Nie Mingjue surfaces from the stillness spaced between sleeping and waking when he first feels Nie Huaisang stir against his chest. The whole line of him shudders as he stretches, arms overhead and legs sloped over Nie Mingjue’s arm; he’s saved from spilling backwards out of his lap by the press of his palm between his shoulder blades. He does not squirm where he’s nestled between Nie Mingjue’s thighs, nor does he string it out; once he is done, he settles back in place, and he stops.

“Good morning,” Nie Huaisang greets, voice scratchy. He straightens up from the brace of Nie Mingjue’s steadying hand, starts to rub the sleep from his eyes, and proceeds to complain about every cramping ache in his limbs. His tirade is only interrupted once, by his own yawn, before he tires of it entirely and stumbles out onto his knees and then up to his feet.

The tension is no longer so tangible, but it does not feel better between them, now, for their talk. Instead, it is more that it is like it is the beginnings of acknowledgement, a meeting of minds, a making of a mutual understanding.

“Go on,” Nie Huaisang tells him, after they’ve dressed, “I’ll follow you out soon. I’ve lost one of my inksticks.” He waves him off, unseeing, over his shoulder, his attention focused solely on his qiankun pouch, as though he can will his missing possession to resurface through his glower alone.

Nie Mingjue goes; returns, some time after, to find that Nie Huaisang has not only failed to follow him out, but that he has not even budged a step from his spot.

“I feel that this is your fault, Da-ge,” he says, with no expense spared on his exasperation, as Nie Mingjue toes out of his boots. “I knew where everything was before you started using it.”

“You’re carrying too much,” says Nie Mingjue, not deigning to look up as he sets down Nie Huaisang’s sabre. He doesn’t need to see his brother’s scowl when he can hear the scoff that accompanies it.

“Everything in it is necessary,” he snips, supercilious. When Nie Mingjue finally straightens, sending a glance over his shoulder, Nie Huaisang’s expression has sunk into a sulk, lips pursed in a pout. “This inkstick, especially! The soot is from burned tongyou, bound with ox hide glue…” he trails off as Nie Mingjue turns, then clears his throat. “...It’s custom,” he summarises. “Expensive. I use it to empower certain sigils.”

“It’s important,” he very nearly whines, after a beat, when Nie Mingjue starts his approach but doesn’t bring along with him any sympathy.

“It’s not gone far,” Nie Mingjue tells him, unassuring. Then, before Nie Huaisang can voice the griping interjection he opens his mouth around, Nie Mingjue finishes with, “empty the pouch out. I’ll help you find it.”

“You had better,” Nie Huaisang retorts, in lieu of expressing his thanks, “you’re the one who lost it in the first place.”

There is no point to protesting his innocence beyond prolonging the inevitable, so Nie Mingjue lets Nie Huaisang please himself with the picayune prize of the last word in their teasing parading as an argument. Nie Mingjue is going to end up roped in and on the floor across from his brother anyway, so he may as well sit down with him and get to it now. His quick capitulation must delight Nie Huaisang to distraction, for he promptly upends his qiankun pouch between his legs in a moment of foolery, sending every single one of its contents scattering to the floor.

“All right,” he says, chastened, as he starts gingerly pushing at various vials and accoutrements to fan them further out along the floor, “I will concede that we’re both right.”

“What does it look like?” Nie Mingjue asks, resisting a deserved but unwise comment to the effect of Is that so? Nothing sounded as if it broke on impact, at least. Nie Huaisang hums, reaching absently to sweep his hair over his shoulder, one-handed, while he holds up a small tube to the sunlight pinched between the fingers of the other.

“It will be in a flat wooden case,” he says, setting down the tube to fish out another from beneath a sheaf of twine-tied talismans, “about a hand’s length and width— one of my hands, that is.”

Nie Mingjue nods to show he’s understood, reaching between them to lift up a fallen-open book, well-read and seemingly oft referred to, for how so many pages are creased over themselves, for how the threading is fraying at the spine. The inked diagrams he catches a glimpse of seem to be anatomical, beneath a branching mess of labels and scrawled notes. Between it and pungent, permeating smell of herbs, Nie Mingjue does not think it is particularly unreasonable to suspect Nie Huaisang has become some sort of physician during their parting.

“Oh!” Nie Huaisang exclaims, some long minutes later, dragging Nie Mingjue’s gaze up to the sight of him gently unbundling tousled black sheer silk from a rattan wicker hat. “Look at that. I had a weimao in here after all.” His smile is, at least, sensibly sheepish when he glances at Nie Mingjue, before he sets it atop his head, fingers feeding his braids through the top, the shroud spilling over the wide brim to shield his face.

It is a jarring sight, if only for the moment Nie Mingjue stares at it, surprised, before he takes himself to task and tears his eyes away. It’s a confronting visual for its former familiarity, and not through any fault of Nie Huaisang’s. Nie Mingjue remembers his brother’s mother better than his own, and his father’s other concubines the best, for how they had outlived both wives and their husband-master — but he does not recall any of their faces. What he does remember is the shadows of them, the shapes they played out beneath the dark veils swept down over their faces, meant to keep the extent of their beauty from undeserving eyes whenever they travelled out from the Unclean Realm. Pale, vague features made monstrous by the warp of the silk, almost unbounden and unfathomable, save for the rouged red of their mouths that kept their visage tamed towards something ethereal but unquestionably human.

“It would have been nice to know I had this sooner,” Nie Huaisang remarks, and, from the corners of his eyes, Nie Mingjue sees his hands rise from his lap, hears the scrape-scuff of the silk as it is bunched up in on itself and tossed back to bare Nie Huaisang’s face.

“You would have,” Nie Mingjue replies, “if you had thought to look.”

Nie Huaisang flicks a vial across the floor at him in umbrage that’s undone by laughter. “Don’t— ah, wait, shouldn’t you show me more respect than this? Aren’t I older than you, now?”

Nie Mingjue actually stops, at that, but does not look up. He didn’t even think— of that. That it would even need to be considered. Is it so? Could that even be how it works, when he no longer ages and Nie Huaisang does? Fifteen years have passed for the both of them, after all, in one way or another, but only Nie Huaisang has the experience to show for it.

He seems to realise, in the brief ensuing silence, the unintended consequence of his thoughtlessness. “You’re still my da-ge, of course,” he says, in a tone meaning to be light but manifesting heavy with reassurance. “I’m still your didi. That’s entirely separate.”

It falls quiet between them for long minutes, after that, until Nie Huaisang sees need to disturb it with more idling chatter, words barely meaningful in any manner, meant only to accompany the sounds borne of their sorting. He doesn’t mention the disparity of their ages again.

It does not take them long to find what he’s searching for, though it is one of the last things they end up uncovering. It takes longest to pack everything back away again, least of all because nothing ends up set aside to be discarded. Nie Mingjue does not suggest it, though he considers it; he knows better to speak, now. What is and is not important, here, is not for him to determine.

The small box storing the inkstick is set on the table, alongside the inkstone and brushes, where one would first think to look for it when in need of it again. The weimao, however, is wrapped back up and stowed. “Ah, I’ve not had it for this long, already, anyway,” Nie Huaisang explains, even though there is no need for him to, and Nie Mingjue does not call on him to do so. “I may as well stay without.”

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang calls out to him, sudden, one morning later, when Nie Mingjue’s fingers are wrapped up in his hair, threading his braids together. He’s not sure what day it is, of the weeks he’s been here, of the months Nie Huaisang has spent ahead of him. For all they are so routinely the same, they have become one brambling blur, a mess and a mass too difficult to make sense of. If he can ever be honest with himself, he stopped caring to track the passage of time well before it became difficult to do so.

“I need to go somewhere,” he continues, voice beaten out into something even and detached, “after. Alone.”

Nie Mingjue can’t see his face like this, not without making it obvious that he’s looking for it, not without moving him or his brother or the both of them. It’s deliberate, that Nie Huaisang telling him this now, in the only brief moment they have of a day where they can hide something from each other. Nie Huaisang lets it hang, in the silence, between them, like a slack lariat looped around a neck.

He doesn’t ask if Nie Mingjue trusts him, and he certainly doesn’t beg. He doesn’t need to, not when they’re the unseen hands holding the rope, the executioner drawing it to collar taut underneath a jaw.

Nie Mingjue is glad, for all they’re not unheard, that they do remain unsaid: he does not know which of the two is the worst of them, and so long as they’re denied a voice, he does not need to find it out for himself.

He lets him go. Of course he does; what is preferable and what is permissible are two very different things, for all they’re rarely indistinguishable between the both of them when it comes to Nie Huaisang’s wants and whims.

If the question is whether or not he could stop him, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative. If the question is whether or not he should stop him, however… Nie Mingjue’s clarity has long been uncoupled from that consideration. The answer is far less clear.

Nie Huaisang slips away silently, sometime during the seconds that sprint between the morning’s drills to the morning’s spars. He is back by sunset, already inside the farmhouse and stripped down to his inner robe, hair undone, when Nie Mingjue steps inside. He looks up from the map on the table when Nie Mingjue approaches, meets his eyes, smiles, and welcomes him home. Beneath all allowable scrutiny, he appears unchanged.

He says nothing of his venture, and Nie Mingjue, again, does not ask him to.

The truth is this: when Nie Mingjue tells himself he does not know when his desire for his brother started, he is lying.

He has always known it for everything it was and everything it meant, from the moment the realisation first ran him through. When the spark of need hit the tinder of hunger in the very ravenous maw of the primal thing in the pit of him and came roaring to life. Like everything else that defined him, it was a violence; so vicious it would have sent him to his knees and bent him beneath it had he not already been kneeling.

Once the moment came, through the culmination of uncountable circumstances and forewarned conclusions, that had seen Nie Huaisang beg him for something, had seen him offer Nie Mingjue anything he could think to take, in turn, for trade— that had been that. The power of it and all of its endless possibilities had put its teeth and its talons through the make of him and Nie Mingjue had been irrevocably tainted, incurably deformed.

The truth is this: when Nie Mingjue tells himself he does not know when his brother’s desire for him started, he is lying, here, too.

Nie Huaisang had never needed to beg Nie Mingjue for anything, not truly, not once. He knew he could have everything, should he only ask. That Nie Mingjue would never deny him, not when and where it mattered. That he’d pleaded, then, in the first place, was itself a violence of its own; a blow brought down to bear on Nie Mingjue’s back for the sake of seeing how he’d fight back.

Nie Huaisang has always meant the things he says, after all, even if he does not always mean to say them, even if he does not always understand what will be wrought when he says aloud what should be unsaid. Nie Mingjue has always known this best, even better than his brother himself.

When there is nothing else to hear beyond one’s self than silence, it stands to reason that every sound made sings out, shrill and far-spanning. It is no surprise to Nie Mingjue, then, that he hears the shatter of porcelain somewhere in the farmhouse from down past the gate as loudly as though he was there to see it fall for himself.

Nie Huaisang is often clumsy, and even the consideration that he may well have hurt himself, in this instance of it, does not quicken Nie Mingjue’s steps. If Nie Huaisang has managed to cut himself, no shard will have sunk deeper than whatever one will have undoubtedly glanced his pride, and his pride is what Nie Mingjue will wound if he comes racing in as though his brother is a delicate waif in want of saving from himself.

Nie Mingjue finds him on the floor by the table, crouched down around himself in only his inner robe, almost cowering, head bent to his chest. There’s an incense burner between his knees, now shattered and still smoking, thick black tendrils curling up towards Nie Huaisang’s face, beneath the drape of his loose hair, the smell of it seeping over, soaking through the whole of the room, pungent and sour and medicinal.

There is no visible blood, which he takes as a good first sign. He does not get the time to ask if Nie Huaisang is all right; Nie Huaisang preempts the question entirely, and his answer is a chilling, rattling choke, all wet and panic, a hand scrabbling up from its clench against the floor to claw uselessly at the column of his throat.

He moves; he’s there, before he even thinks, Nie Huaisang already reaching out for him, blind, slinging his arm limply around Nie Mingjue’s shoulders as Nie Mingjue hauls him up. He crushes the smouldering incense beneath his boot, stamps out the last scrap of its flame, and twists his other arm out from between their bodies. He pries Nie Huaisang’s hand away from his neck, the pale skin already scraped open by his nails in the seconds it has taken Nie Mingjue to embrace him.

“Temple,” he hiccups, voice a torn rasp, as though his throat is ripped raw and burning up from the inside out, “the temple—” He can’t seem to breathe, but that isn’t stopping him from trying to speak, from struggling in Nie Mingjue’s grip.

“Stop,” Nie Mingjue hisses, which only seems to make him fight harder, clawing at his back like a dying beast, “stop, it can wait.” Whatever he wants to say is not and could never be worth his life, no matter what Nie Huaisang himself seems to think.

The shock of dropping him not-quite-gently onto the bed isn’t enough to clear the clotting blockage in his chest. Nie Mingjue goes to his knees, straddling Nie Huaisang’s hips, palm planting on his sternum to pin him flat, and Nie Mingjue sees the flutter in his chest flow up into the seizing clench of his jaw. He manages to get his other hand cupped behind Nie Huaisang’s head in time to angle it to the side, to open his throat so he can choke up blood, the dark red spilling past the shaky seam of his lips.

“There,” Nie Mingjue says, even, gentling, thumb swiping over a smear of red on his chin, “there. Breathe, now.” He keeps his hands where they are, the span of them grounding, until at last the rise-fall of Nie Huaisang’s chest evens out, his breath no longer coming in a long, pitiful scrape that doesn’t sink deep enough down to stick behind his ribs.

