Ties of Obligation

Four times a year, at the change between seasons, Nie Huaisang visits the Cloud Recesses.

It had been by his own force of nature that he arrived, the first time, a month after Lan Xichen left seclusion. It is now by Lan Xichen’s invitation that he is summoned, and by Lan Xichen’s grace that he stays past what anyone else would consider their welcome.

Lan Xichen has spent many hours over the years, both in and out of his penitence, struggling to define his awakened feelings for and opinions of Nie Huaisang. For all of his effort and time, he still finds himself unsatisfied with his answers, each too uncertain to bring with them any comfort.

Despite everything, however, Lan Xichen has come to know this: Nie Huaisang will come when he is called, and does not bring with him their mutually aggrieved history. Lan Xichen can trust him to leave unspoken that which is unforgiven.

It is almost nice, for all its strangeness. Many still treat Lan Xichen with a delicateness that a deep part of him is coming to detest. Nie Huaisang treats him with a diffidence that fishtails between disinterest and disobedience.

Today, Nie Huaisang has brought with him a loose leaf tea from western Hebei that is earthy, hard, especially bitter. It is one of Lan Xichen’s favourites from the province. Lan Xichen busies himself with bringing the pot to a gradual boil as Nie Huaisang sets the table and strips back his beizi. A pinch settles between his brows when he sits, and his eyes drift shut as a malaised sigh wisps out from his parted mouth.

The promise of Nie Huaisang’s permitted presence within his rooms is that there are no longer any performances between them. Nie Huaisang has always honoured this without argument, and so Lan Xichen has no reason to suspect that it is a display overlaying ulterior motive. He raises himself on his knees, and Nie Huaisang frees his hands from his lap to hold each of their cups steady as Lan Xichen pours.

“Something is weighing on you, Huaisang,” Lan Xichen observes when he returns to his kneel, and Nie Huaisang’s soft laugh rings out in answer.

“Ah, Er-ge, what is there that doesn’t weigh on a Sect Leader?” He plucks his cup up from its saucer and holds it to his lips, steam wafting up against his nose.

Lan Xichen watches him sniff it surreptitiously before he sips it, and takes no offence. He knows it is for idle pleasure, not for fear of poison: Nie Huaisang cycles impurities through his core as absently as he takes his breaths. It is not a skill unique to him, but one of many methods of Qinghe Nie that never seemed to break past the surface of the sheer violent might of the rest of their cultivation when they were regarded by outsiders.

Nie Mingjue had taught it to him during his year as a foreign disciple in the Unclean Realm. It had taken a great deal of wine and persistence to master. Lan Xichen had made quite the memorable fool of himself.

He had learned much, in that year, about Qinghe Nie and its then leader-to-be.

“A heavy mantle,” Lan Xichen agrees with sympathy. He takes a sip of tea to wet his throat before he continues. “Something in particular, then. If it is pressing, we can adjourn for another time.” It is chiding, but it is not a dismissal. The curve of Nie Huaisang’s mouth drifts from wan to wry as he listens, eyelids hooding.

“This engagement predates those. I am becoming more responsible with my promises, Er-ge.”

“I can visit Qinghe,” says Lan Xichen, airy, “when your time is less permitting.”

If it is a venture too far, the leash Nie Huaisang keeps on his emotions is too tightly wound for Lan Xichen to tell. Instead, Nie Huaisang simply smiles around his cup as he drains it dry.

“Permit me to ask after what problem troubles you,” he adds. “Perhaps I can help.”

The idle curl of Nie Huaisang’s fingers against his chin suggests he feels the absence of his fan in them keenly as he considers his answer. “Ah, I shouldn’t. I am only just getting used to being self-reliant, after all. If you coddle me now, I’ll just fall back to my old habits.” He sounds so pleased with himself as he says it, each word a deft prompt for praise. Lan Xichen would feel a genuine proudness for his display of responsibility if he still believed it to be newfound.

Lan Xichen measures his reply carefully, in turn. “Part of taking responsibility is knowing when you must turn to others and entrust them with your burden’s care,” he offers, after a long moment of congenial, unhurried silence.

It is a double-edged blade that cuts through both of their hands, no matter how Lan Xichen intends it to land; Nie Huaisang for trusting too little, he for trusting too much. Extremes always spell out their own tragedies. It is a terrible lesson they are both learning, now, to wed reservation with reliance and restraint.

Nie Huaisang strokes the backs of his fingers down the fragile underside of his bared throat as he hums. “You’re right,” he concedes, with honesty and ease, as if it is nothing to admit instead of everything to say. He sets down his cup, thumbing the residual dampness from his lips off the ceramic rim. “It isn’t a problem, though, really. It’s more of a— an inconvenience, would be the best way to put it.”

