearm.

“Da-ge, wh— wait, wait.”

Nie Mingjue waits, but does not withdraw; Nie Huaisang’s grip is not a push or a pull, but a pause. They have time enough that he can give some of it over to letting Nie Huaisang find his ground, and even if they didn’t, it would still be an easy forfeit, a natural one.

“I’m okay,” Nie Huaisang murmurs, peering up at him, brow furrowing as his fingers curl tighter.

Nie Mingjue holds his gaze as he reaches, again, for Nie Huaisang’s hair, and resumes his task. “What good will you do anyone,” he admonishes, firm, as the comb of his fingers sinks into the muss of his braids proper, parting them decisively, “when you are like this?”

It takes a moment to break skin and sink in, but when it does, Nie Huaisang’s answering laugh is breathless, cracking and crumbling in on itself. “Using my own words against me is not— fair,” he protests, even as his hand falls away, finds itself flitting against Nie Mingjue’s flank instead, flustered.

Fairness has little to do with the truth of things, but Nie Mingjue does not say this, not here, not even to tease. “You will be grateful for it in the morning,” he says instead, brushing the curled strands under his fingers flat against the shroud of Nie Huaisang’s hair.

“Maybe,” Nie Huaisang says. His fingers skate Nie Mingjue’s thigh when his hand swings, slight, to follow the sag of his body with his sigh. He closes his eyes and dips his chin towards his chest, and Nie Mingjue observes how his countenance frays, in spite of any and all gentleness. “Is there anything you want to know? About anyone, or things you’ve… missed.” He shrugs; his teeth scrape his bottom lip. Adds, quieter, not meant for Nie Mingjue to hear, perhaps not meant even for himself to speak, “I should have offered sooner.”

Just in case. It is not only about tonight. That Nie Mingjue will be gone again is the end, how and when are the eventualities to face. It is already an intolerable thought, that it will come to pass, but will knowing more make it impossible for him to do what is right?

“No,” Nie Mingjue says. He gives away nothing else; leaves it for Nie Huaisang to take as he chooses, just as he places the ribbon and hairpins in the cup of the hand Nie Huaisang holds out between them.

“Okay.” Nie Huaisang swallows. “All right.” He closes his fingers and lowers his hand. When he lifts his face and opens his eyes, there’s a practised placidity to them, a serenity that ebbs and flows but does not set in. When he reaches for Nie Mingjue, fingers ghosting up the line of his jaw, Nie Mingjue bows low enough to meet it, for Nie Huaisang to not have to stretch and strain to unclasp his guan, to wind his hand in Nie Mingjue’s braids.

“They held well,” Nie Huaisang remarks, to fill the space. His smile grows crooked; his fingers fumble and catch, clumsy with exhaustion. “Not my best.”

He loops the fingers of his other hand through the guan, curves it back against his palm, with the ribbon and hairpins. Nie Mingjue straightens, only to still, when Nie Huaisang’s hand slips from his shoulder, fingers hooking in his belt. The way Nie Mingjue tenses must startle him, and the realisation of where his hand has drifted unquestionably shocks him, for how snappishly he shakes them free and rips them back to his side, as though stung. The embarrassed red that paints itself up his throat is only bolded by the lamplight.

Nie Huaisang’s throat clicks when he swallows again. “You’ll sleep, too?” His voice is barely a scratch of sound, nervous, forced out. “You’ll keep waking me, if you don’t. You know how I am.”

It’s reasonable. It is also a lie: Nie Huaisang has the discipline to put himself to sleep in any assortment of rough conditions, though he will rarely pass up the chance to complain about the inconvenience, after. It is often a shallow sleep, for how sensitive he can be to stirring, but it is no less rest for being easily roused from. Nie Huaisang is not foolish enough to try and deceive Nie Mingjue with a lie so easily disproved. He is, perhaps, fragile enough to try and lie to Nie Mingjue as a means to request something of him, if it is something he feels he can’t ask for outright.

Nie Mingjue cannot remember the last night he was not tired. The last night he slept enough, or slept, truly, at all. He feels free; realises, morbidly, that he is.

“All right,” Nie Mingjue says. There are few things he’s ever denied Nie Huaisang, and less that he’s ever required his brother to be direct about as his cost in return.

Nie Huaisang passes him by, leaning over to set his guan down, the hairpins, the ribbon. The curtains are so thin that what little moonlight there is spills all the way through the slatted windows. It’s enough, when Nie Mingjue extinguishes the lantern, for them to make their way to the bed, a slither of shade and shape against the shadows playing over the empty space. He hears more than sees, over the rasp of his own hands gliding across his garb, Nie Huaisang strip down to his innermost layer, moonlight glinting off the silver silk. Their hands meet; Nie Mingjue holding out his robes and belt in front of him without thought, Nie Huaisang reaching to take them without reflection.