“Da-ge,” he croaks, before he stops, sucking in a sharp, whistling breath when Nie Mingjue’s thumb catches on the corner of his mouth, callouses scraping the heated skin. His voice is wrecked, and underneath him, eyes clouded over with tears, he looks— Desire clamps down on Nie Mingjue’s throat, heat roiling low in his belly, and the suddenness of his own hunger terrifies him. The hunger is not new. The hunger is never new. He does not want it here, now, gnawing away at him, a lust that is as cursed and damned as the dream they’re both trapped in.

“Huaisang,” he says, and Nie Huaisang’s eyes sink shut with a shiver as he sighs out.

“I’m all right,” Nie Huaisang replies, faint. He does not seem it, but he is breathing freely, now, at least, the shift of his chest steady underneath Nie Mingjue’s hand. It is difficult to tell if the tremble Nie Mingjue feels in his fingers is from Nie Huaisang, fed up into his fettering palm, or if it is his own.

Nie Mingjue takes his other hand from Nie Huaisang’s throat and uses it to bunch the bloodied sheet up and shove it away from them both. Then, he braces it against the bed so he is not tempted to use it for something, for anything else. “Can you rise?” he asks.

Nie Huaisang cringes when he swallows, pale face crumpling, the colour drained from it by exertion. That and the residual bruise of the blood only serve to make the wet red of his mouth more bleakly and brutally blatant against the rest of his features. Nie Mingjue wants to sink so low forward as to make it an effortless stretch to hook his thumb between Nie Huaisang’s teeth, wants to slide his tongue in to follow, wants to kneel up and get his brother back out from underneath him more, wants to make sure he is okay and then ensure it stays that way.

“I need a moment,” Nie Huaisang says, and then he takes one, drags and draws it out, before he starts to strain back up. His elbows slide up from his sides to steady the stagger of his weight; Nie Mingjue shifts back, settles onto his heels, his stance widening so that Nie Huaisang can draw his legs out from beneath his thighs. When he sways, Nie Mingjue catches him by the shoulders, and Nie Huaisang’s face crumples in on itself further, inscrutable.

When Nie Mingjue tries to gently pry his hands away, to sever the ebbing heat that is soaking into him from Nie Huaisang’s skin in hopes of stopping the fire in the pit of him from being stoked any further, Nie Huaisang grips him tightly, eyes flying open. “Wait—!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Nie Mingjue reassures him, but Nie Huaisang’s grip does not loosen, and it does not seem to appease the rising tide of his anxiousness.

“It’s me,” Nie Huaisang stresses, frantic panic edging into his voice, pitching it high, “it’s me, I walked out too far and now it’s in my head—”

“Huaisang.” Nie Mingjue clamps down on his shoulders until the power behind the grip is treading water too close to the cusp of bruising, trying to jar Nie Huaisang back to the surface of himself, string his senses back together. Nothing he says is understandable, nor is it usable, for all Nie Mingjue is unreasonably glad for the distraction it gives him, now; the encompassing focus. “Huaisang, steady yourself.”

Nie Huaisang takes a breath, then another, and then he does, as if on command, the fight seeping out of him. His sigh is heady, and when he sags forward, Nie Mingjue takes his weight as though it is nothing, holds him up where Nie Huaisang seems to have yielded to the effort it takes to try.

“Sorry,” he mutters, a bitter laugh hemming it, “ah, sorry, Da-ge, I’m— I’m so sorry, please don’t be angry.”

“I’m not,” Nie Mingjue tells him, but he can’t keep it from his voice, the edge of aggravation, the frustration borne from feeling and being so lost. “I’m not angry, Huaisang, but you are not making any sense.”

Nie Huaisang just shakes his head, teeth digging into his bottom lip, and Nie Mingjue— Nie Mingjue, at an utter loss for what else he can do, sets aside his concerns for the knotted heat still simmering low in his belly and yanks Nie Huaisang forward by his shoulders, brings him spilling into his lap and against his chest. He feels Nie Huaisang’s breath slam out of him, gusting hot and damp against his neck, and then he starts to shake, wretched, a whimpering sob gurgling out of his mouth.

“It’s my fault,” Nie Huaisang whispers, nails scrabbling down the front of Nie Mingjue’s robe until they fall slack and heavy against his abdomen, fingers hooking limply in the silk that has bunched up around Nie Mingjue’s hips. “It’s me, the shard is me, the memories are mine, everything—”

“Shh.” Nie Mingjue strokes a soothing hand down his back, fingers kneading over the crest each laddering rung of his spine, stark beneath the thin silk of his inner robe, pulled taut across his back. He cradles Nie Huaisang’s nape in the cup of his palm with the other, keeps his face tucked to his neck, lets him hide and cry as he needs. “Just be quiet, now. I’m here. I have you.”

It takes some minutes for Nie Huaisang to calm, to truly calm, beyond his false start of a farcical first attempt. Nie Mingjue holds him through it, and supposes he must not be doing the most terrible job of it all, if the way Nie Huaisang relaxes in his hold until he’s almost boneless is to be taken as any indication.

“Damn.” Nie Huaisang sniffs, and then wriggles a hand up between them to get between his face and Nie Mingjue’s shoulder, wiping awkwardly at his eyes without lifting his head. “Can’t believe I was almost assassinated by an incense burner. Really doing our ancestors proud, here, aren’t I?”

He muffles his laugh between his palm and Nie Mingjue’s collarbone, dipping his chin into it, but the shake of it rolls down his shoulders, reverberates through Nie Mingjue’s hands. He moves of his own accord and within his own power, slinking back in Nie Mingjue’s lap just far enough to get his own knees planted properly astride Nie Mingjue’s hips, one hand half wound around Nie Mingjue’s neck, the other rubbing more furiously at his tear-streaked face. Nie Mingjue can feel the backs of his thighs tensing from the all but passive effort required to keep himself seated more upright against the downward slope of Nie Mingjue’s lap, so he adjusts his own knees and palms at the small of Nie Huaisang’s back, letting him sink his weight back into it for more security.

Nie Mingjue only needs one hand to hold him, if that. He lets the other rise to rest on Nie Huaisang’s cheek, thumb circling gently against the crescent of his eye socket, catching a tear, rootless from the rest of the others staining his flush-hot skin.

“Can you tell me what happened, now?” Nie Mingjue asks.

Nie Huaisang starts nodding gently, head tilting, pressing his cheek against Nie Mingjue’s palm in a gesture almost imitative of a nuzzle. “Promise not to be mad, first,” he contends stiffly, despite his agreement.

“Huaisang,” Nie Mingjue chastises, coarse. He is certainly not mad, but he is not going to make the promise that he won’t be, either, if what had sent Nie Huaisang into hysterics truly ends up warranting it.

Nie Huaisang sniffs, mouth crimping, but capitulates. “I found out,” he explains, succinct. His face darkens, almost imperceptibly, eyes narrowing minutely as he wipes his mouth against the back of his hand, before taking a breath. “I realised it, how it all works, a few— a few days ago. I was going to tell you soon. I really was.”

It’s human and it is to be expected that Nie Mingjue feels the wince of something under his skin that could be betrayal, if not something close to it. Still, “I believe you,” Nie Mingjue says, because he does. Would he have done it differently, in Nie Huaisang’s place? Would he have resisted the call to take just a few more days, unchanged? Almost certainly not.

Nie Huaisang nods again, almost to himself, swallowing thickly as he bites down on his relief-born smile before it can bloom. “Ah, it was the farmhouse. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, how it was different for you, and I suppose I— I don’t know, I suspected something. I had Yongrui and Wencheng note down what they remembered of the southern village, when we passed through it, to come to here. I didn’t read them until I was there for myself, so I could properly compare. I thought, I felt as though I remembered it perfectly, but none of what it looks like, what I know, matches what either of them recalled.”

It is a sound and sensible explanation, but more than that, it is— a worry. The answer works at the expense of a revelation that Nie Huaisang may not even have meant to give to Nie Mingjue, if not one he has become so desensitised to that he no longer has a grasp on what it means, for him and for everything. Nie Mingjue always knew Nie Huaisang’s memory to be good, exceptional, detailed and precise most of all for locations. He had explained, once, when Nie Mingjue does not think his brother actually expected him to be listening, to take it as anything more than a sound accompaniment to his own work, that it helped to picture places as though he was there as he charted them. To imagine it was his body between chines and cities, to see how one might or might not be able to move with and through them.

What had happened, between then and up to now, to see him lose that perceptiveness, that sense of placement? To see him muddle and merge details, to flip them, to misplace his memories entirely?

Nie Mingjue’s memory had been and become the same, in the end, but the gradual degrade had been the fault of his decomposition to his qi deviation. Surely that was not— that it couldn’t possibly be the fault behind Nie Huaisang’s?

He does not panic. He does not panic, not as his fingers flinch across the small of Nie Huaisang’s back, not as he tenses underneath Nie Huaisang’s thighs, not as he takes a strained breath and thinks too much and too terribly for anyone’s good. “You mentioned a temple,” he says. That is something that is safe, that is something relevant, current, actionable. That, Nie Mingjue can do something with.

Nie Huaisang blinks at him, blanking. “A temple? Did I?” At Nie Mingjue’s too-terse nod, his brows knit together tightly. “I— no, it’s the inn. Twenty-four li from where we are, practically to the step. That’s where the array gates through.”

Nie Mingjue can excuse the temple for a moment of madness, then; some hapless reach for something holy while the breath and the life were being choked out of him. He can set it aside for now. “So that is it, then,” he concludes. “You called yourself the shard. When you said you walked out too far, that was into the trap in the first place?”

“The dream,” Nie Huaisang affirms. He closes his eyes and buries his face further into the basin of Nie Mingjue’s palm, turns into it so his mouth brushes his skin, so Nie Mingjue can feel the way it shapes around his breath and his every next word. “I was running. I must have come free of myself and strayed too far out. I don’t know why Yongrui and Wencheng followed, though, and not the others. Maybe they strayed too far out, too.”

He shrugs, bringing the swerve of his shoulder high enough that it grazes up the back of Nie Mingjue’s hand. He doesn’t elaborate on the dream, the running, if it was to, or from, or what, even, for. Nie Mingjue suspects it may be relevant as much as he senses it is not something he should ask.

If Nie Huaisang’s memories are intertwined with it, they cannot plan ahead. It is not a favourable position to be in, but it will have to be a tenable one.

“We’re out of time,” Nie Huaisang says, final, and that is the warning Nie Mingjue gets before the air itself shifts, in tune and in time to the tense of Nie Huaisang’s back beneath his hand, the clench of his jaw against the other. When Nie Mingjue tries to retreat, Nie Huaisang grasps his nape, whip-quick, and comes surging in between them only to stop just shy and short of crushing their mouths together, his gasp scraping Nie Mingjue’s lips.

“Da-ge,” he breathes out, eyes dark, then, damningly, “please.”

The hunger is not back, because the hunger never left. The hunger, instead, is no longer tame, or tolerable, or quietened. Nie Mingjue claws down, scratching Nie Huaisang’s back, tangling his fingers in the spidering strands of his hair where they frame his face, and snaps his teeth together before he can bring them down on the soft swell of Nie Huaisang’s bottom lip.

“Huaisang,” he hisses, all swimming heat and ravenous urgency and reluctant, failing resistance. Huaisang, he thinks, like a beg for a stay of execution. If Nie Huaisang pushes on, presses in, Nie Mingjue will consume them both. They are too close; they are no closer than they’ve ever been. And yet— he can’t take this, can he? Not here, not in this way, not when only one of them will have to live with it, after.

“Push me away,” Nie Huaisang whispers back, trembling and tender and tentative, broken open but still not bridging the final gap. “If you don’t want it, push me away, just do something. Please do something.”

“I can’t,” he grits out, closing his eyes, looking away. He can’t push him away, he could never push him away, couldn’t break him apart like that, when there’s no way to piece him back together from it. He can’t— he can’t take him, either. He wants to. Nie Huaisang is right here, and he is asking, and Nie Mingjue doesn’t know which of them he is sparing from a worse fate with his refusal, or if he’s even sparing either of them at all. Nothing exists in a state divisible from anything and everything else when it comes to him and Nie Huaisang.

“Are you going to leave me waiting for you again?” Nie Huaisang asks, bearing down, digging in, nails scraping Nie Mingjue’s neck and lips ghosting a breath closer, no longer sounding broken but something terribly beyond all of it. “That’s the cruellest thing you’ve ever done to me. You realise that, don’t you?”

“You never asked,” Nie Mingjue near growls out, helpless, all too aware of how he’s breaking down, perfectly, coming apart everywhere that Nie Huaisang knows like second nature to open him up from, and that there’s nothing left, that there’s never been anything left, ever, at all, to stall it. “Not once, Huaisang, did you ever ask—”

Nie Huaisang kisses him to cut him off, fingers twisting in his hair, and it’s vicious for all the ways it is so viced down in control and chasteness, close-mouthed and dry. For all it’s a take, he only takes that, that and no further, and he stops Nie Mingjue from taking more, too, in the second he completely blanks, blacks out, snarls into it, surges. “Because pulling away is your answer,” he snaps, kissing him again, harder, then, “you were already so far away before I realised, it was like you were already gone. I was scared for you! I didn’t know what to do!”