He flicks out his sleeves and leans up to hold their cups steady as Lan Xichen pours them each out another serve of tea. “Your inconvenience, then,” Lan Xichen pries. The smile that rises to his lips as Nie Huaisang’s features slump into a beleaguered grimace feels almost too nostalgic to bear.

“Ah, my,” Nie Huaisang complains without bite, before he drinks down his entire cup in one long swallow. “It is the merchant clans in Shanxi,” he reveals, sighing through his nose. “Of all the provinces to neighbour— they are more burden than boon! All I want to discuss is our seasonal procurements, all they want to discuss are their unmarried children.” Lan Xichen watches as the light of an idea dawns on his face. “I’ve told them all already I will never marry.”

“Never marry?” Lan Xichen repeats, and Nie Huaisang’s mirth dims, tempered by Lan Xichen’s choice in focus.

Beneath every guise he does and does not wear, Nie Huaisang has a lover’s heart and an appetite for worldly pleasure. Even after everything, to so blatantly and breezily forsake such a connection seems— inapt, to Lan Xichen.

“Da-ge did not,” is all Nie Huaisang says, at first. When all it does is hang between them, because Lan Xichen knows Nie Mingjue never married, but not how or why it matters, Nie Huaisang’s lips part gently and his eyes fly wide, a raw regret sweeping his features like a wave. “Oh.”

Lan Xichen feels his teeth sink into his bottom lip distantly as his gut churns. His tea tastes foul when he remembers himself enough to unhinge his jaw to sip at it, the brew clinging, tacky, to the flat of his tongue. The shuttering of Nie Huaisang’s expression sinks through him like a stone, dislodges something akin to chagrin in turn to curdle his blood.

Oh, indeed.

“I thought—” Nie Huaisang begins, but much to Lan Xichen’s absurd and profound gratitude, he stops himself just as quickly. “I am the younger brother,” he says instead, voice tightening finely. “I cannot marry before the eldest. Even in death.”

“If there is anything else that can be said of Qinghe Nie,” Lan Xichen recites, helplessly faint, “it is that we take our weddings and our burials very seriously—”

“—For they are, to us, one and the same,” Nie Huaisang finishes for him. “You do remember.”

“I did not think it was serious.” Lan Xichen swallows, hard, unable to dislodge the discomforting distress welling up in the back of his throat. It had been— so long ago, that he’d heard it. From a young Nie Huaisang, no less, a year before his older brother had sent him to repeat his failed lectures at the Cloud Recesses. He and one of Nie Mingjue’s peer disciples had been singing it to one another when a closeby Lan Xichen had drawn their attention, a stilled splash of blue in a swirling sea of silver and cream.

Er-ge, Nie Huaisang had greeted, slithering from the shoulder of his senior to all but drape himself in Lan Xichen’s lap, impressively and inexplicably drunk, even Gusu Lan, who love for life, hold no candle to us, don’t you think? Lan Xichen had made some noncommittal sound, just shy of a laugh, and so Nie Huaisang had turned back to his senior, only to find his brother in the man’s place. His hands had whipped out to grip him beneath his armpits like a striking snake, and he’d hoisted the heft of him effortlessly from his entanglement at Lan Xichen’s side before Nie Huaisang could yelp out in protest.

Lan Xichen, emboldened by the cup of wine Nie Mingjue had poured for him personally some hours before, had asked after Nie Huaisang’s words, when the night was drawing itself to a close. Nie Mingjue had dismissed it with silence; an answer Lan Xichen had interpreted meant it was unimportant, not that it should be unsaid.

Nie Huaisang yet has the grace in him to be repentant, if only for this wrongdoing. “I erred in my levity, both then and now.” Lan Xichen watches, dulled, as Nie Huaisang’s fingers twitch against the hill of his knee, flinching against the urge to reach out to Lan Xichen to provide some hollow debasement of comfort. “It— the elders once suggested we give him a minghun, for— I forbade it. I forbid it.”

The tea has long grown cold. Lan Xichen does not relight the fire to reheat the pot; instead, he places down his cup with its dregs and relinquishes the pretence of it entirely. “Why?”

Lan Xichen is not sure, precisely, what he is asking; Nie Huaisang, in turn, does not seem to know what should be his answer.

“No-one will do,” says Nie Huaisang, with grave finality, even as his smile softens with a latent tenderness. “If I am to be happy in this life, he must be happy into the next.”

Nie Huaisang makes to stand, the unfurling of his limbs slow, legs shuddering awake from their brief disuse. Lan Xichen watches him with an unease to his spirit that he sees mirrored behind the veil of Nie Huaisang’s carefully cultivated temperament.

“There is someone that you want to marry,” Lan Xichen observes.

