River's Hush

Sect Leader Nie has still not returned to the main hall over half an hour after the agreed time. For the first twenty minutes, it had posed no issue to the point the arrangement was actually preferable. But now, having exhausted the items on their agenda they can discuss in good conscience and polite civility without Qinghe Nie’s input, Nie Huaisang’s ongoing absence is beginning to wear thin patiences even thinner.

Jiang Cheng’s patience is especially threadbare for having to play gracious guest to the Xuchang Shao Sect in the first place. It is of no surprise to anyone that he is the one who ends up losing his temper.

“Really?” Jiang Cheng scoffs, derisive, when the Qinghe Nie cultivators only have the same answer they had for him fifteen minutes before they were due to restart: no, esteemed Sect Leader Jiang, we don’t know where Sect Leader Nie is. “You haven’t a clue where he might be? What general direction he’s even gone? You do realise he could be dead in a hole while you’re sitting here being similarly useless and wasting my time?”

“I’m sure that’s not the case,” Sect Leader Shao pipes up, possibly alarmed by the prospect one of the leaders of the Four Great Sects could have died somewhere on his estate.

It will be, Jiang Cheng thinks to himself bitterly, when I find him.

“Don’t all move at once.” Jiang Cheng hauls himself upright, snatching Sandu from his table. “I’ll go fetch Sect Leader Nie.”

“Perhaps we should adjourn for an hour?” Sect Leader Ouyang suggests.

“Perhaps,” Jiang Cheng snaps back, his spiteful stride already having carried him halfway towards the door.

The murmuring starts before he’s even across the threshold, but it is to be expected. What is not entirely expected is the person that tentatively joins him at his side while he’s trying to orient himself. Between his slipshod recollections of the estate’s layout and his assumptions as to where Nie Huaisang could have possibly spirited himself off to within it, Jiang Cheng has to admit to himself, reluctantly, that he hasn’t got the best idea as to where to start.

“Sect Leader Jiang, can I help at all?” Ouyang Zizhen ventures, earnestly eager.

“Do as you like,” Jiang Cheng snarls out, before cutting himself off with a scowl. Thankfully, it seems it doesn’t make a dent on the Baling Ouyang heir, who simply waits, patiently, until Jiang Cheng gets a grip on his manners. If it will annoy your father, absolutely. “Yes. Sure. Go west.”

Ouyang Zizhen cups his palm as he bows, the salute respectful if brief, before he hurries off as directed. Jiang Cheng watches him go until he’s jaunted off down another hall, before he sighs, shakes his hands out, and sets off down the opposite way. Surely, between the two of them, it won’t take long. Xuchang Shao’s grounds are not large by any means, and so there are only so many places Nie Huaisang could be within them.

Jiang Cheng scares a lead out of a servant after ten minutes of aimless pacing when he rounds a corner at speed and nearly causes the girl to drop her basin of water. Someone matching the clipped description Jiang Cheng gives her went into the study wing over an hour ago, or so she thinks. Given that it is the best Jiang Cheng has to go on, he takes it without complaint.

It is only after he’s passed it twice and he’s retracing his steps back through the corridor from the opposite direction that Jiang Cheng sees it. Part of the wall’s panelling — an obnoxiously carved and ornately decorative thing — stutters, warping in on itself. When Jiang Cheng moves in to examine it, he smells sandalwood and smoke, and finds a gap that he can slip three fingers into.

Jiang Cheng throws the hidden door wide, sending the outside light spilling into the dim room, and Nie Huaisang very nearly leaps out of his skin from where he’s seated on the floor.

“Sect Leader Jiang!” he yelps, gathering his beizi around his shoulders. He looks all the part of some half-dressed, half-debauched maiden in her boudoir that Jiang Cheng is intruding upon, uninvited. It serves to make Jiang Cheng feel all the more furious, a dangerous heat and something else all the more unspeakable licking its way up his chest.

“What are you even doing in here?!” Jiang Cheng demands in a rush, storming into the slim, suffocating little space. Between both of them, he takes up most of it, though it is less from any physical immensity than it is from sheer infuriation. “Do you not know what the time is? Do you not know the meaning of propriety as a guest?”

“What—” Nie Huaisang blanches, head swivelling towards the lone candle in the room. “Oh, I forgot to push the pin in. Sorry.”