Nie Huaisang has long been wise to his wants, and has only grown wiser in Nie Mingjue’s absence. He seems to know exactly what to do, now. It’s not that simple, nothing is ever that simple, but perhaps it should be. Perhaps it can be. There’s no point to it, anymore, in the fact that they shouldn’t. It’s the realisation he was most repulsed from wanting to have: that he can’t hurt Nie Huaisang more by giving him what they both want and leaving him to carry it back alone than he already hurt him by dying in the first place.

There is something tenuous enough left in Nie Mingjue that he can yet muster it. “What do you want?” is how he spends it, rasping the question in a press to Nie Huaisang’s mouth, hands shaking on and around him.

“Everything,” Nie Huaisang begs, “anything, so long as it’s you, it’s only you—”

Nie Mingjue kisses him back, kisses him hard, holds him into it and makes his mouth open to the first forceful pry of his tongue against his teeth. For all it’s a wilding, ferocious thing, bruising teeth and devouring tongue and scraping, clutching hands, it’s nothing less than what they want, nothing more than what they can take. It’s as brutal and ugly as the both of them, together; it’s perfect; it’s coming home.

When Nie Huaisang tears away for breath, Nie Mingjue ensures it doesn’t get far enough down into him to settle in his chest, shoving him from his lap and lying him flat against the bed, hard enough that he judders up the wood, jerking, mouth falling open around his grunt. Nie Mingjue straddles his hips, gets one hand wrapped around nearly the whole of his throat, and Nie Huaisang’s blown-black eyes grow impossibly wider.

“Tell me what you want,” Nie Mingjue growls, demanding it while he still can, while he still has half a mind to, and he leashes his tongue before more can come spilling out, swallowing down Tell me how not to hurt you.

“I’ve told you,” Nie Huaisang replies, and Nie Mingjue feels it, feels his throat rumble with it underneath his hand and how the swallow that follows rolls down. “I’ve said it. I want everything you want to give, Da-ge. Let me show you how well I can take it.”

It’s not an answer, and they both know it: it’s a provocation. Nie Huaisang is smart enough to stay still underneath the knife of Nie Mingjue’s utter undivided attention, to move no more than to blink and breathe as Nie Mingjue rears back to kick off his boots, unbind his braids, and strip himself down with perfunctory precision. Were this happening any other way, Nie Mingjue might have taken his time to savour it, if not his part of it then absolutely the unwrapping of Nie Huaisang, but here, his brother’s robe is little more than an overindulgence, an obstacle to be outdone. There’s a pleasure to be taken, anyway, in the way Nie Huaisang shudders, hands clenching around air where they’ve been flung up to frame his face, when Nie Mingjue takes the collar of it in his hands and rips it from his chest, tearing the ties at the waist free from their stitching.

There’s still the concern, prowling underneath his skin, down around the outskirts of all of the need and desire and possessiveness, that he might go too far. Nie Mingjue knows there’s a line that rests between hurting someone and causing them pain, and he’s sure it’s a line he can tread with Nie Huaisang. His brother survived his death, after all, and survived everything that came after: what could Nie Mingjue possibly do to truly harm him, given that? What else exists that he cannot possibly endure?

He flips him onto his belly to work his arms out from the sleeves, and Nie Huaisang squirms forward, gets a few inches out from underneath Nie Mingjue to throw a flailing hand at the headboard. He raps the heel of his palm against the wood until it sounds back, hollowed out, and, fumbling under Nie Mingjue’s gaze, he pries it back just far enough to pull out a small jar, sending it skidding back towards Nie Mingjue just as Nie Mingjue takes him by the hip. One-handed, he tugs Nie Huaisang back into place beneath him, and Nie Huaisang whines in one long drag as the wood chafes his bare chest.

Nie Mingjue presses the hand on his hip down, in, under, and Nie Huaisang needs no further command than that glide of pressure to get his knees up underneath him, to arch his spine and spread his thighs until he’s bent up into the brace of Nie Mingjue’s body as he drapes it down over him. He finds Nie Huaisang’s cock already swollen thick and hanging between his legs, heavy and wet, and Nie Mingjue gives him nothing but a teasing pinch at the tip, coaxing a bead of precome from his slit and a shuddering grunt from between his teeth before he edges his hand up higher. Nie Huaisang’s quivering belly twitches beneath the slide of his palm, and when he tries to inch his hips up to dull the edge of the sensation, it ruts him into Nie Mingjue’s cock so roughly he kicks out at the bed with a startled whine, the sudden grapple of Nie Mingjue’s hand around the soft swell of his pectoral stopping him from cowering back away, flinching down to escape it.

“Oh,” Nie Huaisang pants out, hoarse, squirming as Nie Mingjue kneads his chest, rolling the peak of his nipple against his calloused palm, “Da-ge, I’m not— I’m not going to last, please, please keep going.”

The snarling, scalding heat in the pit of his gut surges, dizzying, and Nie Mingjue sags forward more under its power than his own, nosing at the curtain of Nie Huaisang’s hair until he can mouth at the shell of his ear. “Do you think,” he breathes out, teeth baring around a low growl, “that I need your permission to finish what you started, Didi?”

The shocked sound Nie Huaisang makes as he seizes up against his chest is obscene, strangled and breathy and wrecked, and Nie Mingjue feels a wet rope streak the backs of his knuckles as Nie Huaisang comes, all-but-untouched, all over his stomach and up his chest. His reaction to the threat of getting exactly what he wants from Nie Mingjue, from being broken in on his cock and used until Nie Mingjue decides he is done with him, his own body and pleasure secondary, barely even worth calling considerations — that is its own due reward. But to feel him and hear him come, just from that? It takes every scrap of Nie Mingjue’s control not to take his throat between his teeth and suck a bruising brand against his hammering pulse, to instead drag his face back to his nape and dip it low enough that the sin of it will be hidden by the collar of his robe as he marks him up with his mouth until he tastes blood on his tongue.

He pants, hard, and unlatches his teeth, lets his mouth grate over the jut of Nie Huaisang’s shoulder blade until the swim in his head subsides before he rises, tucks his face into Nie Huaisang’s neck, and lets his fingers on his chest fan out, tracing his sternum, feeling the ram of his brother’s heart as it rattles his ribs.

Nie Mingjue doesn’t even need to wonder it, now, not anymore, whether or not Nie Huaisang has ever had anyone else. The thought sends a possessive frisson of needling heat down his neck and the backs of his thighs, anyway, that someone else could have touched him first, that someone else might have ever even dared to entertain trying, but that’s all it is: a thought. He knows he hasn’t; knows without being told, because he knows Nie Huaisang, who is stubborn and selfish and spiteful, who would rather have nothing at all than settle for substandard.

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang whimpers, so thready and threadbare that Nie Mingjue feels it tremble through his chest from Nie Huaisang’s back more than he hears it, “please. Keep going, I want to feel it, I want to feel you—”

Nie Mingjue exhales, shuddering, and lifts his head, puts his mouth back to Nie Huaisang’s ear. “You’re going to,” he promises, ragged, rolling his hips against his ass just to feel the way it reverberates through him, full-body, until a whine stumbles out of his mouth. “I’m not done with you yet.”

For all it’s him who says it, and for all it’s Nie Huaisang who shakes and shatters just a little more apart from hearing it— Nie Mingjue can’t give if Nie Huaisang won’t take. But take Nie Huaisang does, and he takes so beautifully. He takes the gag of Nie Mingjue’s fingers, shoved in past his teeth and hooked down on his tongue; takes the second orgasm Nie Mingjue wrings out of him without even touching his cock, just from a hand pinning him down by the neck and three fingers stroking unerringly and unrelentingly over his prostate. Finally, fucked out and held up only by the rope of Nie Mingjue’s arm threaded around his chest, Nie Huaisang takes him in properly, inch by inch by aching inch, tight and hot and the perfect fit, just like Nie Mingjue knew he would be, just how Nie Mingjue tells him he is to feel him twitch weakly around the blunt breach of his cock.

“Taking me so well,” Nie Mingjue praises, ruined and raw and awed, mouth pressed to his temple, “so perfect for me.”

“Told you,” Nie Huaisang moans, slow and slurred and spent, yet with enough left in him, apparently, yet, to be smug about it, “made for you.”

He is right, but for the impertinence of saying it, Nie Mingjue drags his brother’s hand down between his legs, makes him fit his fingers around his oversensitive cock, and pins them both against Nie Huaisang’s belly beneath his broad palm. Then, he makes his rub himself between the obscene protrusion beneath his skin of Nie Mingjue’s cock as it rams into him and his own limp hand, again and again, despite every warbling cry and futile struggle, until he’s coming dry, mouth slack around a sob that’s all breath and nothing else left. When Nie Mingjue finally, finally, finally comes, it’s all Nie Huaisang can do to scratch his nails against Nie Mingjue’s thigh when his hips shift back to pull out, a wheeze of discontent pitching up from his chest.

He’s taken so much, taken everything, taken and taken until Nie Mingjue’s shaped him around his cock and sculpted him down to something narrow and animal and made to be fucked, taken until the torrent of sensation has swung out from unendurable to survivable, if barely, if only just. Nie Mingjue gives him one last thing to take, because he needs and wants it enough and can stand enough yet to reach out and ask him for it. He kisses his cheek, his eyelid, his jaw, the corner of his mouth, tells him senseless praise that Nie Huaisang won’t remember, so he barely has to think about, and grinds his softening cock shallowly inside him until Nie Huaisang gives out a ragged, broken whine, and goes still, blacks out, overwrought and overcome.

Then, and only then, does Nie Mingjue take for himself: he brings Nie Huaisang gently against his chest and cradles him with every due care, keeping him seated and stuffed full of his cock. He cleans them both up sparingly, settles in, and lets Nie Huaisang have this moment of rest, something peaceful and uncomplicated and soon to be gone.

Nie Mingjue has not quite slept, yet, and so he does not quite wake when he feels Nie Huaisang stir against his chest, the languorous hitch of his hips dragging him a searing inch up Nie Mingjue’s hard cock before he seats himself back on it properly. It is dark, now, but there is moonlight enough that Nie Mingjue can see how Nie Huaisang’s body shifts, almost like water, and the sensuous pull of his skin, bruise-marked, as it draws taut against his bones, his lean muscles.

“Did you come again?” he asks, all but voiceless, throat still wrecked despite the hours of respite meant to mend it. When Nie Mingjue shakes his head, Nie Huaisang turns his face, craning towards him, until the column of his throat is nearly curved to breaking. “Oh, Da-ge.”

He curls his fingers down, rethreading their lace through Nie Mingjue’s own, where his broad palm rests low on Nie Huaisang’s belly, cupping the bulge of his cock. Nie Mingjue can see the hint of his smile, cleaving his delicate profile, before he tightens down, thighs flexing, and wrings out a jagged hiss from Nie Mingjue’s teeth.

“I can take it,” Nie Huaisang murmurs, all cloyed heat and unrushed sweetness, “I can take you. How many times do I have to say it, before you take me seriously?” He cranes his neck just a fraction further, impossibly, and Nie Mingjue meets him over his shoulder, presses their mouths together, clumsy and perfect.

“I always take you seriously,” Nie Mingjue argues, heatless. Greedy thing, he thinks, pleased. He chases them both with the nip of his teeth, tasting the copper-tang of now-dried blood on Nie Huaisang’s skin.

Nie Huaisang sighs against him, into him, and Nie Mingjue lets him lave at his bottom lip, lets him take his hand from his belly and guide it up the slope of his hip. Then lower, lower, his knee dragging up to bend against his chest to carve out the fraction more room he needs between their bodies to coax Nie Mingjue’s fingers to graze over his rim, where he’s still stretched so wide around the breach of his cock, well-worked and hot-sensitive muscle flutter-twitching around the intrusion.

“Then fuck me again, already,” Nie Huaisang demands, breathless. “Keep using me until you come, don’t stop for anything,” and who could even want to refuse that, or hope to refuse him? Who would Nie Mingjue be, if he did not give in?

Nie Mingjue wakes, finally and properly, at the first bleed of the dawn sunlight past the sill of the window, to Nie Huaisang’s weight straddling his waist and his hands circling around his throat.

Nie Huaisang is, still and always, the most beautiful thing Nie Mingjue has ever seen, even like this, soft and fraying at his edges where Nie Mingjue’s eyes still blur with sleep. It’s the bruises that sharpen to serration first, the mars from his mouth like xun ma leaves, threaded together by the raised red lines scratched between and through them by Nie Mingjue’s blunt nails, pulled like a cloak over Nie Huaisang’s skin.

“Da-ge,” he murmurs, voice scraping out of his still-raw throat. The pads of his thumbs stroke up the jut of Nie Mingjue’s jaw, across the rasp of his stubble, and Nie Huaisang’s head tilts with a question that doesn’t follow through past his lips, hair spilling down the slope of his shoulder.

Nie Mingjue does not keep him waiting nor does he keep him wondering, letting the press of his hands down on Nie Huaisang’s hips be his answer.

Nie Huaisang’s smile is neither brilliant nor blinding, but it is beyond enough. He lets his hands brush down Nie Mingjue’s throat to flatten against the bed, bracketing him in as much as bracing his own weight. Nie Mingjue does nothing more than tilt his chin up, making Nie Huaisang bow, to and for him, until his back is a reverent arch that brings him low enough to press their lips together. It’s a hungry thing, the kiss, for all its sweet closed-mouth chasteness, but not in the way Nie Mingjue is used to, when he thinks of hunger. It’s not a scared starvation, a drive to devour all he can fit between his teeth before it’s torn away, but a safe satiety, a sureness in the sanctity that he has been seen by someone who has then chosen to stay.