Nie Huaisang discards them swiftly, tossing them with little care for the creases that will come of his laziness and inspire his annoyance in the morning. Then, he clambers onto the bed, puts his back flush against the wall, and, eyes meeting Nie Mingjue’s, proceeds to cross his legs and slap down on the wood beside his thighs with a jarring forcefulness. It’s loud, it’s childish, and it’s reminiscent, in such a foolish and tender way, that it actually slams a laugh out of Nie Mingjue. For the briefest moment, in the dim, with his shoulders hunched and his hair ruffled, Nie Huaisang looks so very young. With the smell of woodsmoke wafting in from outside, and the tumbledown mudbrick sheltering them, Nie Mingjue feels so very young, too.

It is so much like their earlier days, of coming to the places like this, far-flung, where Qinghe begins to fray and bleed over borders and boundaries. When the world was a little simpler for them; when all they needed to do to keep their people safe was hunt beasts across the grasslands. When there was only the night, the campfire, their men; the tents they’d erect in the fields and off the beaten paths when there was no space in the low-slung homes of the farmers to spare.

The moment passes. Nie Mingjue brings himself into the bed, first to his knees, and then to his back. He feels Nie Huaisang shift, ghosting against his side, making room for him even though he does not need it. When Nie Huaisang’s hand comes to rest on his sternum, questioning, he lifts his arm in answer, draping it across the hills of Nie Huaisang’s shoulders as he tucks himself against his side. Nie Mingjue can’t help but think, as Nie Huaisang pillows his cheek against his pectoral, his soft exhale gusting out across the silk of his inner robe, of the last time they slept in the same bed. When they had returned from their ancestral halls, and after, long after, when the day and its disarray and its dead were gone and buried, Nie Huaisang had invited himself into Nie Mingjue’s room. Had said nothing of it; of what was behind them, nor of his presence, as he climbed into Nie Mingjue’s bed, pressed himself to the line of his brother’s back, and slept like that, arm slung around Nie Mingjue’s waist.

It had been a sorely needed comfort, one he could not ask for, but one Nie Huaisang knew he had to give. For Nie Mingjue, that night had been mere months ago; for Nie Huaisang, it has been many years. Without, for so long— it is no wonder, Nie Mingjue thinks, with a terrible understanding.

This, Nie Mingjue will all too gladly grant, if it will put at least some part of Nie Huaisang’s soul to rest, allow him some hours of peace in the din at long last.

Nie Mingjue had died screaming, in the end, and screaming is how he wakes.

It takes long, long minutes, for him to even realise— he is not at Koi Tower. There are no looming pillars overhead, opulent stones underfoot, no moonlight glancing off gossamer gold: there is only brick and dirt and candlelight, with the bridge of Nie Huaisang’s voice strung between.

In the dream that still lingers, Nie Huaisang is screaming, too, frantic and wailing and for him. But in waking, he whispers to him. Cadence even, coaxing; a comfort and a centrepoint.

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang calls. It’s gentler than the shake of his own body, coming apart; quieter than the roar in his head, thoughts ripping into one another and rending themselves apart in the rush for sense. “Da-ge. Da-ge.”

The rage and the red are unfathomable. Nie Mingjue burns, and burns, and burns, in a way that even bloodshed can’t sate. But it’s not— real. It’s not real. It has been lived through, died from, it’s not—

He follows his brother’s voice. In both and all places, he’s easy to find: bold where everything else blurs out. He’s close enough to see well, far enough not to be reached, lingering at the foot of the bed, pale and rumpled. His expression softens when Nie Mingjue turns to him, but his eyes remain the same, scared wide and black and wet.

“It’s okay,” Nie Huaisang reassures him. Voice thready, smile trembling; relief in the set of his features, defeat in the sink of his shoulders. “You’re okay. You’re here.”

Nie Mingjue heaves in a breath, but it barely makes the descent into his chest. There’s too much to take in; forward and back, rent between the end and here, the after. Where does he start with it, what sense can he hope to make of it? He grips at what is beneath his hands, bears down on the resistance he feels beneath his feet, and it does not ground him, how could it possibly—

“Da-ge.” Nie Huaisang’s voice, again, weak and wrecked but there, reaching out, pressing through. “Da-ge, you’re safe, look here. Look at me.”