Of course, he answers only the easiest of Jiang Cheng’s questions. Jiang Cheng tucks Sandu’s sheath under his armpit and snatches up Nie Huaisang’s wrist with his freed hand. “Absolutely useless,” he gripes, pulling the clumsy clutch of Nie Huaisang’s body to its feet.

A wooden click sounds out behind them, and the room is plunged into a pervasive darkness that the candle’s flame struggles to penetrate. Nie Huaisang’s mouth falls open in a stupid shock, and Jiang Cheng feels his annoyance flare to all new heights as Nie Huaisang stiffens under his hand.

“Oh no,” Nie Huaisang manages.

“Oh no?” Jiang Cheng repeats.

“The, ah, door?” Nie Huaisang stammers. He tips himself up on his toes to peer over Jiang Cheng’s shoulder, as if he needs further visual confirmation of being able to see barely anything at all to convince him that the door has certainly, without a doubt, swung shut. “The door is shut.”

“So I’ll open it,” Jiang Cheng snaps at him, turning and pulling Nie Huaisang along with him to do just that. He gives it a testing push. He gives it a shove, putting his weight into it from his shoulder. He kicks down on the sill. It doesn’t budge.

“It’s warded,” Nie Huaisang points out, as though he thinks Jiang Cheng would not have appreciated the observation before he started beating down on the wood like a tantruming child. Now that Jiang Cheng knows that, it’s a waste of words and breath.

At first press, he thinks it must be sealing their spiritual energy, somehow, the talismans likely disguised within the tapestry of the scene carved into the panel’s other side. Jiang Cheng feeds more force into it, just to be sure, and finds that the spellwork is not pointed outward, but instead enmeshed within, made to be a pull to any push rather than a protest. It takes what Jiang Cheng gives and nullifies it across the span of itself. Made to detain, but not disarm. Unlikely to be a prison, then, given that, but the alternative — that it’s an enforced seclusion room, or some manner of the like, instead — isn’t all that comforting, given the end result is that they’re stuck either way.

“Fuck!” Jiang Cheng seethes, giving it another shove for desperation’s sake before he steps back, Nie Huaisang dragged in tow. “Of course. Fine. Great.” It really is his lot in life that everything that can go wrong must do so for the greater sake of utterly ruining his day.

Nie Huaisang tweaks his wrist within the cuff of Jiang Cheng’s fingers, and Jiang Cheng releases him with a huff. “Ah, it’s fine, it’s fine,” he says, and though his tone is soft and his words are mollifying, Jiang Cheng is both unassuaged and unimpressed. He watches as Nie Huaisang wanders back the few steps to where he was first found, the shift of his draping robes around him made strange, almost ethereal, by the play of the shadows. He sinks low, into a crouch, and comes back up with a scrap of folded paper pinched between his thin fingers.

“It could be worse, couldn’t it?” Nie Huaisang adds, when he has returned to Jiang Cheng’s side.

“How?” Jiang Cheng asks, in all seriousness, and Nie Huaisang only laughs, at first, in reply.

“I’m not sure,” is his proper answer, given as he goes into a kneel to carefully work the paper through the sliver of a gap between the door and floor. “I’ll think on it.”

Jiang Cheng sighs out, his breath deep and his body heavy with a sly, surreptitious tiredness.

“How long was I gone for, before you found me?” Nie Huaisang asks when he rises.

Jiang Cheng looks past his dark eyes and the sweat beading up on the slope of his jaw, gaze flitting off to rest on the little else there is in the room to look at. “Over an hour,” Jiang Cheng tells him, and he sees, in his periphery, the corner of Nie Huaisang’s mouth twinge as he pinches his lips.

“Really?” he exclaims, and it’s a suitable enough provocation for Jiang Cheng to round on him, eyes narrowing into a slitted glare.

“What, do you think making a point about your inability to track time requires any exaggeration?” It’s all sound without fury, but Nie Huaisang, at least, has the decency to stifle his laugh behind his straining smile.

“Perhaps not?” Nie Huaisang tries, voice tellingly light.

“Perhaps not,” Jiang Cheng snarks.

Nie Huaisang turns away, lifting a hand to brush his hair from his nape, gathering it all over the slope of his slight shoulder. “Is anyone else searching with you?”

He begins to wander back, and Jiang Cheng follows along. “The little Ouyang heir.”