It’s cruel that he’s learned it, that there can even be this gentle distinction to a thing he’s only ever known to be brutal, on the day of their second parting. But, well. Nothing about what composes and confirms he and Nie Huaisang both is not cruel, from their Dao to their duty and the death that separates them in this lifetime. It’s who they are, and it’s what they are allowed to have

Their ritual is no different for the knowledge that this will be the last time they perform it, though they take every liberty they can, for as long as they can endure before it threatens to well up overhead and spill out into something too mournful. Nie Mingjue trails his fingers from the small of Nie Huaisang’s back to the base of his nape before he collars him in place with his palm, and Nie Huaisang’s hands float back to cradle his face in turn. He feels his brother’s laugh brush against his lips; the hitch of his breath when Nie Mingjue licks into his mouth. The rock of Nie Huaisang’s hips is a slow, thoughtless undulation, a blind reach towards every harsh kiss, the scrape of Nie Mingjue’s teeth on his bottom lip, the scratch of his nails on his throat.

Nie Huaisang’s cock snubbing along his abdomen until it’s swollen thick, leaving wet streaks of precome across his skin with every sliding thrust, his whines muffled around Nie Mingjue’s tongue, is a temptation and a trap he does not resist. Nie Mingjue lets him take as much as he himself gives back, slow and soft and sweet, one hand a constant against Nie Huaisang’s neck, the other sliding beneath his legs. His fingers skim the crease where his thigh meets his ass before they curve over and press against his hole, stroking the rim as it twitches from the threat the touch carries, the promise of the pressure and pleasure of being opened up and filled.

He can’t take that much time with it, he knows. If they had another day, he would give Nie Huaisang something more alike what he deserves, would pull him from his lap and pin him to the bed, hips raised up as if to ready him to be bred. Would sink down between his spread legs and lick him open, stubble scraping against his skin until it's rubbed pink and hot and raw. Until he’s come from that and no other touch, crying beautifully, clenching tightly down on his tongue. But he can’t entertain even the breathless fantasy of it all for too long. That would be the start of the end of them: it would not stop at one day more. It would not stop at all.

It’s safe enough, though, for Nie Mingjue to open his brother back up on one finger, then two, then three, the stretch and the glide made easier by the slick of his come still left inside from hours before. Safe enough to crook them so that they drag hard along his prostate as Nie Huaisang fucks himself down on his hand with no help from Nie Mingjue save the praise he croons against his cheek. Safe enough to think of how else he could make Nie Huaisang sob and sob and come, his straining, flushed red cock untouched, as he does here, after too-long minutes that pass far too quickly.

“You too?” Nie Huaisang breathes out, shaky, against his neck, once he’s slumped slack and spent against Nie Mingjue’s chest. Nie Mingjue just presses a kiss into his hair, then steals away another three, before he gingerly rolls him over onto the sheets and stands up.

“So, no?” is what Nie Huaisang resumes with when he returns, wash basin in hand. He does not sound disappointed, and leans readily into the damp cloth with a sigh, eyes fluttering shut, when Nie Mingjue presses it against his throat. He could push it, they both know. He could branch his hand between the both of them and close his fingers around Nie Mingjue’s half-hard cock, and Nie Mingjue would fail to deny him that due, but he doesn’t, acquiescing instead to Nie Mingjue’s hands as he dabs the sweat and come from every stretch of his skin. Nie Mingjue does not need to take more pleasure than he already has from having Nie Huaisang come apart so wonderfully in his hands, and there’s an understanding that neither of them needs to give voice to that there is no time left for it, now, not anymore.

Nie Huaisang picks up his guan from the bed beside them, later, after Nie Mingjue does not hand it to him, and the second disruption to their routine is when Nie Mingjue catches him by the wrist before he can slip around to press up against his back.

“You should take it,” he says, and Nie Huaisang glances away, the twist of his mouth hinting at something rueful behind the brief grit of his teeth.

“I don’t need it,” he says, when he looks back. “Our coffers aren’t so empty that they’ll miss the cost of commissioning a new one from a silversmith.”

It’s a deliberate diversion, a dance around the real point of contention in the matter, and Nie Mingjue does not let him have it. “It was a gift.”

Nie Huaisang does bend, at that, his expression softening, but he does not break. “Then I’m gifting it back.”

When he turns his wrist in the circle of Nie Mingjue’s fingers, he finds the give he seeks in the grip, and pulls himself free. Nie Mingjue lets him leave to kneel up behind him, gathers his hair from its spill over his shoulders and brushes it back towards Nie Huaisang’s roaming hands, and leaves well enough alone for that.

The last disruption comes late into it, at the end, when Nie Huaisang does not move to dress but instead goes down to his table, wets his inkstone, and takes the one-misplaced inkstick from its case. When it grinds, the ink comes away red as blood, and he dips his brush in it before he pauses, free hand flitting to drift absently along his collarbone.

“Da-ge.” He looks up. “Can you come and hold my hair for me?”

Nie Mingjue finishes latching his belt, steps over, and takes the loose strands up in both hands, lifting them away from Nie Huaisang’s bare back. He hums his thanks as he leans back towards Nie Mingjue’s chest, dips his chin, and swipes the bristles of the brush down his chest, painting a swooping line from the flat of his belly down to the dip of his hip. There is enough ink for another sprawling stroke, this time across, a swirling handle on the soft swell of his pectoral that sinks down and slopes around, bridging the fan of his ribs across the drop of his sternum, before it swings back up on the other side of his chest.

Nie Huaisang is careful not to smudge the ink as he stretches his arm down to wet his brush, and Nie Mingjue watches him, recognising even from his lofty angle, Shouxing, the house for the sigil he is filling in on his skin. Nie Mingjue can smell the herbs on the ink, circumventing the need for incense as part of the empowerment process. It’s all no small feat, at that, made all the more difficult for how Nie Huaisang is drawing without the aid of a mirror.

“Has it been a year since you last saw your reflection, as well?” Nie Mingjue asks, after some consideration. Nie Huaisang stiffens against him for only a second before the tension breezes out of him alongside his huffed laugh.

“No, that part is newer,” he admits. The confession is a casual one, considering the gravity of its implications. “You know. Roam not in dreams,” he flicks his wrist as he recites, slashing red ink across his belly and then stabbing down, “see not your self reflected in mirrors or water,” he begins to fill in the frame of the house between his chest and the break across his middle with short clipped strokes and curling lines before he lifts the brush away, “relinquish the power of cognition, and you will be elevated to enlightenment.”

Nie Huaisang punctuates the end of it with a breath that pulls the canvas of his skin taut against his ribcage, and rounds his shoulders back, straightening his spine, pointedly perfecting his posture to protect the sigil. Adjust yin. He shivers, minutely, as the backs of Nie Mingjue’s knuckles ghost across his nape when he adjusts his hold on his hair.

“Cultivate immortality,” Nie Mingjue summarises, and Nie Huaisang’s hair shifts through his fingers, soft as silk, as he nods his head.

“Hard not to wonder what is meant by it,” Nie Huaisang says, “when the symbology is so blatant. But that’s why I was fairly convinced, at first, that the dreaming state was trying to construct itself like a trial. It sets the scene, doesn’t it?” He tosses a glance over his shoulder to Nie Mingjue, at that, the corner of his mouth hooking upward with his smile. “All that was missing was Heaven’s protest. Then you came.”

Nie Mingjue has to swallow, and think, and breathe, before he replies. “Is that what you thought I was?”

Nie Huaisang looks away, head jerking sharply with it, as though he has to take his eyes off Nie Mingjue not so much to continue with his sigil, but because he does not believe he can survive seeing him while he answers. “Well,” he says, voice tight, “I certainly felt like the sky had split open, when I first saw you.”

He wets his brush, and starts anew on his sigil, this time in the bell bracketing his belly. “But no,” he concludes, after a wait, several long breaths that stretch out endlessly between in the silence that has ensued from his rending revelation, “I don’t think I ever really believed that was why you were brought here.”

For all the lower sigil is more elaborate, he seems to be done with it far quicker than the first. It isn’t one that is familiar to Nie Mingjue, though he can, at least, comprehend the core intent of it: evade.

“But you know, now,” Nie Mingjue says, even as he feels himself resist it, feels a revulsion ripple beneath his skin with the thought of hearing an answer he cannot hope to unhear, “why I was.”

Nie Huaisang turns his head back to look at him again, neck craning to the very extent of its limit before it crosses the line between straining and snapping. “No,” he tells Nie Mingjue, and it is with complete honesty and utter irreproachability. “I could guess, but not with any certainty. I do know that it was because of me, though.”

It is not as though Nie Mingjue can comfort him, at that, or tell him otherwise. There is no doubt or question that it is true. He may not have set the array himself, but for the purposes of its empowerment, Nie Huaisang is its engineer, the directional force with which all other elements are elaborated and warped. Nie Mingjue is here because he is what Nie Huaisang both guards and regards highest against all things else, worldly or otherwise. It’s not his brother’s hand that pulled him from Diyu, but it was certainly his will.

“I’m glad,” Nie Huaisang says, selfishly, “that it happened.”

Nie Mingjue brushes Nie Huaisang’s hair back out against his neck and shoulders, soft, and lets that be his reply. He can’t say that he’s glad, too; that this and all of it was worth the world even if it means he’s been pulled from the cycle in exchange. But he thinks it, and they both know it, and that will do.

“Don’t be afraid,” Nie Mingjue has to say, when he sees Nie Huaisang’s slim shoulders start to shake beneath the silk of his inner robe as he slips it over his skin. “I’ll protect you.”

Nie Huaisang does not look back up at him, setting his attention to sliding his arms through the sleeves of his middle robes instead, but there is a smile in his voice when he speaks that isn’t solely sad. “How could I be scared of anything, with my da-ge here?”

And, well. That is but another thing that must be left alone to lie where it falls: how Nie Huaisang truly does have nothing to fear in that respect, but everything to lose in all others. That is where the terror thrashes against its manacles; that is the threat Nie Mingjue cannot protect him from, but can only enable and enact.

It says something to the circularity of departures that, today, on the last morning, they dress just as they did on the first. Nie Mingjue, to die again in the garb he’s bled through once before; Nie Huaisang in the clean black denoting the beginning of his unclarity. Without his guan, the shape is not quite right, his silhouette not quite befitting his status as Sect Leader, but every other piece plays its part: rich, layering silks, embroidered silver koi scale patterned middle robes, lapels and cuffs stitched with the swirling white phoenix feather-flames of Qinghe Nie.

The map stays unrolled on the table, along with all of Nie Huaisang’s scrawled and scrunched up notes. He takes only what is needed, only what he means to keep; the rest serves no further purpose.

“Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang says, small, catching him by the wrist at the threshold of the door. It’s the last step they need to take to end this part of everything, and start what must be done next. It fills Nie Mingjue with a damning, dooming dread; with his heart already sitting flat in the back of his mouth, all but choking him, it’s not a foolish fear to worry that Nie Huaisang will abuse the weakness in the blood he scents on the air. That he’ll ask for something he should not ask for, and Nie Mingjue will grant it gladly and ruin the both of them.

He watches Nie Mingjue for a moment, and Nie Mingjue watches him. Then, Nie Huaisang shakes his head, smiles a complicated smile, and lets go of him. “Ah, no,” he amends, a gentle relent, “nevermind.”

“Huaisang,” Nie Mingjue says. He doesn’t say more, not You can ask for anything and not I promise; he’s already said too much.

“It’s all right.” His smile says otherwise. Beneath Nie Mingjue’s watch, Nie Huaisang draws his fan out from his sash, a simple strip of black that he’s foregone his better belt for, and flips it open to veil his jaw with the leaf. “I don’t need to ask it, Da-ge. You’ll do it when the time comes. Shall we?”

He gestures to the door with his free hand, head tilting, and Nie Mingjue unbars the way for them as directed. Already, down by the gate, they are awaited; Jia Wencheng and Yu Yongrui both at a clear ease that fades out into a militant attentiveness as they see the tells of something dire on each of their expressions.

Nie Huaisang does not even need to tell either of his men anything, then, in the end. It’s clear to Nie Mingjue, just from this, that they will follow Nie Huaisang down into the long dark is a given long before he asks.

He gives them what he has, anyway. Nie Huaisang is prompt with his explanations, precise with his instructions, and practical with his presumptions. Nie Mingjue has not needed any convincing, not for some time, that Nie Huaisang has grown tall as much as he has gone astray, if not more so. Still, it is— it is—

Nie Mingjue is grateful that Nie Huaisang has remembered Nie Mingjue’s promises, and has seen fit to fulfil them where Nie Mingjue failed. That he still thinks of the brothers they lost to their ancestral halls, in some small way, and honours their loss by not asking for blind, unwitting sacrifice from the brothers that have followed on and beyond their footsteps. He’s clear with Jia Wencheng and Yu Yongrui in every way but saying it bluntly that he is asking for them to die, if it so comes to it. To bleed for him, almost certainly, but not simply because it is their obligation to him to do so.

“Sect Leader,” Yu Yongrui says, when Nie Huaisang has nothing more to say for himself, “we will scout ahead, and meet you on the road later.” When he and Jia Wencheng salute to them both, it is obeisance; it is not a farewell, though this is the lone opportunity they have to make it one.