Nie Mingjue does. When he blinks the last streaks of red from his eyes, there is a stain of it that remains, a bitter bright bloom on the abraded swell of Nie Huaisang’s bottom lip. Nie Huaisang follows the narrow point of his gaze, and tongues, nervously, at the cut, brow furrowing.

Has he hurt him? Did he hurt him? Nie Mingjue doesn’t remember, for here or for then, only that it’s terrifyingly possible that he did, that Nie Huaisang is here, but that he was there—

Nie Mingjue stills, cold, as the submerged shards of his senses break through to the surface. There is no order to them, no sequence, but he has his hands around the throat of it all, now. He feels the dirt under his bare feet, the crumpled sheets beneath the heels of his palms.

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang murmurs. Nie Mingjue watches him take a half-step, his hands held out in placation, breaching the deliberate distance to place himself within Nie Mingjue’s reach. “Come back. Come back to me.”

Nie Mingjue is here. He is dead; he is not aflame. It is sweat that soaks his robes and sticks them to his skin, tacky, not blood. And Nie Huaisang— he hopes he hasn’t—

“Huaisang,” he rasps. It rips up his shredded throat, rakes over his dry tongue.

“There you are,” Nie Huaisang breathes, and Nie Mingjue has to close his eyes, tight. Has to grit his teeth, lest he starts to cry from the way his brother’s countenance cracks open and choke on the tentative thing that makes its home in his voice.

There is nothing and no-one here to hold Nie Huaisang back from him. He can come to Nie Mingjue, and so he does. He draws close, his steps slow, and stoops down low, sinking into a kneel. Between the pen of Nie Mingjue’s knees, Nie Huaisang looks small, and feels safer. Only the slightest flinch snaps through Nie Mingjue’s fingers when Nie Huaisang finds the furl of them and follows them up, touch light, until his palms settle over Nie Mingjue’s straining knuckles.

“What is the last thing you remember?” Nie Huaisang asks, when his fingers are pinching the sleeves of Nie Mingjue’s inner robe, blunt nails toying absently with the gathered fabric.

“Koi Tower,” Nie Mingjue answers, unsteady. The rest of it won’t come. What else? He had left his rooms, after retiring to them, at an hour he can’t determine and for reasons he can’t recall. Within the guest wing in one breath, scaling the stairs to the main hall two at a time the next.

“Do you remember where you are now?” Nie Huaisang asks. “Do you remember what happened to you?”

“Yes.” Low to the floor and back to the light, the shadows on Nie Huaisang’s face cast the cut on his lip into jagged focus. Nie Mingjue goes to lift his hand, and finds there is no resistance in Nie Huaisang’s atop it, no rebuke; it follows the trail of his reach until he cups Nie Huaisang’s jaw, thumb brushing his lip. It strings out a hiss, and Nie Huaisang swallows back against it, catching the reflexive lave of his tongue before it can wet Nie Mingjue’s skin.

“It’s okay.” Nie Huaisang tilts his face into Nie Mingjue’s touch, affirming it, as he curls his fingers, hooks them beneath the fan of Nie Mingjue’s on his jaw, and squeezes down. “It’s over.”

Is it? Gold viced around silver; fear sweeps up his spine. That Nie Huaisang is still alive, is still well, is no longer assurance enough, now. It can’t be, not when Nie Mingjue remembers Jin Guangyao’s true face. Nothing else matters; not what led to it, not what became of him for it. Only that he needs to warn Nie Huaisang of the danger he’s left him alone with.

“Huaisang.” His brother thumbs at the bind of their hands against his face, and squeezes down on his hand, now slack, against the bed. “Jin Guangyao—”

“—Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang interrupts. It’s harsh enough to sound wet, clipped enough to ring in his ears. His grip is still gentle, grounding, but something dark has settled in behind his eyes, turning his gaze vacant, tinging it with vitriol. Nie Mingjue knows, at once, that it is not for him, and that he does not need to finish. “I know. He’s dead. It’s over.”

There’s a finality to it, as though Nie Huaisang will not entertain any further elaboration, even for Nie Mingjue’s sake. For now, at least, if not forever.

Nie Mingjue does not need to know, for now. He may not even need to know at all. His brother found out, in the end. Jin Guangyao is dead, outpaced and outlived by Nie Huaisang. Does it matter how it happened, when the deed is done and the body cold?

Nie Huaisang learned the truth of his death. Nie Huaisang watched Nie Mingjue die, held in his brother’s killer’s arms, his brother’s sabre pointed towards them both with a shaking hand.

Do you really want me to watch you die before me until you stop?