“Oh, xiao Zizhen?” Nie Huaisang gathers up his papers, and then closes the few books he’s pulled from the uncluttered shelf tucked in the far corner. Then, the space as cleared of his imposition in it as he can manage, Nie Huaisang strips off his beizi and flicks it out, spreading it across the floor. He looks back at Jiang Cheng only when he has settled down atop it, ankles crossing languidly over themselves, the slant of his frame sprawled indulgently back. He pats the space beside him and smiles up to Jiang Cheng, knowing full well it’s an invitation that won’t be refused. “I like him.”

“You would.” Jiang Cheng places Sandu down and takes a seat in the space that has been set out for him, knees kicked up towards his chest. “He’s got a smart mouth.”

Nie Huaisang chuckles. He starts to shuffle around, bumping their shoulders together, and Jiang Cheng turns his head to see him pull his fan from his belt. “He’s an artist. There are some prolific poets in Baling, you know. Sometimes we discuss their work.”

He flicks his fan out with a well-practised pivot of his wrist, and begins to waft it against his chest. It’s angled just enough for Jiang Cheng to catch the cooling tail of the gust on each swoop. The gesture is as overburdened as his words, laden with edges deliberately pointed to prick Jiang Cheng’s skin. It’s surely on purpose.

Even knowing that, it is still an embarrassing exertion of effort for Jiang Cheng to keep his self-control in check enough not to fall into the trap. “Tell your people where you’re going next time,” Jiang Cheng berates him instead. It’s safer to take than the bait, even though Jiang Cheng knows it’s not entirely without risk. It simply strays down another path instead. Better trodden, yes, but quiet as kept. It’s not what they’ve done and not what they do, to speak aloud the sum of any of the parts of the intricate ritual they’ve constructed between themselves in relative silence over the last two years.

Ever since that night in Yunping, at Guanyin Temple.

“I will be more considerate in the future,” Nie Huaisang apologises, appropriately contrite.

He won’t. He and Jiang Cheng both know he won’t. That’s not how it is, between them, anymore. It’s not how this particular dance goes, even though Nie Huaisang keeps seeing fit to change the tune whenever Jiang Cheng thinks he has a handle on the steps.

“Of course you will.” Jiang Cheng closes his eyes. He tugs, absently, at the chest of his robe. The fabric is starting to feel too thick on his skin, the heft of the layers heady and their heat humid. He can feel sweat dripping down the backs of his knees, pooling in the crooks of his elbows.

“Ah, it’s so hot,” Nie Huaisang complains, breathy. “I’ll put the candle and the incense burner out.”

Jiang Cheng doesn’t bother with the pretence of verbally acknowledging him; Nie Huaisang will stand up and set out with or without his approval. He reaches for his lap instead, hooking his fingers blindly into his belt to pull it free, letting his outer robe fall open across his chest. It offers a brief, sweet relief, before the stuffy warmth of the room gets its teeth back into him and bites down for good measure.

The light of the candle leaves, first, and without it, it is easier for Jiang Cheng to hear, over the thrum of his blood and the thud of his heart, the pad of Nie Huaisang’s footfalls as he circles around him. Every second takes a year to pass by, and then the smell of smoke and sandalwood loses its edge. The floorboards creak, and then Nie Huaisang’s bare arm is slipping against his sleeve as he settles down against Jiang Cheng’s side, the bundle of his shedded robes discarded behind them.

Jiang Cheng turns his hand over, and he feels the shudder beneath Nie Huaisang’s skin as his knuckles graze his forearm. That— he is not sure what to do with that, or if it is something he should do anything with at all. The room takes a turn for the hotter. The air becomes clotted, as hard to breathe in as the saliva pooling on the back of Jiang Cheng’s tongue feels to swallow.

“Why did you even come in here, anyway?” Jiang Cheng asks, hating the way it scratches up his throat, hoarse.

“I just wanted to be somewhere quiet,” Nie Huaisang whispers back. It doesn’t seem like the whole of it, but Jiang Cheng is sure, at least, that it’s not a lie. It colludes with the inherent rules of engagement for their low stakes arrangement, after all.