Nie Mingjue considers it and them both as they go, permitted the transient reflection by Nie Huaisang’s tentative hesitance to set out after them. There are many things that he has been shown that, only now, when they are no longer relevant or serviceable, are starting to make sense.

“You chose them not for their skills, but because they understand you,” Nie Mingjue remarks. He rolls the lanyard of Nie Huaisang’s sabre absently between his fingers, for want of a sensation on his hand other than that of his sweat-damp palm wrapped around the scabbard.

Nie Huaisang’s face is still turned towards his departing men, fan drifting lazily down his throat, but his gaze is set on Nie Mingjue at his side, eyes still and clear beneath the swoop of his dark lashes. “No-one is able to completely understand another person, Da-ge,” he says. It’s neither cruel nor kind, simply— an observation, devoid of opinion. “But there’s something to be said for those who keep their eyes open and try.” He sighs, and it does nothing to hide the shiver that has begun to slither through his fingers, the tremble of his bottom lip. “They’re good men.”

They are. Nie Huaisang has done well with them; has done well with their sect. Nie Mingjue would tell him as much, if only it did not seem as if it would snap the wretched thread of tension tying Nie Huaisang’s broken and breaking parts together. The hand he extends between them is no less dangerous, but Nie Mingjue must give Nie Huaisang something for his woeful quiet, and pray it comes across as comfort. The something he gives is the curl of his fingers through the crook of his elbow, where he has his other arm bent to tuck against his back. He thumbs at where the creases in his sleeve crumple like cragged cliffs, and squeezes when Nie Huaisang sinks down, settling into it. He holds him there, for long and longer minutes, until Nie Huaisang’s delay gives way to decisiveness, and Nie Mingjue feels the pull in his grip of Nie Huaisang trying to slip free and forward of it.

They are not in excess of so much time that they can thoughtlessly spare it, but when their choices are to hurry at the cost of energy, or conserve it and become harried, the latter’s prudence countermands the former’s promptness. That it caves to their clinging and gives them but a final bit more of one another’s company, both as two and then, further down the road, as four, well. What is the glimmer of an hour, when held up against the gleam of weeks, cast over the sun of a lifetime?

The silence that greets their approach is new.

It is a novelty that anything here can be new at all, let alone the absence of, but it is, if nothing else, the day for it. Though they can see the whole scene of the southern village, set on the horizon before them, none of the sounds from the life that once beat in its chest sweep out to them on the wind. It unpicks the way Nie Mingjue has stitched his body around and atop the old unease and brings it back to the brink of his skin to bleed freely. He does not miss the way Nie Huaisang puts away his fan; slow, almost a performance, an elaborate exaggeration and emphasis of each shift of his hands, ensuring they know the blows of the sounds it makes will come well before they actually land.

The inn sits in the same place in all of their waking recollections, but only Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang know how to navigate the way Nie Huaisang’s warped memory has wound the other buildings around one another, has weaved the pathways and wrecked the boundaries. It is not a long trip. The inn looks no different; an all the more insidious depiction given how the village has been gutted of its false life around it.

Their evaluation is not a long one. “Burn it,” Nie Huaisang commands, cutting to the quick. An extreme call, but not excessive: there’s no need for finesse when it will only likely be to their detriment. Better to put it all to flame and see what rises from the ashes.

Nie Huaisang steps back, steps away from Nie Mingjue’s side, arms folding behind his back. There is no need for him to do anything but observe the three of them as they shape the sigils to summon flame, to conserve his own feeble reserve of energy. It does not take long for the fire to catch, to burn into a blaze and then scream into an inferno; it does not take long for it to grow molten enough and for its orange-red maw to stretch wide enough that they have to step back to join him to escape the heat, sweat a chilling needle-prick where it has risen up against their skin.

For long moments, it seems as if nothing happens, nothing but the billow of black smoke blooming up into the sky and the splinter-crack of wood. Then, as is the nature of all things of this nurture, everything happens all at once; the tide turns, and the sky overhead seems to sag down on them as the ground beneath them shudders, though none of them are shifted an inch.

Nie Huaisang grabs Nie Mingjue’s sleeve, for the briefest of breaths; the desperate clutch of his fingers reaching for reassurance in one second, ripping themselves away empty-handed in the next. Nie Mingjue can only yield to the urgency of their predicament, forsaking his own yearning to reach back, to offer the comfort Nie Huaisang did not manage to abscond with.

He does not think he could describe how the whole vision, how everything seems to— shatter, around them, in places, growing sheer and shimmery in others. Not well, and not accurately. It does not defy explanation so much as it defies everything. He draws his sabre, as do Jia Wencheng and Yu Yongrui, their steps leading them to take position in a loose circle where Nie Huaisang is their apparent centre.

The fire finds its mark, in amongst its rapid and ravenous consumption, within mere more minutes: the moment it must get its mouth on whatever it is that is making the array stick, everything spins, and then the sun plummets, suspending them in utter darkness so suddenly that their collective heaves of stunned breath are all Nie Mingjue can hear in the swim of his own pulse in his head.

The light returns as their eyes adjust to the gloam, heralded by an inhuman growl, three-voiced and pitched low to the ground. This— it— defies everything, too. Nie Huaisang’s half-mad, half-choked rambling about a temple that he later retracted on the return of his sense— he was right. Nie Mingjue can see the stone, worn back and cracked, through the few spaces the beast does not spill into, with its bent back pinned to the high-flung ceiling.

It is as massive as it is monstrous; too many blunt teeth in a bronze-cut jaw, beast-faced and bird-clawed and everything between, churning across and through its body, fur and scale and feather and metal, almost, Nie Mingjue can only wonder, for how its sheen dances under the dim light of the sunlight that is streaming through in snatches of no traceable origin.

Nie Mingjue blinks, and the beast’s head snaps towards him in an instant, lumbering, its thick throat almost dragging along the floor. Two of its eyes blink back at him, slow, each filmy lid slicking over its eyeballs one after the other.

The third eye, embedded in the crevasse that cleaves through the middle of its black-plumed skull, twitches in its socket. Then, it swivels, bulges, until the protrusion of the bone-white blind orb has angled itself to face down on Nie Huaisang. Nie Mingjue feels fear frisson through him, and flings his left arm up, instinctual, scabbard turned on its side in his hand, to shield Nie Huaisang; to guide him further back and in until he’s covered and concealed by the bulwark of his body.

The beast doesn’t move. Nie Mingjue doesn’t think he even breathes, not until pain lances through his chest and he inhales with shock.

“It’s trapped,” Jia Wencheng observes, and though it is no louder than a whisper, it carries and cuts through as though it is a wail. The beast’s claws flex against the friction-sanded stone underneath it, and another growl gurgles in the back of its throat as its lips pull back into a snarl.

So are we, Nie Mingjue thinks. Then, It understands us.

Nie Huaisang must realise it as he does, if the stutter of his shallowly-strung breath is any indication. “Da-ge,” he says, terse, but not trying for subtlety. “Do you feel it, too?”

Nie Mingjue doesn’t know what it is, what Nie Huaisang might mean it to be, but it is more expedient to shake his head in answer than it is to pry his jaw open from its tense clench and ask his own questions.

“Incredible,” Nie Huaisang breathes out, “impossible.” Then, “Immortals, can none of you actually feel it? We need to spread out, right now. This is a Shenshou.”

Nie Mingjue feels his head start to snap towards the sound of Nie Huaisang’s voice, has to force himself to stop before he tears his gaze free of the beast. The stall jolts through his jaw and down his neck, jarring it harsh enough that it throbs out, sore, for long seconds after. A Divine Beast? In Qinghe? Incredible, indeed; but, impossible, certainly?

Nie Huaisang sounds unshakeably sure of himself, and he would not exaggerate here. Not with lives in the balance. Not when the only reapable reward for the risk is the instillment of fear. He has augmented his preternatural abilities with the sigil on his skin, but even without it, he has always had an attunement for the make and mettle of things. Can any of them justify an underestimation, here, anyway, should it turn out that his claim is unreliable?

“Go slow,” Nie Huaisang commands. “Let it move first.”

There is nowhere, in actuality, to go; the few paces any of them can take behind them to bring their backs to the walls will not take them out of the arc of any slung claws or its snapping maw. There is nowhere that Nie Mingjue wants to go, when it means to separate him from Nie Huaisang, who should stay at his side— who needs to be sent away from it.

The white third eye follows only Nie Huaisang in a morbid, muddled march. The beasts other two eyes, seeing, dart frantically between the other three of them, its cramped body tensing in its already taut, aggravated clutch.

“Look at you,” Nie Huaisang jeers under his breath, the line of his mouth warping out from underneath the derision that sets itself down over his focus-fraught features. Nie Mingjue almost snaps at him for the sheer stupidity of it, of taunting it, of all things— but he stops himself even before he notices that the beast doesn’t react. Its ears flick against its skull, but that could be as much for the scuff of their boots as it could be from Nie Huaisang’s scorn.

“How long do you think it has been here, cultivating like this, to grow so big?” Nie Huaisang asks aloud.

“People go missing every year, Sect Leader,” is Yu Yongrui’s grimly pragmatic reply, from the furthermost left of the temple. “More than we could hope to count.”

“Fuck,” Jia Wencheng swears, a suitable omen for the second that swiftly follows it when the beast rounds on him and swings. He drops to his knees and tumbles underneath it, and the beast screeches, tri-pitched, ear-splitting, the buck of its haunches sending debris down in a shower across them.

Time stops; starts; moves all at once. Nie Mingjue can only move with it, can only act in the now with his body, and comprehend with the mind later. The beast can’t truly bear down on them, not without bringing the temple to bear down on them all in turn, but they can’t do much against it but weave around its blows, denied the room to turn its force back against it.

It doesn’t seem, still, to be paying any heed to Nie Huaisang. That does not mean Nie Huaisang is safe.

The beast takes a beating, but does not start bleeding. Nie Mingjue feels the recoil of the force of his swings ricocheting back through him, feels as much as sees his sabre sink through muscle and clip bone, but no blood. No blood wells to the surface, and when he blinks, when he happens to look again— any sundered sinew is stitched back over, whole anew. It feels as if it is an age before Nie Mingjue’s mind latches onto it; it feels as if it’s too late by the time he realises it. He means to warn the rest of them, but Nie Huaisang is swifter, clearly having seen it for himself, too, that nothing they’ve done is making any difference.

“Just distract it!” Nie Huaisang shouts. Nie Mingjue doesn't expect it to sound out from the direction it does, and that is how he learns that he can’t actually see Nie Huaisang anymore, can’t catch sight of him even when he risks a glance around. Even the creature’s third eye can’t seem to track where he is in the temple; instead, it darts and rolls in its socket, frantic, circling nauseatingly. Panic plummets through him like a stone kicked into a pond, and there is nothing he can do to placate it.

Nie Huaisang surfaces after seconds, darting out from the dark behind the beast’s heavy-bent hock, a dull flurry streaking across Nie Mingjue’s periphery. “Da-ge!” is the warning Nie Mingjue gets, before blue flame bursts up from beneath Nie Huaisang’s feet and he is across the temple in an instant, colliding with Nie Mingjue’s chest with all the momentum as if he was still running for his life.

Nie Mingjue feels the way Nie Huaisang’s breath slams out of him on impact, and he has to discard the scabbard in his left hand to catch his brother gracelessly around the back before he falls back and collapses in a crumpled heap. It gives Nie Huaisang leverage enough to wrap his legs around Nie Mingjue’s waist, and then he’s slanting the centre of his weight sideways, swinging the underside of his arm up against the single-edged side of Nie Mingjue’s sabre and following it with his fingers in quick succession, slicing open his skin and spilling the first blood of the encounter.

Nie Mingjue flinches at the sing of it against the blade, the heavy wet splatter that slaps the stone soon after, but holds steady as Nie Huaisang then bends himself further back against his arm, bringing it down with him until he’s planted a palm on the ground and drawn something in his own blood with a sloppy flourish. Nie Mingjue hauls him back up when he feels Nie Huaisang’s thighs clench against him, and his brother is already starting to pale when he’s again upright, sweat freckling his skin, eyes blown wild and black and hair starting to unravel from the loosened ribbon bundling his braids together.

“Quick,” he pants, “throw me back!” He’s already drawing his knees up to his chest, hands clawing down on Nie Mingjue’s shoulders, and Nie Mingjue unwinds his arm from Nie Huaisang’s back to bring the flat of his palm up to meet his feet. He springs off just as Nie Mingjue sends energy through him, and hits the ground seconds later almost as far back as he first started, hard, rolling into it and then up from it in a clumsy surge. No way that Nie Huaisang moves can be said to be done with grace: there is little rhyme and less reason in the way he seems to choose to race off, staggering to a halt to smear another sigil in-between stolen breaths before he moves again. He simply moves as if he knows he needs to, and he is doing just enough of it to survive.

Nie Mingjue loses track of him again, after that; has to, attention whipping back to parry an errant slam of a scale-gnarled foot. He trusts that Nie Huaisang knows what it is that he is doing, wherever it is he must be doing it; he does not trust himself that he can endure letting Nie Huaisang do it, hurt by the process of it, for long as it will take for them to see this task through to either one of its ends. For all his protestations and for his weak cultivation, Nie Huaisang is a model disciple in theory, and able to wield his body when and where it counts.