Nie Huaisang cups his hand and bows, and that he averts Lan Xichen’s gaze when he straightens is every confirmation Lan Xichen could ever need and none he could ever want.

“There’s a beauty and a comfort to yearning,” says Nie Huaisang, head high, voice aloft. “Dreams realised rarely are everything we ever imagined them to be, after all. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Love and respect yourself, Lan Xichen thinks. Nurture aspirations. Strengthen your will and you will accomplish anything. “I am not sure I would,” Lan Xichen replies.

“Think on it.” Nie Huaisang bows for him again, the gesture prompter than the first, perfunctory. He takes up his beizi and folds it neatly across the bridge of his forearm, hand curling inward, thumb and forefinger tracing the raised leaf filigree gingerly. “Thank you for having me, Sect Leader Lan. Extend my regards to the Chief Cultivator.”

“Safe travels, Sect Leader Nie,” Lan Xichen wills him, and does not rise to see him out.

Lan Xichen does think on it, in the months that follow.

A wisened, bitter part of him knows that, in some respect, it is the outcome Nie Huaisang intended, no matter the opacity of his purpose, the moment Lan Xichen drew attention to it. Lan Xichen wishes meditation still offered the same peace it once gave him so freely in his youth. He wishes the tenets of his sect still inspired the same faith, and that they provided him with the same succour.

Too much has changed; too much once taken for granted is now unknown. Lan Xichen had tried, in his seclusion, to source the schism sundering him, soothe it back to a steady stillness. He had peeled every layer of himself back only to find the stain was inextricable from the rest of him, born with the seed and entangled with the root, not a scar to be stitched or a shortcoming to be strengthened. What else could he do, with the unburial of that damnation, but put himself back together and resurface, pretending to be remade?

Lan Xichen had thought himself a vastly different man, once. With that veil now lifted, he does not like the truth of the self he sees and the deeds he has done.

He sends word ahead that he will join Nie Huaisang in Qinghe for their forthcoming appointment. Not one of his people thinks his behaviour strange, save Lan Wangji, who has, of late, come to know a blemished Lan Xichen better than Lan Xichen has come to know himself. There is an implicit trust, Lan Xichen knows, in how his brother lets him go with worry but without question.

Lan Xichen hopes it is not to become the newest of all the beliefs in him that he has sorely tested.

Nie Huaisang receives him personally. Lan Xichen hands over Shuoyue and Liebing, not because it has been asked of him but because he cannot cope with holding them, not here, and his blade and his xiao are both taken and entrusted to a disciple’s care with barely a raised eyebrow. He and Nie Huaisang then speak, idly, of polite civilities as they walk together through familiar halls. Neither of them forsakes that particular appearance until they are well behind closed doors.

“You expected I’d come,” says Lan Xichen, draping his sleeves into the basin of his lap as he kneels into his seat.

“I suspected it,” Nie Huaisang corrects, mild and unoffended. He joins Lan Xichen at the low-stooped table, the monture of his fan clasped loosely in his fingers as he fiddles with it. “Still, we needn’t speak only of business.”

“I would prefer that we did,” Lan Xichen replies. He thumbs at the embroidered clouds that rib the thick cloth of his outer robe, with the false hope that the sensation will ground him in a place that is groundless.

“Very well,” Nie Huaisang permits, delicately unfolding his fan. “State your case, Sect Leader Lan.”

Lan Xichen breathes in, slow, feeling his chest hitch around the exertion. The air feels all too thick, in Qinghe, too heady. All his reasons, well-rehearsed, race from his head, and his mouth grows dry in the absence of sound. “He would have wanted you to be happy,” Lan Xichen manages, at last. “More than anything.”

Nie Huaisang is unjustly unreadable, the sharp narrow of his eyes unyielding where they peer at Lan Xichen over the leaf of his fan. “And when I see him again, waiting for me at Naihe Qiao so that we can cross over it together, do you think I will find it easier to meet his eyes knowing he would permit my every selfishness?”

Lan Xichen does not flinch back from the steady strikes that sing out with Nie Huaisang’s every word, delivered with such vicious, abhorrent insouciance. Lan Xichen has come to convince him to accept a terrible favour, to pressure him to allow himself a small happiness, and Nie Huaisang sees only the impudence inherent in the charity.

Perhaps it is only fair. This is not the Cloud Recesses. Their armistice has no place and no power here.

“He loved you,” Lan Xichen argues, gritting through every word, dishonoured by the quake in his voice and the flare of stinging heat at the corners of his eyes. “He wanted the world for you.”

He had never spoken such a thing to Lan Xichen, or shown it to him so blatantly, while he was alive. It was never his way. Only in death and in retrospect was the depth of his devotion laid so bare; for how else could Nie Huaisang have avenged him, so completely and so cruelly, if not for a love too grave to speak aloud?