Sometimes, when they cross paths at places like this, meetings and night hunts and banquets and conferences and any and all of the myriad commitments demanded of them in-between, Nie Huaisang makes him an offer. It is something privately afforded, something Jiang Cheng never need show himself for or otherwise become vulnerable just to take. He knows it is there when he asks any of Nie Huaisang’s disciples where their leader is after he disappears and they have an answer to give. Knows he can go, and he and Nie Huaisang will sit, and do nothing of importance, and speak of nothing that carries too inexcusable a truth.

It is not something that allows either of them to put their guards down. Jiang Cheng is too vigilant and all too wounded and wound for that, as is Nie Huaisang, in his own ways and for his own reasons. But it is— nice, almost. Nie Huaisang is a shade more honest, and Jiang Cheng less hardened. It is a moment of respite; a place for both of them to put their heads and rest before they must stand up and soldier on.

When his people have nothing to tell, it only means Nie Huaisang has gone somewhere and does not want to be found. Of all the things he could and perhaps even should hold against Nie Huaisang, Jiang Cheng can’t find it in him to begrudge him that.

“Are you satisfied?” Jiang Cheng asks, a little too tightly to sound how he wants, to be as scathing as he needs. “Is this quiet enough for you?”

“Ah, well, it was...” Nie Huaisang’s breath grazes the shell of his ear as he laughs, the sound splintering off into a yelp when Jiang Cheng shoves out at him with his knee.

“You think I want to be here?” Jiang Cheng croaks, unconvincingly contemptuous. “This is your doing.”

Nie Huaisang slants back against his side so smoothly and so seamlessly it is as if he never left it. The press of him is too close, too hot. Jiang Cheng’s sleeve clings to his sweat-damp skin as much as it does to Nie Huaisang’s.

“I am sorry, Sect Leader Jiang,” Nie Huaisang says, his obvious smile seeping into his voice, “that you kicked away the wood I was using to prop open the very obviously magical door to one of Sect Leader Shao’s hidden rooms.”

Jiang Cheng shoves out at him with his hand this time, and Nie Huaisang squawks as the heel of Jiang Cheng’s palm skims over the slight swell of his pectoral, jostling him off-balance.

“I should beat you within a breath of your life,” Jiang Cheng grumbles, hoping his sharp, shuddering inhale comes off as frustrated. “Get off, it’s too hot.”

Nie Huaisang doesn’t rise from what Jiang Cheng can only guess is his slumped, overwrought crumple against the floor, in a rare display of subservience to Jiang Cheng’s outburst. Jiang Cheng regrets it the moment Nie Huaisang exhales, ragged. The sound of his quiet breath and his— everything else, rising up to meet Jiang Cheng’s ears from somewhere below, only spurs a cold shiver to strum up his spine, severe enough to make his teeth click wetly together.

“I can’t be blamed for you wearing too many clothes,” is Nie Huaisang’s low retort. Carefully pitched, convincingly even. Uncontestably unaffected.

“You can be for you wearing too few,” Jiang Cheng grits out.

“It is too dark in here, Sect Leader Jiang,” Nie Huaisang presses. It’s commendable just how bored he is making himself sound, the act of it almost perfect, save the stumble of his tongue over his words. “Really. I think your virtue may be safe?”

“Not from whoever opens that door.” Jiang Cheng reaches, slowly, for his collar, flinching when the fabric crackles beneath his touch, layers scuffing together as they’re shifted further apart.

“I do hate to say it,” Nie Huaisang replies, “but that could be hours away.” There’s a pause, tangibly tense, and then it passes. Jiang Cheng divests his outer robe to pool beneath him, and starts on the middle one as Nie Huaisang sighs. “Let me back up. I’ll fan you?”

“Does it seem like I’m stopping you?” It’s as close to Yes and Come here, then, that they both know he’s going to be able to say. This is too uncharted to feel safe. This is almost too much to undertake, even here, in the dark, where neither of them have to truly see what they’re uncovering. Jiang Cheng is not really sure where he’s being led, or if he wants to be there with Nie Huaisang, yet, if at all.

He pulls his inner robe down, and flinches, jerkily, as he feels Nie Huaisang’s arm slide around his back, his hair ghosting against the hill of Jiang Cheng’s shoulder. Cool air begins to blow against him as Nie Huaisang waves his fan, the sweep of his hand spacious and loafing. Jiang Cheng trembles, and draws his shoulders up towards his neck, taut, as the breeze glances off his chest, catching on the raised scarring knitted across it.

“Better?” Nie Huaisang asks, breath brushing along the blade of his cheekbone.