“I’m sorry,” Nie Mingjue whispers. It has been long moments, their seconds uncounted; enough for Nie Huaisang’s eyes to lose their serrated glint, for the pool of his weight to have settled still into his knees. He nuzzles into Nie Mingjue’s palm, the gesture seemingly absent of any consideration but his brother’s comfort and his warmth, and his mouth parts as he blinks up at Nie Mingjue, slow, the corner of his lips grazing Nie Mingjue’s thumb. He shivers at the catch of it against the cut, this time, but no pain etches into his features, and he does not flinch away.

“Don’t be,” Nie Huaisang replies, voice soft and scratchy with more than encroaching sleep. “Don’t ever be. Help me up?”

Even though he asks for Nie Mingjue’s help, it is Nie Huaisang himself who delays Nie Mingjue from giving it; Nie Mingjue needs his hands, and Nie Huaisang is reluctant to untangle his own from them. When he does, at last, Nie Mingjue grasps him beneath his biceps and lifts him without effort, does not need to even raise himself to draw Nie Huaisang to his feet.

Nie Mingjue does not think his brother understands what he is trying to apologise for— the specific atonement he seeks, for all the wrongs he’s wrought by nature of his premature passing. And so, he tries again to put words to it, as he lowers his head, as he lends his hands to brushing the loose dirt free of Nie Huaisang’s legs. “I never wanted,” Nie Mingjue says, loud enough to not be denied by either of them, “for you to see me like that.”

He remembers their father’s death; a slow wasting, drawn out across long months. No less violent for how it was so quiet. No less the fault of his sabre spirit, in the end, even if the cause that slit him open from throat to belly and bled him out was sabotage, not insanity. He was old enough when their grandfather died to know just how the madness looked, too; when it was not a whisper but a roar that rends and reverberates.

It was not so strange for Nie Mingjue to have his guan li as young as he did, not for a Nie. Not so unexpected, for him to be called upon to set aside his given name, with all other childish things, and become the man his sect needed him to be. Nie Huaisang had barely grown hair long enough for his first braid, to thread the ribbon through, before silk had been unwound and set over with silver. He had been so young, too young to remember who he was before he was made to become Nie Huaisang. For all the meaning in the names they took to be their last and only, what most defined them was that they were so bittersweet. The last gifts their parents had to give them, bequeathed so young because they were gone too soon.

Was it so terrible, that Nie Mingjue had wanted to spare Nie Huaisang from carrying more grief and ghosts than he already did?

Nie Mingjue thinks, at first, that Nie Huaisang’s silence is just that, and nothing more. Something as simple as tiredness. Then, he hears the shuddering breath, sees the curl of Nie Huaisang’s fingers in his robes, against his thighs, the way the fabric warps and feeds in on itself beneath the claw of his tightening grip.

“You remember me?” Nie Huaisang murmurs, faint. Nie Mingjue whips his head up at once, seeking out Nie Huaisang’s gaze to hold it. Nie Huaisang meets it, eyes wide and dark and thrown open with a shock that Nie Mingjue didn’t— could never have expected.

“Did you—” Nie Huaisang hesitates, and then he closes his eyes, face crumpling. Nie Mingjue can see, even from where he is, even from the way the turn of Nie Huaisang’s back and the bow of his head veils his face beneath his hair, the tears that catch in his eyelashes, but shed no further. “You heard me. Of course. Of course you did.”

Nie Mingjue takes Nie Huaisang’s hands in his own, catching him just as it seems he’s about to swing off the precipice, every scrap of strength and inch of fight left in his body falling out from underneath him. Nie Mingjue takes his hands, and his weight, and everything else of him, gathering Nie Huaisang in his arms to bring him back down to the floor of himself, back down to the bed. Their knees knock together as Nie Huaisang catches himself against Nie Mingjue’s side, one hand unwinding from his robes to clutch at Nie Mingjue’s hip, the other dragging up his own thigh to fist in his lap. Nie Mingjue keeps him steady, as best he can, the heel of his palm slotted against the small of his back.

It had only been Nie Mingjue who was afraid of hurting Nie Huaisang, until that night. Could Nie Mingjue not simply keep that fear with him, wear it to his rest? What need was there for such a fear in the world, that Nie Huaisang had to take it from his hands in his final moments and carry it on with him in his stead? Had to be denied any certainty as to whether or not Nie Mingjue would have hurt him, if only he’d managed to get within reach?

“Didi.” It’s heavy in his mouth, but not as heavy as Nie Huaisang’s head on his shoulder, his hand on his hip.