It can’t have been more than minutes when something shifts, again, and the underlying wire of tension beneath the straining cords humming through the temple just— snaps. Suddenly, the beast’s eyes dart to follow where its third eye is straining in its socket to follow Nie Huaisang, and then the rest of it coils to follow, swinging around within the grave of its own making.

Nie Mingjue thinks it might be Jia Wencheng who shouts, wordless, or even him, or all of them, at once; each of them are too far away to do anything, and Nie Mingjue is the furthest of them all. Even if he broke formation, severed their flow, he would not cross in time, and so he can only watch, instead, as Nie Huaisang’s head swings up to track the way the beast’s claw swings down. The sight blurs, overlaps; Nie Mingjue sees him get struck, the sight stretched across something else, the shade of Nie Huaisang ripping his outer robe off his shoulders and sliding free of it before sprinting out of range. The robe falls to the ground, heavy as lead, crumpling like a body, and the two visions merge back together: the beast’s claw embedded in the rock, torn silk tangled up in its talons; Nie Huaisang rounding around its side, tendrils of dark smoke wisping out from his belly from underneath his middle robes.

“You know what I’m doing, don’t you?” he hears Nie Huaisang shout, strangled. “I see you, false god!”

Nie Mingjue sees his opening, just as Nie Huaisang barrels out from behind the back legs of the beast, the creature’s roars severing into enraged screams as it begins to buck its shelled back against the ceiling, again and again, frantically trying to dislodge the roof itself and bring the temple crashing down atop them all. Whatever Nie Huaisang is doing, whatever only it and his brother know he is doing— it’s apparently enough for it to decide they all need to die before it happens. He starts to move to his left, meaning to meet Nie Huaisang in some sort of half way, put his body to him, do something—

“I see you for what you are, coward!” Now that he’s closer, now that he is getting closer, Nie Mingjue can see how Nie Huaisang’s teeth are bared through his snarl, how his face is red with more than just his exertion. “Do you really think you can bring your temple down in time to stop me?!”

He goes to his knees, arches his back as if in sufferance and supplication, face veering towards Nie Mingjue as he notices him out of the corner of his eyes. “Don’t!” Nie Huaisang snaps, face naked with fear at Nie Mingjue’s closeness to him, a hand flying up from his side to warn him away. “You can’t!”

Nie Mingjue stops, obeys, even as everything in him rails against it, rages to keep moving. Even when he sees Nie Huaisang’s reason for it, even when he realises why he can’t, why Nie Huaisang would tell him he can’t at all, he still fights with himself, fear swelling and surging, sickening, fogging his head and choking him around the neck.

The beast is too slow, has doomed itself with its own gluttonous gorging; even forsaking any care for keeping the temple upright around them, it still can’t outpace Nie Huaisang. It can’t swing its head around before Nie Huaisang digs his fingers into his sliced open wrist, urging out fresh blood to slick his fingers through gritted teeth before he tears his middle and inner robes open wide enough at the neck to reach his chest. With a few clipped strokes, Amplify yin morphs, maladapts to Exert.

“The moment it’s out,” Nie Huaisang yells, nearly incoherent in his stained rush to get it out through a ripped-raw throat in an ailing voice, “go for its gut, cut everything free! Don’t stop until it’s empty, no matter what happens to me!”

He doesn’t wait for them to assent, secure as he must be in the knowledge that they’ll do what he says no matter how little they agree with it. Nie Huaisang slams his bloodied hands down against the ground, slashes at the stone with the heels of his palms in broad strokes, and activates the array he’s caged the Shenshou in with. Immediately, defencelessly, Nie Mingjue thinks of the binding from their sabre halls, from the way Nie Huaisang’s blood, strewn throughout the temple, shapes itself into ropes that then lunge out, snagging the beast around the hinge of its jaw, its throat, its limbs.

It’s not a nonsensical thought, he realises, after immense seconds, as the ropes start to sink in without opening the skin up around their intrusion: it is the binding from their sabre halls. But much like anything else Nie Huaisang gets his hands around, it is different, reshaped and remade for his own suitability to something more, something worse.

The beast roars, all three voices in deafening fever-pitch, and somewhere beneath it, half-suffocated, Nie Huaisang’s voice joins it, his own scream indistinguishable from one of anger or caused by anguish.

Nie Mingjue can’t hear it, not through the shattering, all-subsuming screeching, but he can imagine it, how it must sound, as he watches the beast’s body start to split apart, sever from its outer skin, the real shape of it sluicing to the floor. It’s still monstrous and mangled and massive, sopping with its own blood and its shredded sinew, more ropes emerging to snare its limbs; to string it out and bare its bulging, misshapen belly, to hold it wide and on display, meat to meet their blades.

It bleeds, now, when Nie Mingjue’s sabre swings through it, carving a gape from its cracked-open breastbone downward, and the smell is— the smell is rotten, melting flesh and bile and rot, as its belly bursts open and the spoiled contents start to spill out. Bodies, body after body of the dead that have decomposed but have not been digested. Nie Mingjue does not choke on it, the sight and the smell and the way it ravages his every sense, but he hears someone else, distant and far away, splutter and retch, wet and nauseated. Nie Mingjue steels himself, sucks in a breath through his mouth, and then sinks his arm into the hilt of his shoulder. Claws his hand around the first deep-swallowed thing his fingers learn the shape of, digs his heels in, and pulls.

He no longer hears Nie Huaisang screaming so much as he hears the precise, horrifying moment that he stops, when his voice breaks around it and his mouth must be left hanging open, left wide around the silence. Nie Mingjue doesn’t look. He has been told not to stop, and if he looks, he will, so he keeps going, gets his second arm in alongside the first, yanks and yanks until every corpse down to the dismembered limb has been fed back out and thrown down to the floor around them.

The moment Yu Yongrui drags out a too-small body, the bones of it bundled up in its own ratty clothes like a shroud, the Shenshou breathes out, once, whining, wrecked. Its claws twitch miserably, clacking against the stone, and then it is still, the ropes holding it down falling slack, then falling away.

The sound that follows, a limp body hitting the ground, reverberates. Nie Huaisang’s winded laugh is a terribly weak thing, but it’s not a last breath, for all it sounds wrapped up and wound in agony. Nie Mingjue doesn’t register that he moves, and he doesn’t need to, not when it means he’s found himself at Nie Huaisang’s side within instants, all three of them coming to kneel where Nie Huaisang is on his back, limp, soaked through in blood that can only be his.

It takes seconds Nie Mingjue does not want to spare, but he strips his outer robe away and wipes his hands clean as best he can on it before he reaches down to touch Nie Huaisang’s throat, to put his fingers to his pulse and feel for himself how it still thrums. The whites of his eyes are speckled with blood when he opens them; clots of it are caught in his eyelashes, streaking down his cheeks, his lips from his nose, his chin from his mouth.

“You all survived,” he manages to croak out, smile crooked, “good job.”

“Sect Leader,” Jia Wencheng murmurs, wary with worry, and Nie Mingjue sees as Yu Yongrui reaches out from against his side to press his own fingers to the underside of Nie Huaisang’s wrist.

Nie Mingjue sees Nie Huaisang’s lips purse, sees the slight protrusion of his cheeks, and angles his head to the side gently before the first sputter comes tearing out through his teeth, helps clear the path for the blood in his chest to make its way out onto the floor.

“Ugh,” Nie Huaisang complains, when he can finally come back up for air, then, “I’m okay.” Nie Mingjue is sure that’s not entirely true, for how he’s already favouring parts of himself, even still as he is against the ground; how he’s starting to cringe in on himself. His left shoulder is almost certainly dislocated, for where it is bent oddly at his side, the joint noticeably severed and stretched from the socket even beneath his sleeve.

“It’s dispelling,” Nie Huaisang confirms what they’re all beginning to feel, even Nie Mingjue, somewhere settled deep past sense and indescribable. “Ah, give it some minutes.” Then, inclining his head vaguely, he adds, voice softer, barer, “Please.”

Jia Wencheng and Yu Yongrui nod their understanding and rise to their feet. It is not as if they can give them much privacy, here; it is not as if they can stop themselves from overhearing anything they have to say to one another. But it seems to put Nie Huaisang to some slight semblance of ease, to see them turn their backs on them both, to watch them walk away.

Nie Mingjue helps him sit upright, as gently as he can, mindful of his arm, which jostles a hiss out of him when it sags to his side in a too-low hang. When he goes to let his hand fan over it, ghosting above the silver scaled silk, to see if he can at least blunt the edge of the pain— no spiritual energy rises to the fore of his fingers. A step backward and a look inward confirms Nie Mingjue’s suspicions: without the beast, he is left without, too.

“You did well,” Nie Mingjue whispers, and that brings a smile to Nie Huaisang’s lips, albeit a wry one.

“Only well?” His face crumples, eyes squeezing shut; the humour he’s trying to cover himself with falling flat.

He is— beautiful. What a thing to think, here and now, but it is no less true for being tactless. Nie Huaisang is so very beautiful, blood-soaked and pale and jagged with something trembling and tentative and vicious, and he is his.

“You were incredible,” he emends. “A Shenshou, Huaisang.” He has to catch his breath when it hitches, the true weight of it starting to sink in, press him down. A Divine Beast, in Qinghe, and Nie Huaisang slew it without a sabre in his hand, without losing a single man. “I could not be more proud of you.”

Nie Mingjue trails his hovering hand away from Nie Huaisang’s injured shoulder and lets it settle on his chest, instead, the bared ink-smeared skin framed by his crumpled robes. His fingers sprawl across the fan of his ribs, the bridge of his sternum, and take in the quickened, shallow ebb-flow of his every breath, as if to commit it to some memory he only now remembers he will not actually keep.

“Ah, it’s done.” Nie Huaisang breathes out, lets his head bow, chin dipping to his clavicle. He blinks, slow, as his gaze joins Nie Mingjue’s on his hand, settled on his skin. Settled over the marks Nie Mingjue has left on him, the marks that cannot be mistaken for anything but what they are, the marks his men have now seen. They both see it together, how it seems as though Nie Mingjue’s hand is losing its shape, its lustre, like a glimpse of a reflection within muddy water.

“It’s done,” Nie Huaisang croaks, voice cracking. His chest shudders underneath Nie Mingjue’s fingers. “It’s not fair.”

It’s not. “I know,” Nie Mingjue hushes him, “I know.”

“I can’t do this again,” Nie Huaisang admits. Though the sob curling up his throat tinges it with something grieving, it does not sound broken, for all the words are themselves breaking. It merely sounds— empty. As though there is nothing left to break.

“You can, Huaisang.” It doesn’t utterly ruin Nie Mingjue to say. He survives it, somehow, if not worse off for it.

Something dark flashes across Nie Huaisang’s eyes, beneath the cloudy film of burgeoning, unshed tears and the red gleam of his blood. His one good hand surges up between them, fists itself in the neck of Nie Mingjue’s robe, the clutch of it furious and desperate and shaking. “Nie Mingjue,” he heaves, and it’s a blow unto itself for how it leaves his mouth, seething and sepulchral, “I am telling you—”

He bites down on his lip to stop himself, hard enough to draw blood, fresh pinpricks of it welling up to spot across the swollen red, abraded skin. “I don’t want this,” he whispers instead, hoarse, fraying, “I don’t want any of this to be the last thing I say, but I am so, I am so angry—”

Nie Mingjue quiets him with the brush of his hand up his throat, feels the bob of Nie Huaisang’s swallow against the heel of his palm. Nie Huaisang’s breath starts to come harder, straining, the higher his touch rises, until at last it slams out with a wail, when Nie Mingjue threads his fingers through his mussed hair and turns his face in, hides him against the crook of his neck.

“I’m here,” he murmurs, pressing the words against his hair like they’re a prayer and Nie Huaisang’s acknowledgement of them is their absolution. “You were perfect, Didi, you did so well. You can let go, now. I have you.”

“Please,” Nie Huaisang mouths against his neck, blood-smeared lips quivering, his hand fisting impossibly tighter in Nie Mingjue’s robe. “I don’t want— please.”

Nie Mingjue embraces him as tightly as he can without hurting him more than he already has, than he needs to. He hushes him, he rubs his back, and he presses kisses into his hair, against his brow; bringing all the gentleness he and Nie Huaisang can endure to bear on his brother’s body. Nie Huaisang begs him, and Nie Mingjue holds him to him and holds himself back in turns, holds and holds and holds until there is nothing left to hold, until there is nothing left at all.

Nie Mingjue wakes, and he is not in his guest rooms at Koi Tower. He is not at the farmhouse at the edge of Qinghe bordering Gucheng. He is not within his coffin at the Stone Castles.

He knows this should concern him, and yet, it does not. That his mind is so clear does not make it any less strange, for him, to be waking here. To be waking at all, in a place more familiar than it should be for all the time that has passed since he last saw it.

And yet, here he is.

Nie Mingjue looks up at the black lacquered wood roof overhead, high slung, and feels the body of his bed braced against his back. He takes a breath to ground himself, the between to his home’s above and its below. He does not need to look within his body to find the man wrapped around the monster for the sake of bringing it to his surface; not when it is already there, settled across his skin, a perfect fit to the whole of him.

He turns over, slowly, following a soft sound, almost washed out beneath the rest of the dulled clamour of the morning. He feels the shudder ripple down his frame as he shifts, shrugging the disuse from his leaden limbs. Beside him, not far, is Nie Huaisang, face soft with sleep, his silk inner robe shucked halfway up his smooth thighs, his ankles tangled in the kicked-off sheets.