“It’s not worse,” Jiang Cheng concedes.

The veil of Nie Huaisang’s hair drifts down his arm as he turns his face away, and then Jiang Cheng feels the press of his cheek as he brings his head down to pillow it on Jiang Cheng’s shoulder. He breathes out, and his face is tipped just so that Jiang Cheng can feel the edge of his mouth scrape along him, the lurid curl of his every hitching inhale.

A terrible, twisting heat threads itself around his throat, cinching tight, and Jiang Cheng swallows around it, helpless.

It’s forever, and it’s no time at all, when the rhythm of Nie Huaisang’s hand stumbles and flags. “Ah,” he murmurs against Jiang Cheng’s shoulder, the drag of his mouth so slow, the agony of it almost unsurvivable. Jiang Cheng is still aflame even after Nie Huaisang lifts his face, tipping his chin up, pulling back from one break in Jiang Cheng’s defences only to press his advantage into another. “I’m getting a cramp. Would you…?”

“Hand it here,” Jiang Cheng rasps, turning up his palm in the cradle of his lap. When Nie Huaisang finds his palm, slotting the rivet of his fan into the loose splay of his fingers, Jiang Cheng tosses it to the floor and seizes his wrist.

“Jiang Cheng—” Nie Huaisang starts, but that is as far as his objection goes, the rest of it stopped still in the back of his throat by the press of Jiang Cheng’s mouth to his cheek, unmistakable for anything but a kiss even with all of its teeth and its ungainliness. He regrets it. There is nothing for Jiang Cheng to do with it but regret it, but he’d denied Nie Huaisang his riposte, and so it’s only fair that Nie Huaisang denies him his retreat. Both of his hands catch Jiang Cheng by the nape when he tries to pull away; even holding Jiang Cheng in place, Nie Huaisang still bumps their noses together, a little too roughly, when he tries to lean in, to fill the need Jiang Cheng has made and left.

Nie Huaisang’s breath catches. Then, he rights the angle, and pushes his own scared, starved little sound straight into Jiang Cheng’s mouth, following it through with the pry of his tongue past his teeth. Jiang Cheng grunts as Nie Huaisang’s fingers tangle in his hair, each tug of them sending white-hot streaks of sensation skittering across his scalp, treading the fine edge towards painful. He tries to give as he gets, blunt nails scratching down Nie Huaisang’s back as he scrabbles to grip his shoulder blades, but they’re a false equivalence, and he engaged himself in a losing battle the moment he gave in to this mortifying, wildering desire.

The gates have been thrown open, the walls are down, and the fire has burned up to their threshold. They can rebuild, after, but there will be no going back, and Nie Huaisang— Nie Huaisang laps the roof of his mouth and sucks on Jiang Cheng’s tongue like he’s incensed. The whole slip of his frame is quaking apart with an inexplicable ferity, an unsurmountable fear, as if Jiang Cheng has backed him into a deadly corner and he can do nothing but throw his thighs wide around Jiang Cheng’s hips and fight back for his very life.

Jiang Cheng has never been one to surrender. Not when he can struggle out of spite. He claws one hand up Nie Huaisang’s shaking back and fists his braids, vicious, the other dragging down to snare his hip. Jiang Cheng swallows the hiccuping whimper he wrings out and sucks Nie Huaisang’s bottom lip between his teeth, gagging him. Nie Huaisang writhes in his lap, feet kicking out, and Jiang Cheng yanks him back by the hair and throws him to the floor, forcing the column of his throat into a virulent, nasty arch as the air slams out of his chest. Jiang Cheng takes half the blow in the brace of his arm, but he’s all too happy to feed the force of the rest into Nie Huaisang’s spine, his teeth scraping open Nie Huaisang’s lip as the shock of the collision reverberates between the bridge of their bodies.

“Oh,” Nie Huaisang groans out, weak, but Jiang Cheng doesn’t need to wonder if it’s too much, not when Nie Huaisang surges up underneath the cage of Jiang Cheng’s spread thighs, rutting their clothed cocks together. Jiang Cheng heaves his weight into the fetter of his hand on Nie Huaisang’s hip, pinning him, and with the scrap of light that makes it way beneath the sill of the door from the outside, Jiang Cheng can just make out the ugly, mottled red painting Nie Huaisang’s skin, from the slant of his sternum up to the tips of his ears, the hungry black of his wide eyes as he stares up at the shaded silhouette of Jiang Cheng’s face.