Nie Huaisang takes a breath, and then another. Nie Mingjue feels the pull of each of them, the shift of his mouth against his sleeve and the warm curl of every exhale. Then, he pats Nie Mingjue’s hip and rights himself with a sigh that shakes sharply past his lips.

“No,” he says, shaking his head to punctuate it. “It’s okay. I always knew that, Da-ge, truly. It’s nothing that you need to worry about anymore.”

When Nie Mingjue turns his head to look at him, Nie Huaisang’s smile is rueful, wide enough to tug at the cut on his lip, the skin bared beneath the split a shiny stinging pink. He lifts his hand from his lap and furls his fingers against his collarbone, like he might curl them around the sticks of his fan were it in his grip, were he able to raise it up to shield his face from the pry of Nie Mingjue’s perusal.

“Huaisang.” His brother is a terrible liar, when it comes to all of his softer spots, the spaces and stretches of his shroud that turn sheer when Nie Mingjue looks at him and sees him properly, out from underneath. That has not changed. That is still, yet and always, the same.

“Da-ge, really,” Nie Huaisang replies. The rue in the moue of his mouth gives way to something sweet, and Nie Mingjue feels his hand trail from his hip to smooth up his spine, palm circling between the wings of his shoulder blades. “It’s in the past. So far back in the past, really, I.” His shoulders jerk into a shrug as he huffs, shakes his head, and scrubs his eyes, the fingers on Nie Mingjue’s back curling, nails scratching the silk.

“Let’s just leave it there,” he concludes, at last. He sinks down, settling onto the bed, flat and face up, fingers steepling over his stomach. The edges of his eyes are as red as his mouth when he shifts his gaze up to meet Nie Mingjue’s, hips hitching so Nie Mingjue can drag his hand free from where it is cinched between the bed and his back.

Strain strums up the slope of his neck to try and look at Nie Huaisang, when they’re set out like this. Nie Mingjue draws his legs up as he balances and bears his weight down on his hand, braced to the bed, arm tucked towards the bracket of his ribs. Nie Huaisang blinks up at him, bleary, thumbs circling the crumpled fabric beneath the clasp of his hands as the rise-fall of his chest hitches.

If Nie Huaisang wants to leave it be where it lies, Nie Mingjue has little claim to any right to deny him that. Things he’s given over to Nie Huaisang, however unwittingly and unwillingly, are no longer his to take back.

“I set silencing talismans, earlier,” Nie Huaisang pipes up. “There are a few hours left before sunrise, I think.” It’s a needed change in topic, but it clashes, awkward, with the gravity still heavyset on their bodies, both between and overhead. Nie Huaisang drums his laced fingers against the soft dip of his belly, the tip of his tongue glancing the cut on his lip, heedlessly hard enough to earn a contrite hiss.

Nie Mingjue reaches between them, with the hand not holding himself up, and follows the lean of it with the rest of his frame until he can take Nie Huaisang’s chin between his fingers. Though he feels him tense in his hold, there is no resistance from him when Nie Mingjue gingerly tilts his face towards the light to better examine the cut.

Nie Huaisang predicts and preempts Nie Mingjue before his intent coalesces into something proper, progressed beyond inaction. “I tripped,” he says, “while I was, when…” his voice trails off and away, the half given of the explanation clarity enough, and Nie Mingjue feels his mouth twitch between his fingers as he swallows. “Ah, it’s fine, it’s fine.”

It would look and feel far worse, if he had been the one to— still. There’s worth in having it confirmed; a comfort, however small, is not wasted. Nie Mingjue takes his fingers away, and, freed, Nie Huaisang starts to wriggle and squirm up the rest of the bed with no finesse, making room for Nie Mingjue to rejoin him. He doesn’t go far; has learned quickly just how much space Nie Mingjue takes and fills, and strays back just shy of past that, slipping forward again once Nie Mingjue has flattened his back to the wood, has held his arm up for Nie Huaisang to slide underneath.

For all the unpleasantness of how he was woken, how they were both woken, it seems to have blunted the edge of his anxiousness, to have stirred and found Nie Mingjue still at his side. The morning could still change it, but Nie Huaisang would have already considered the chance of that, long before it occurred to Nie Mingjue to even ponder. If it still scared him as much as it did, hours ago, Nie Mingjue would know; he would be able to tell from the claw of Nie Huaisang’s fingers in the waist of his robe, would be able to feel it draw the slip of his frame pressed to his side rigid with tension.

Nie Huaisang is slack with an ill-won ease against him, his clasp loose, his breaths soft. Nie Mingjue closes his eyes, and red does not burst and burn behind them. He does not dream again.