It is Nie Mingjue’s hand that branches out between their bodies; he watches it, lets his eyes, still blur-hemmed with sleep, trace over the shapes of his fingers as they stroke across the span of space. It feels real in a way he did not ever think he would again be able to miss.

Nie Huaisang stirs the moment the backs of Nie Mingjue’s knuckles brush his jaw, but he does not startle. “You’re awake,” he whispers, eyes still shut, no sharp surprise in his scratchy voice, only sweet expectation.

“So are you,” Nie Mingjue says, quiet, and his reward for it is that he gets to watch the too-open way that Nie Huaisang’s smile sprawls across his lips before he yawns and stretches.

“What is the last thing you remember?” Nie Huaisang asks, when at last he is awake enough to thread their fingers together, to blink up at Nie Mingjue and see his face properly.

“The temple,” Nie Mingjue answers, ready. “When we fought the Shenshou.”

Nie Huaisang’s relief blazes across his gentle features, burns bright as the summer sun. “That’s,” he starts, but he has to stop as the laugh in his tone surges to the fore and dominates his tongue. It spills so sharply out of him that it’s almost a shout, his shoulders shaking with it, the corners of his eyes scrunching up. “That’s, ah,” he starts again, when he’s snatched back his breath, the tangle of his fingers squeezing all the more tightly down around Nie Mingjue’s own. “Really. I could, I could not have possibly hoped for better.”

“What happened?” Nie Mingjue asks, because he must, before this all sinks too far in and overwhelms the shred of strict sense in him. It is not an accusation, for however roughly it rasps out of him, but something wrought of a need ascendant of any higher calling.

“A lot,” Nie Huaisang answers, breathless and rushed, “so much, ah, I don’t— how do I even start?” He wriggles his other arm out from beneath its flush tuck against his side, half pinned to the bed, and traces the tips of his fingers along the underside of Nie Mingjue’s wrist, pressing the pads of them down where his pulse beats up through his skin. “It’s been half a year. You’re in Qinghe, you’re— home. The rest is, so much of a long story, it can— it can wait for a moment.”

Nie Huaisang sits up so quickly that Nie Mingjue feels as if his head spins with it, his robe riding all the higher up his thighs as he kicks out of the sheets. Less care is clearly given to how his struggle must look, and more to ensuring that his hands do not slip from where they’ve come to ground themselves on Nie Mingjue, and when he is finally righted he is a show of a sight, mussed hair all but strangling his throat and the skin of his cheek scuffed pink from the bed.

“How do you feel?” he asks, shuffling closer, cross-legged, until Nie Mingjue has to prop himself up on his elbow just to see him properly without straining his neck, their joined hands spilling past Nie Huaisang’s shins to rest in his lap. “No discomfort? Pain? You— you feel, right?”

Nie Mingjue adjusts the snare of their hands, turns the grip over and rebinds it so he can swipe his thumb across the backs of Nie Huaisang’s fingers softly, soothing him. “Huaisang,” he gentles, and, “I’m fine,” then, most importantly, “what have you done?”

Nie Huaisang sucks in a breath, shaky, then tongues at the swell of his bottom lip, brow furrowing. “It’s, complicated. Possibly. It may be better if I— show you, yourself, first.” He withdraws the hand straying against Nie Mingjue’s wrist and twists himself around, fumbling in a half-blind lunge for the table pulled up to his bedside. Nie Mingjue cannot see much, past the straining spun-slope of his spine, save for the vague claw of his hand to the wood. There is a heavy clatter, and when Nie Huaisang turns back to face him, his fingers are fastened around the handle of a bronze mirror. It’s a smaller thing than what he had with him in the dreaming state, more personal, with a loop forged at the base for a tether to be strung through so that it can be worn at the waist.

“Here,” Nie Huaisang says, and turns the polished surface up and to him as Nie Mingjue rises onto his knees.

He sees it at once; it is such a shocking thing that it subsumes any other sight. It renders him powerless to do anything but perceive it, it and nothing else, for what drags like a day and passes as if it is a year. The middle of his throat has been struck through with scar tissue, raised up on his skin, white-knit and gnarled thick. Numbly, when he goes to raise his hand to trace it with a fingertip, he finds he is already halfway there. He doesn’t need to tilt the mirror or his head to know that it loops around the whole way, a morbid collar and a damning tell, when he can confirm it by touch alone.

“It’s you,” Nie Huaisang explains, clumsy, voice sounding thick with— something, something Nie Mingjue can’t name, something that defies and denies a term. “Your soul, your body, your meridians. The qi is different, and so is the core. But for all the sum of the parts, it’s still— you’re still you. You’re alive.”

What Nie Huaisang has given him is— an explanation that bodes only for further questions and fewer answers. He feels almost as if he is choking, but not quite, just from looking at his own neck; swears that, when he swallows, hard, he can feel where it catches on the inside of his throat, where the blade swung clean through to rend the flesh that later repaired itself.

Nie Mingjue jerks his head up, rips his eyes away, and Nie Huaisang turns the mirror over, face down, and puts it to rest on the bed. “Let me,” he says, quiet, “just,” and then he is unwinding their joined hands so that he can reach for Nie Mingjue’s chest, can curl his fingers into the neck of his inner robe. Nie Mingjue cannot say he does not stiffen, that he does not flinch, but he does not shy away. It is all, simply— a shock. It is all so much. But Nie Huaisang’s hands, like this, hooking beneath where his robe folds across itself and following the hem down to the ties at his waist to undo them— that is still new, too, but safer in its somewhat-almost familiarity. To have his chest bared by his brother, to be touched— this, Nie Mingjue can manage to do.

“Ah, don’t ask me how I did it, how it even worked—” If he means it to be a warning, or even a request, Nie Huaisang manages neither, only sounds strung up between something frail and something awed. His robe splits open as the ties are freed, neck to belly, and Nie Huaisang splays the silk wide, baring Nie Mingjue’s chest. His breath catches at something Nie Mingjue imagines he has already seen countless times; Nie Mingjue lifts his hand without the prompting that is bound to come, presses the heel of his palm against his sternum, and drags it down until the jut of the bone jars against a jagged cleave of scar tissue that, much like his throat, is terribly new and utterly telling.

“It had to be perfect,” Nie Huaisang concludes, voice wrought with a fraught— relief. Nie Mingjue can call it relief. He feeds the tremor of his fingers in through Nie Mingjue’s own as he cups his hand over Nie Mingjue’s, brought to rest over his dantian. “There’s a technique for transferring a golden core between bodies, that— well, all of the records of it were destroyed, I was told. But Wei-xiong, for all his memory is terrible, remembered the important parts, and we pieced together enough to adapt to suit, ah, this, instead.”

For all his head feels weighed down by fog, his ears washed out by the rush of his blood, Nie Mingjue feels— calm. As though all the panic that should rightly be inflicting him, all the confusion that should be destabilising him, has been brought to heel by Nie Huaisang’s hand on him, his hand on Nie Huaisang. The grave thought already occurred to him that his brother has done something unforgivable by bringing him home. His peace was made with that the moment he watched Nie Huaisang wake, watched the raw, tender thing he was still too tired to shield bloom over his delicate features. Now, there is only— only everything else, that he’s missed and now must find, and put to its rightful place.

It takes him a moment, in amongst everything else, for the rest of him to catch up and realise that there is more than one thing to trip over in Nie Huaisang’s words. Wei-xiong. “Wei Wuxian?”

Nie Huaisang pauses. “Oh, right,” he says, “yes. Wei-xiong is back. That’s a— that’s a really long story. Several really long stories, actually.” He blinks, brow furrowing, before his eyes fly wide in understanding. “But he’s fine! He’s fine, Da-ge, he’s... a lot changes, with time, and— and death.”

Nie Mingjue supposes that is true. He supposes, too, that he does not need to trust Wei Wuxian, or that it matters if he doesn’t, so long as Nie Huaisang does enough to call him a friend.

“He found me,” Nie Huaisang says, soft, almost distant. Pensive. When Nie Mingjue looks at his face, looks at Nie Huaisang properly, he seems pained in a way that is not raw but instead by rote. “Ah, he and Hanguang Jun. And he didn’t owe it to me to help me with this, but he offered before I could ask.” Nie Huaisang bends his fingers to pet the tips of them, haphazard, across the scar. “A credit to his perceptiveness, but, you also make me quite transparent.”

That is— that is so great an admittance of intimacy, so terrible an admission of fragility, that it steals Nie Mingjue’s breath for long seconds. He cannot speak, for what feels like an age, until such a confession has been met with the silent reverence it is so due. “The Shenhe is here, then,” Nie Mingjue surmises, at last, voice a gravel-rasp. He swallows to sand down the scrape in his throat. “Inside me.”

A Divine Beast’s core— a true Divine Beast’s core— an incomprehensible power, an incalculable treasure. Nie Mingjue cannot even remember when he last heard of a Divine Beast being found anywhere, let alone hunted. He does not think any have been seen since their founder’s generation, if not well before it. He doubts their rarity has changed during the time of his passing. Nie Huaisang could have had everything for it, and he had risked it for this, instead. The worst of it is that it would never have been a waste, not to him, had it burned up and still not brought Nie Mingjue back. In his success, he has bent the whole world wide open around the space he’s needed to bridge between life and after, to lead Nie Mingjue across to his rightful place at his side.

“Yes.” Between the yawning space of the seconds that have passed them, they’ve shifted closer, and Nie Huaisang punctuates its absent passage by bringing his other hand to perch on Nie Mingjue’s knee, his own legs all but shy of spilling into his brother’s lap. “The risk of failing was— it was all improbable enough that it was practically impossible. I spent three days alone, just,” his breath heaves out of him, hard, as he shakes his head, nails scratching at Nie Mingjue’s knee through his pants as his grip flinches down. “Just, my hands in your chest, mapping the core to the memory of your meridians. Three days alone, just for one of the sanbao. There was nothing I could do about your body’s inherent jing, but there are methods to manage that. Shen was the challenge, the— the crux of it, really. A soul has to be willing, for anything to even have a hope of working in the first place.”

Nie Mingjue hears what is not said, and thinks, for how it vices viciously in his chest, that his heart might stop again. “Did you think I would not come,” Nie Mingjue asks, raw, “if you called?”

Nie Huaisang’s answering smile is a brief flicker of a thing, a shade of something soft that slips free and through of his hands, shattering his composure. “I had tried before. Not even to bring you here, but to, to just, at least hear you. You never answered.” The breath he takes is shuddery, but it is not yet a sob. Nie Huaisang swallows that down, even though it is a struggle that Nie Mingjue sees seizes through the entirety of him.

What can he do? What can Nie Mingjue even say? He cannot imagine ever denying Nie Huaisang something as important as this, cannot comprehend why he would. He cannot remember it, the stretches of time where he was spaced apart and separate, spirited away as a spectre. But if he was— there are ways to speak to even ghosts that have moved well on, so long as they are still on their journey through to their next destination. Nie Huaisang would have known them; would have learned them, if not more, methods and manners Nie Mingjue could not dream of imagining. How could Nie Mingjue have endured refusing him? How can he forgive himself, now, knowing he did, even if he cannot remember it?

Words fail Nie Mingjue, as they should. But his body does not, and so, he slips his hand from beneath Nie Huaisang’s on his chest, brings his brother’s palm to flatten against his dantian, the scar he left as the only impression for how he bled so much and so badly into Nie Mingjue to make him breathe again. He closes his hand over the backs of Nie Huaisang’s knuckles to hold it there, so he can feel the beat of his heart as it bounds in his chest.

“What else could I do?” Nie Huaisang asks him, voice breaking. “What else could I think, but that you were— at some peace? That you were not unable, but unwilling? I had to.”

“Oh, Huaisang,” Nie Mingjue whispers, wrecked, “Didi, come here.” Already he’s moving before he’s been told; already Nie Mingjue is meeting him before he’s even asked to be met. Nie Huaisang is lighter than nothing and a perfect fit in the cradle of his lap. Nie Mingjue helps coax his arms around his shoulders, guides his face to his neck, and cups the back of his head to steady him as Nie Huaisang muffles his first gasping wail into his skin.

“I don’t want to cry,” Nie Huaisang hisses, knotted up and clotted and wet, “I didn’t want to cry—”

“You can cry,” Nie Mingjue interjects, pressing it like a kiss and a croon against his hair, “you can cry, Didi, it’s all right.” It’s a battle in and of itself to force the words up through his teeth without choking on them, without cutting them down with a sob of his own. His chest burns, ribcage charred black and bones cracking apart from the sheer heat of the naked flame. But Nie Mingjue has both survived and fallen to far worse. “I’m here now,” he assures, he promises, he comforts. “I have you now.”

When Nie Mingjue has permitted it, how can Nie Huaisang refuse? He can’t, and so he doesn’t. His body breaks open against Nie Mingjue’s as the first of his innumerable, nigh-infinite sobs tears free of his grief-throttled throat; he lets himself be held, he allows himself to feel safe, and Nie Mingjue guides him through it. Tempers every thrash, soothes every shake; his mouth whispering nothing against his hair, his forehead, his temples, his hand stroking the plains of his back, catching on every ridge of his spine through his thin robe.

“I promise this is mostly happy,” Nie Huaisang croaks, when he’s carved his voice back out for himself in the space between a whimper and a breath. “I, fuck.” His laugh is a weary, wispy thing, but it is close to pleased, something bright, tipped back from the brink of his unmaking. He turns his face up from Nie Mingjue’s neck, sniffling, and draws over his hand, fisted in Nie Mingjue’s robe, fumbling to dab his eyes dry against the hem. “You’ve missed so much. You really— you missed so much. So many stories, not even counting the ones that aren’t mine to tell.”