It’s— he wants to see more of it, and see it well, or— so he thinks. Jiang Cheng truly can’t be sure. Maybe he doesn’t need to be, not when Nie Huaisang takes one look at him in his moment of hesitation before he reaches between them, eyelids hooding, the drift of his hand unflinchingly gentle as it maps his scarred chest, the pads of his fingers rolling over his nipples. Jiang Cheng hisses in a breath, tensing up, and Nie Huaisang pinches his fingers together, tweaking one of them, turning the flat of his nail in to dig into the tender skin. The pressure and the point of it is just tight enough to sting, and Jiang Cheng jerks his hips, clenching his jaw as he feels the tip of his cock snub up against the seam of his thigh.

Nie Huaisang must take pity on him. The kiss he presses to the seam of Jiang Cheng’s thinned lips is no more gentle than the last, but it’s just as welcome. It tempts Jiang Cheng out of his own head enough that he can latch on to the hot graze of Nie Huaisang’s palm as it smoothes down his abdomen, the tremble in his thin fingers as they dip past the hem of his waistband. He cocks his hip, testing the give in the bind of Jiang Cheng’s hand, and Jiang Cheng gives him enough leash to bring up his knees until they’re tucked behind Jiang Cheng’s thighs. It’s an awkward contortion, almost, and Jiang Cheng can see Nie Huaisang’s brow furrow as he pushes himself to get it to work.

He manages to brace his feet flat on the floor and rock his hips up, and he chokes around his exhale when his cock rolls against Jiang Cheng’s, and Jiang Cheng moans shakily right back into his mouth. His hand unwinds itself from Nie Huaisang’s now-wrecked braids to sprawl against the floor, steadying the sag of his weight as Nie Huaisang fists his cock, the pump of his palm around his shaft rough and barely shy of too dry. It can’t be considered good. And yet, and still, Nie Huaisang holds his cock in place for him to rut against. He fumbles every clipped stroke around Jiang Cheng’s shaft, the heel of his palm kneading at his tip, smearing the beading precome from his slit up the underside of his wrist, and Jiang Cheng can only bite down on Nie Huaisang’s lips to try and abate and allay his humiliated horror as he comes, too quick and too messy and wet, over himself and his pants and Nie Huaisang’s clammy hand.

The noise Nie Huaisang makes against his teeth when he feels Jiang Cheng come is terrifying, terrible and heaving and ruined, and Jiang Cheng blinks the burning blear out of his eyes just in time to watch Nie Huaisang’s face beneath him crumple in on itself as he bends his back to the precipice of breaking it as he spills against Jiang Cheng’s hip. Jiang Cheng feels his knees buckle, and he tilts himself enough to roll onto his side with a winded grunt, grimacing as the skin of his inner thighs catches against his soiled pants. Nie Huaisang’s hand drops to his own abdomen with a wet smack, his fingers cupped loosely around themselves, around— Jiang Cheng rips his gaze away and fixes it, pointed, on the low-hanging ceiling.

“Ah,” Nie Huaisang breathes out, strained.

Ah.

Jiang Cheng closes his eyes, his nose crinkling as he clamps his jaw shut tight. He tries not to listen as Nie Huaisang clambers up onto his knees, and then his feet; to his shambling gait as he feels his way around the room; to the creak of the floorboards as he settles back in at Jiang Cheng’s hip and drops something more dust than gauze into his lap. Probably for him to try and mop up the come that hasn’t yet dried enough, tacky, on his skin and his clothes to be written off as a lost cause.

He opens his eyes again just in time to see the flicker of amber light spark across Nie Huaisang’s fingertips, the sigil to relight the candle haphazardly traced through the air. Jiang Cheng squints, scowling, as light floods back into the room, brighter than it had been when it was first snuffed out.

“Can you pass me my fan?” Nie Huaisang asks, voice scraped raw. Jiang Cheng feels around at his side until his fingers skirt the monture, before he promptly snatches it up and flings it in Nie Huaisang’s vague direction. What little glimpses he’s unwittingly catching of a debauched Nie Huaisang, with his mouth kiss bruised and swollen, the nest of his hair fluffed up at the crown of his skull, are already thoroughly too much for him to bear.

Nie Huaisang makes a cut-off sound of whining protest, but he must catch it, because it doesn’t clatter to the floor. A few moments later, a cool air starts beating down on Jiang Cheng’s too-warm skin, though it does little to ease the nauseous churn in his gut or the swim of his thoughts in his head.

“So.” Nie Huaisang clears his throat. “How long do you think we’ve been in here?”

“Must you talk?” Jiang Cheng blurts out, fraught. “Will you die if you don’t talk?”

“Maybe?”

Jiang Cheng, his composure already utterly obliterated, rolls over in a staggering hurry, propping himself up on his elbow in the same fluid motion that he brings his other hand down to slap against Nie Huaisang’s knee, sharp. It’s a mistake, and Nie Huaisang makes him pay for it immediately after he’s made it, his own free hand whipping out to wind, tight, around Jiang Cheng’s wrist.

“You are being,” Jiang Cheng snarls out, “absolutely—”

“—Impossible?” Nie Huaisang finishes for him. There’s a tremor to his voice; a tartness in his tone. There’s a jaggedness to it that Jiang Cheng can’t describe, but he can’t dismiss as unjustified. He falls silent, and Nie Huaisang releases him in turn.

Is he supposed to apologise? Is Nie Huaisang? If either of those are to be the case, they will both be waiting some time for it to come, as both of them would surely rather die than bend the knee to bid the storm to pass. Jiang Cheng leaves his hand where it has come to rest, for lack of anything else that he can possibly do, at the loss he’s at. As the seconds pass through to minutes, he lets his thumb curl into the crook of Nie Huaisang’s knee, following the idle impulse that itches down the backs of his knuckles.

It must be enough, eventually, for Nie Huaisang to accede. Gradually, soon enough, his mood visibly shifts from aggrieved to appeased, and the tight coil of his frame loosens as he sinks back into a sprawl, thighs splaying out.

“Give it here,” Jiang Cheng snaps at him, when he sees Nie Huaisang’s hand begin to wilt around the waft of his fan.

“Oh, no.” Nie Huaisang shakes his head, eyebrows raising. “No. Do you know how expensive this is? What it is made of? I trusted you once with it—”

Jiang Cheng pulls his hand from Nie Huaisang’s knee, grapples his forearm, and tugs him down to the floor. Nie Huaisang drops like a stone, stunned, but by the time he’s recovered enough sense to start to squirm, Jiang Cheng has already looped the bar of his arm around his back to pin Nie Huaisang to his chest.

Nie Huaisang lowers his arm to drape across Jiang Cheng’s neck, but he does not pass up the chance to slap the leaf of his fan against his temple before he brings it to rest behind Jiang Cheng’s head, the furl of his fingers tucked into his hair.

“Oh,” Nie Huaisang finishes, soft.

“Better?” Jiang Cheng asks him, stupidly.

Nie Huaisang’s lips purse, and he rolls his shoulder out before he gives his fan a testing wave. “Ah! It actually is.”

He smiles, cheeky, and lets his eyes sink shut, long eyelashes clumping together, as he resumes his steady pace. Jiang Cheng’s gaze is pulled, powerlessly, to the quirk of his mouth, the abraded skin and the flecks of dried blood that have dried over the welts made by Jiang Cheng’s teeth.

“You know,” Nie Huaisang starts, quiet, after a beat, “Jiang Cheng—”

Jiang Cheng shifts his shoulder, slides the cup of his palm up to rest over Nie Huaisang’s nape, and presses their mouths together. Softer, this time. Hesitant. More yearning, more tender, more grateful. It’s better, for the second chance of it, the reattempt.

Nie Huaisang breathes out, shallow, and Jiang Cheng feels his lips quirk into a smile, something soft and surprised and a little pleased. He wriggles against Jiang Cheng’s chest, curling more into it, his other arm tucking up against his sternum so he can trace the harsh jut of Jiang Cheng’s clavicle. His fan butts clumsily against the shell of Jiang Cheng’s ear as he makes himself comfortable.

“Don’t even start,” Jiang Cheng says, the warning as harmless as it is heatless, “just be quiet.”

Nie Huaisang hums his agreement and tilts his chin to bring their lips back together, his knee nudging itself between Jiang Cheng’s thighs as he sidles impossibly closer, his fan resting against Jiang Cheng’s hair, still in the loop of his fingers, but otherwise forgotten.