“You need only start with yours,” Nie Mingjue says, gentle, “when you are good and ready.” There is time, now. No-one could be more mindful than the two of them, together, of how quickly it could all fall out from beneath them, could be stolen away, but— there is time. There is time, and they will take it, to do this properly, to put it and them all back to rights.

“I can’t.” Nie Huaisang straightens in his lap but does not slip free of it, sniffing again as he unhands Nie Mingjue’s robe to scrub at his own face. It seems to only serve to smear the mess of his tears and snot across his flush-mottled skin further. When he’s finally dug deep enough into the well of him to find the strength of will to lift his chin, he does, and he brings his gaze up to meet Nie Mingjue’s. “There are some things that I can’t. I don’t know how to. I’ll lie to you.”

Nie Mingjue wonders how Nie Huaisang can still think that there is anything he has done or could ever do that Nie Mingjue could revile him for. Could find disgust in. How he could hope to surmount the love between them that is tantamount to worship. There is no one of them, not without the other. They are a singularity, for however ugly their halves make the whole.

He does not say it, though. He thinks, when Nie Huaisang is not so frayed and flayed open, when he’s settled underneath himself and drawn the fragile strips of his skin over his bones, he’ll remember it for himself. For now, for how he is, bent to breaking by barely fathomable frailty, hearing its confirmation will do more harm than it will help heal.

“I will hear it from others inevitably,” says Nie Mingjue. It is nothing more than a reminder; that Nie Huaisang needn’t race his own resolve to some resolution within his soul, but that there is only so much he can control. The dark only lasts so long before the dawn breaks through again.

“I know.” Nie Huaisang closes his eyes, nodding to himself, stiff and stilted. He takes a breath. “I won’t apologise for anything you hear. I have no desire to atone for the things you will be told I have done. But I can admit to them, for you, if and when you ask.”

“Very well,” Nie Mingjue concedes. It’s one of the fairer compromises Nie Huaisang could have called for him to make.

Nie Huaisang sways, but does not stumble; does not strike fear in Nie Mingjue that he might fall. He simply slants forward again, heavy, and tucks his face into the hinge of Nie Mingjue’s shoulder, lips brushing at the hinge where it meets his throat. “Did I do the right thing by you, Da-ge?” he all but whispers, more a shift of his lips to Nie Mingjue’s skin than any sound. It’s too burdened to be loud, too bereft to be anything but felt. His arms rise again, sliding around Nie Mingjue's shoulders like a snare. As if he thinks Nie Mingjue might just disappear. “Was it wrong to bring you back?”

It is— Nie Mingjue can’t speak as to its rightness, not when all of his being screams as to its wrongness. But the truth he can speak aloud is one that he will readily admit, and one he would not change. “I never wanted to leave you,” he answers. “Not for our lifetime.”

Nie Huaisang’s breath slams out of him as if he’s been slapped, sharp and stinging. It feels wet against Nie Mingjue’s neck, worse than his tears. “You don’t have to stay,” he stresses, strained, “just because I—”

“I would not,” Nie Mingjue snaps, too sharp and too savage and too severe, incapable of being anything but, “I would never.”

Nie Huaisang does not answer I know, does not amend I just want it to be clear that it is a choice you can make. He simply sighs out, presses his lips together against Nie Mingjue in a shiver and a shadow of something that could be taken as a kiss, then rights himself again.

His eyes are still wet and red when he opens them, but they are clearer for their brief rest. “Do you want your rooms back?” he asks, before he starts to laugh, shaking with it in Nie Mingjue’s arms, as though he’s only realised the actual absurdity of it upon hearing it spoken aloud with his own voice.

“They are your rooms, now,” Nie Mingjue answers. As they had once been Nie Mingjue’s, so too had they been their father’s, before he died; his father’s, before him. They are where the Sect Leader resides, no matter who that may be at any given time: deep in the fortress, easily barred up in the event of a sudden qi deviation. Nie Mingjue no longer has any claim nor right to them.

“They, well.” Nie Huaisang pauses, licking at his bottom lip. He drifts towards the ghost of Nie Mingjue’s hand as it grazes his cheek, raised aloft between them, and brings his cheek to rest against the pads of his fingers. Nie Mingjue takes the tacit permission to idly swipe at a track of dried tears, and he feels Nie Huaisang’s smile curl against the edge of his palm. “Well,” he continues, emboldened by that tender touch, “they could be ours. Our rooms.”

They could, and perhaps they shouldn’t; this is not like the dream, that severed them from all else. Here, where their blood runs up against borders, there are greater considerations that they need to make. Still, Nie Mingjue cannot simply say this. One momentary carelessness will mean nigh-ending days of restlessness. It’s excruciating, to examine his every thought and word and still not know if they will be the end or if they will manage to be enough.

“Huaisang,” he ventures, “what do you plan to do?” It comes as gently as he can make it and himself, for all he is a gruff, grumbling thing, brutish and burly by sinew, built up and brought to bear over his bulk.

It seems it is enough: Nie Huaisang does not stiffen against him, but instead slackens, sinks down, lets another sliver more of himself soak out to give over the space it has left to Nie Mingjue’s strength. Nie Mingjue can hold him up; can carry anything burden Nie Huaisang wishes to set down on him.

“I don’t know,” says Nie Huaisang, soft. His smile grows small, but does not lose its light. Nie Mingjue lets his thumb brush the edge of it, almost idly, because it is there, and that it is there means he is allowed it. “I really don’t. I know I’ve had the time to think that far ahead, but I haven’t, Da-ge. For home, for Qinghe, it doesn’t matter what we do. For everywhere and everyone else— I suppose I could lie about you, or I could tell the truth.”

For all he says he has not thought ahead, and despite how quickly Nie Mingjue knows his mind works, Nie Huaisang’s answers come with the haste that belies the claim of no prior consideration. Nie Mingjue does not think it is a lie, though. More, perhaps, that it is a lie Nie Huaisang has unwittingly told himself, a trick he’s played so well that even he believes he has not thought nearly so much about the tale he would tell to spin his brother’s return as he truly has.

“How would you lie?” Nie Mingjue asks, as he lets his other hand stroke, heady, down Nie Huaisang’s back, at last, to settle heavily on his waist. Nie Huaisang presses into the pin of it and pushes into Nie Mingjue’s palm on his cheek all at once, and then he’s drawing his knee up awkwardly between them so he can resettle his weight with his thighs spread over Nie Mingjue’s lap, his legs hanging over his hips.

“Ah, hmm, let’s see,” he hums, glancing up. He clears his throat, then, in a tongue-in-cheek tone laced with acerbic mockery, he exclaims, “Sect Leader Nie has finally gone mad! He’s taken a cut-sleeve lover, the spitting image of his deceased brother!”

Nie Mingjue has to clamp down on something furious, curdling from the pit of his belly up to the back of his throat, and his fingers claw down on Nie Huaisang’s waist in a feeble attempt to keep the rest of him grounded. It serves little more than to crumple the silk viciously in his fist and scrape his blunt nails sharply enough across the skin underneath that Nie Huaisang gasps.

“Sorry,” Nie Huaisang apologises, though he sounds more concerned than he does contrite. His arms unwind from Nie Mingjue’s shoulders, and he tenderly takes Nie Mingjue’s face in his hands, thumbs tracing his cheekbones. Nie Mingjue gentles under them, almost at once. Though it didn’t set him aflame in a beat and see his sight bleed red in a breath, to hear Nie Huaisang say— to mock himself in the precise and exacting way he would be mocked, it still made him angry. Now that the snarling threat of teeth is dissipating, tempted free and away by the kneading circles of Nie Huaisang’s fingers, he can better think on what was underlying it.

“Look,” Nie Huaisang resumes, “I don’t think you’re a shame or a stain to hide, Da-ge. I would rather tell the truth, not in the least because any lie, no matter how good, is just handing over the dagger that will eventually end up in each of our backs.” It is a wisdom spoken from their shared experience. “No-one but us has to know the whole of it. It would not be dishonest. Our people will keep our secrets. The rest can assume what they will."

“There would be talk,” Nie Mingjue replies, imparting a warning he knows Nie Huaisang does not need, but one that Nie Mingjue must give anyway. “It would open you to many dangers.” None I can protect you from, he thinks, but he holds it back against himself and keeps it just for him.

“There is always talk,” Nie Huaisang argues, “there are always dangers,” and he is right to argue it. It is something that has not changed, and it is something that never will. It has never stopped them before, in all other things but this. Why should it be what stops them now?

What they are, what they’ve done, and what they will do— none of them measure up to much at all when held against other wrongs to compare the wounds caused. One could argue far, far worse has been done by the hands belonging to the mouths who would accuse them in the same breath of impropriety. And that, Nie Mingjue realises, is all it would be: an accusation, no matter how close it may land to the truth of all things. No-one but he and Nie Huaisang would know their exactitudes. No-one else would ever deserve to.

“What do you want?” Nie Mingjue asks. He does not miss the way Nie Huaisang’s thighs twitch in on themselves from the words, though they are not delivered with the breathlessness or the promise of obscenity that might better warrant such a primal reaction.

Nie Huaisang tries to hide it with the shift of his hips, forward, in Nie Mingjue’s lap, only to unconceal it with the flit of his fingertips up Nie Mingjue’s face, the sink of them into his loose hair. “We could share the mantle,” he suggests, holding Nie Mingjue’s gaze as he scrapes his nails across his scalp, soft lines that shiver sensually down his spine in accordance with his brother’s very design. “I have been thinking of ways to defer power. A xianling, perhaps, to put a fumu guan between the sect and the commoners. It’s not a step too far in any direction, regardless, to separate the duties of one between two. Or,” he leans in with his pause, as if he is to impart something of a secret, “you lead the sect. I will be your little Nie-furen.”

“Huaisang,” Nie Mingjue hisses out. It should not sink through him as it does, hot like a dagger eating into the meat of his chest, clipping between the rungs of his ribs. It should not make his gut twist in on itself with something hungry. But it does, and Nie Huaisang knows it, which is why he’s said it at all.

“I’m not being entirely disingenuous, Da-ge. I just.” He shrugs, then taps his fingers down in Nie Mingjue’s hair, almost nervous, pitter-pattering like rainfall. “I’m tired. I’m tired of being the one to make choices, to decide what is and is not done. I want you to do it again. If you want to call me brother or call me lover as you direct me is up to you, but— how different would the latter truly be to how everything was before you died?”

He is right, and he knows he is right just as much as he knows Nie Mingjue knows it, and sees it, now, where he could have once ignored the comparison. The line between being Nie Mingjue’s pampered younger brother and his pampered wife had long been crossed between them, blurred over and bled through. It has even been consummated, now, hasn’t it? All that would change is that it would be given a name between the two of them that acknowledged the actual face of their arrangement.

Drawing up boundaries was always an exercise in undertaking futile endeavours between them, anyway. One could not hope to stop lines from being crossed by something that could neither be comprehended nor contained.

“Let me think on it,” Nie Mingjue says. Even though he is sure of his answer, he still needs to give himself time with it, to see it coalesce beyond something that is only a hungry amalgamation of needs and greeds.

“Of course,” Nie Huaisang says, combing his fingers through his hair. That his smile shifts into something sweet and pleased tells Nie Mingjue that he knows what Nie Mingjue’s answer will be, already, too. But he concedes to his pace nonetheless, and plays into the pretence. “Anything you need.”

Anything is time, but Anything is everything else, as well. Anything is leave for Nie Mingjue to lean between them, to take Nie Huaisang’s mouth in a kiss, and so he does for the sake of feeling and tasting the smile that he sees on his brother’s face, too.

“As much as I hate to rush this,” Nie Huaisang says, doing anything but rushing, for the way he punctuates every word with kisses to Nie Mingjue’s lips that turn into huffed wordless complaints when he is not allowed to deepen them, “we should get presentable. We won’t be disturbed by our people, but Wei-xiong will be up soon, and disturbing us is absolutely the first thing he will do.”

Nie Mingjue, with reluctant altruism, helps Nie Huaisang out of his lap, who steals every kiss he can before he can no longer crane his neck far enough to reach. “I really can’t wait to let him know it worked,” he continues as he stands, palms smoothing his rucked robes back down to shroud his slim legs. It amplifies his deceptive illusion of decorum, if nothing else. “And to tell him to take his twenty children and get out of my county. I’m not exaggerating,” he adds, when he glances over his shoulder, body half-turned away to face his altar table, and catches the confused contortion of Nie Mingjue’s expression. “Another day and I think one of them will have finally managed to break something other than my patience incumbent in my hospitality. His husband really spoils him and them too much, it makes it so difficult for the rest of us.”

He continues to ramble— to rant, really, under his breath, as he ambles away to start collecting up the things he needs to comb their hair and pin their braids. He manages to tire himself out and trail off by the time Nie Mingjue has brought himself to sit on the edge of the bed, though he balks at Nie Mingjue’s blank expression when he returns.

“Twenty children?” Nie Mingjue asks, blunt. “Husband?”

“Oh.” Nie Huaisang blinks. “I suppose I didn’t explain.” He then proceeds to clamber around behind Nie Mingjue, gather his hair from its spill across his shoulders, sink the teeth of the comb down through the strands, and do precisely that.