Jiang Cheng brushes Nie Huaisang’s bottom lip with his tongue, teasing, and just as Nie Huaisang sighs out and presses in to chase it, a click sounds out from the door.

Jiang Cheng tears his face away and sits up in a harried rush, dragging Nie Huaisang along with him. “Open that door another inch,” he shouts, gravelly, “and I’ll whip you and anyone else in that hall.”

“...Uh,” comes Ouyang Zizhen’s voice, after a long moment. “Okay, Sect Leader Jiang.”

“Don’t laugh,” Jiang Cheng hisses under his breath at Nie Huaisang, as he throws his fan over his face and slides to the floor, shoulders shaking uncontrollably. “Don’t you dare laugh! Put your damn clothes on!”

Nie Huaisang can only wheeze back at him for several extraordinarily long and agonising seconds before he collects himself enough to stand, legs wobbling. Jiang Cheng really must be the most misfortunate man alive, cursed to exist and persist through every galling inconvenience and abashment.

They dress as quickly as they can, and though Nie Huaisang does make a valiant attempt on his braids, in between bundling his robes back around himself and tucking a piece of folded paper into his sleeve, there really is only so much they can do before they have to show themselves. Thankfully, it’s only Ouyang Zizhen in the hall, who very sympathetically pats Nie Huaisang’s back when Nie Huaisang throws himself into his arms and sobs about his terrible ordeal and how he was so sure he was going to die in there, tells them both that the discussion will resume in the morning, and does everything in his power to not meet Jiang Cheng’s eyes.

It could be worse, yes. But it could also, really, be so much better, and that is the fact that has Jiang Cheng fuming, later, for the better part of the evening, before he finally gives up the grudge of it and goes to bed.

Jiang Cheng considers the previous day forgiven, if not necessarily forgotten. Right up until the point in the discussion where Sect Leader Shao mentions trade routes, gesturing to the map on his desk, and Nie Huaisang makes a questioning sound, loud enough to interrupt without seeming calculated.

“Is something the matter, Sect Leader Nie?” Sect Leader Shao prompts. There is a sly cut to it, a barely-there frustration that would be irrespectively impolite had Nie Huaisang not singlehandedly set their agenda back half a day. Given their circumstances, he seems all too glad to undertake the opportunity to undercut someone of a much higher standing.

It rankles Jiang Cheng, somewhat. Perhaps.

It does not seem to get any rise out of Nie Huaisang, however, who simply clicks his tongue, his brow furrowing, painting his expression into the perfect portmanteau of shamed and shy. “Oh, no, I’m sorry,” he starts, stammering, the waft of his fan picking up a nervous speed, “it’s only, that… I’m surely mistaken?”

He reaches into his sleeve, and draws out a folded piece of paper— the very same Jiang Cheng watched him steal out of the hidden room after they were sprung by Ouyang Zizhen. He unfolds it, lips twisting at his own clumsiness, and manages to lay it out on his own table after a few fumbling misses.

“My map is different to Sect Leader Shao’s,” Nie Huaisang says, voice lilting up, as if he’s terribly confused by the fact. “See? The border for Xuchang is off.” He taps it with his nail, lifting his fan to his face, the ink-gilded leaf brushing the bottom swell of his lip, still slightly red from— “Mine is closer in than Sect Leader Shao’s. But surely that’s not right? Perhaps my map is outdated, but, see… it’s signed for this year? And it has the official seal on the back, for authenticity…”

He trails off. A dead silence follows.

“Does Sect Leader Shao’s map have the seal?” Nie Huaisang pipes up again, after a beat.

Sect Leader Shao makes a show of turning his map over, his mouth thinning. “I must have a copy,” he explains. “It is a few negligible li difference, likely the result of a rushed, amateur hand.” The excuse is silk-smooth.

“Ah, of course, of course.” Nie Huaisang bobs his head, tapping his fan against his mouth again before he leans over, folds up his map, and holds it out towards the nearest steward. “Sect Leader Shao can borrow mine.”

Jiang Cheng hopes, when Nie Huaisang finally meets his eyes, that his expression clearly communicates the sheer depth of his desire to vault across the main hall and throttle him at the neck. It likely does, for after holding his gaze for a breath, Nie Huaisang smiles at him serenely, lifts his fan to hide his jaw, and turns away.