“He gave me the world,” Nie Huaisang replies, out from underneath the shroud of his fan. “He gave me enough.”

Nie Huaisang had always been the twisting knife, unseen, behind the bulwark of Nie Mingjue’s back. Nie Huaisang was the only one who could ever draw Nie Mingjue back from the brink, before a third hand tipped the scales too far out of their favour. Nie Mingjue had been the only thing holding Nie Huaisang back.

Lan Xichen shakes out his shuddering hands, sucks in a breath, and switches his tactics. “How do you see me, Huaisang?”

There is a small victory to be had in seeing the shadow of Nie Huaisang’s jaw move behind his fan, his mouth falling open in the seconds pinned between his shock and his recovery. “Er-ge?”

“You honest opinion,” Lan Xichen presses.

“This is unwise,” Nie Huaisang justly warns.

Lan Xichen swallows, and strokes his palms down his thighs until they meet the rises of his knees. “It is,” he doesn’t deny, “but I would hear it nonetheless.”

Nie Huaisang lowers his fan from his face, folding it back in on itself with great care before he tucks it into his belt. Lan Xichen is terrifyingly, exhilaratingly aware of his presence in the heart of the tiger’s den as Nie Huaisang leans across the table, arms folding atop the polished wood, chin settling on the shelf of his hand.

“I don’t know,” Nie Huaisang says, and then he laughs, the peal of it too loud, subsumed by a thrilled hysteria. “I— I really don’t! It’s unsatisfying, isn’t it?” His bottom lip trembles as he pulls his mouth into a thin smile. “It’s unfair.”

To know Nie Huaisang moved to wound him as collateral without any particular individual conviction does not complicate anything that was already certain. It itches at Lan Xichen, anyway, sparking to catch on the tinder deep under his skin, leaving a dark and dire heat to bloom in its place, ripe for the flame.

“Elaborate,” he requests, clipped.

Nie Huaisang breathes out in a rush, squeezes his eyes shut, and capitulates. “I despise you.” His thumb circles against the table, his features crumbling, cracking, contorting, and Lan Xichen cannot breathe, can only listen, hostage to the revelation. “I pity you. I… grieve you.”

He opens his eyes, and Lan Xichen chokes on his own spit when he gasps, wretchedly, released from the hold of his own making.

“It is the same,” Lan Xichen rasps back, “for me, of you.”

Nie Huaisang’s eyes are hemmed red, wet with tears that overflow when he blinks, droplets catching in his long lashes, streaking down his cheeks. “I think,” he begins, with such enviable clarity, even as his visage splinters itself apart from the turmoil that has bent his back to breaking, “you swept yourself up in the perceptions people had of you. You believed yourself to be such a saviour that you never realised it was you who was in need of saving.”

He reaches up, distantly, and sweeps the tears from his cheeks with a quivering sigh. New tears fall to take their place, and he licks his bottom lip, shaking his head to himself. Even when Nie Huaisang lifts his gaze to meet his eyes, Lan Xichen does not feel seen so much as seen through.

Lan Xichen does not know what to say. It’s a grievous insult, but does his pride truly deserve to be defended against the truth? He had let many wrongs stand unopposed, either because his perspective had never allowed him to perceive them for what they were, or they were too inconvenient, bore too great a risk to his face. Righteous acts made a righteous man; Lan Xichen was merely a man who thought himself righteous, and so extended that belief to his acts.

And to think, he had often considered Nie Mingjue to be intemperate in matters of morality. How harrowing, in hindsight.

“I resent you, Zewu Jun,” Nie Huaisang says, brittle, after an age of humbling quiet. “Above all else. I knew my brother was dying, but were it not for you, he would not have died so soon. And he never would have died the way he did.”

It’s luck that Lan Xichen catches himself with his forearms against the table when he collapses in on himself, strength bled out of him by the knife of Nie Huaisang’s rancour sinking between his ribs to its hilt. It is not a new confession; just as Lan Xichen still holds onto the vestiges of his ugly grudge for Nie Huaisang’s use of him, Nie Huaisang still clings to his own. But a gash still bleeds, just as the body still screams where it’s been split open, even if it’s endured such an agony innumerable times before. He had subdued every disquiet reservation, had turned his face so often and so readily away from Jin Guangyao’s actuality that it was any wonder he had not snapped his own neck in two for all his contortions.

Of all the sects, Qinghe Nie was one of the most discordant when it came to strangers. Nie Mingjue had exemplified this: though he had many companions amongst his peerage within his sect, he held all others at an arm’s length. In his life, he had accepted only two outsiders into his intimate confidence. He had been betrayed by both of them.

It is a disgrace that Lan Xichen does not cry, even as the need and the urge all but consume him. When he manages to lift his head, he is met with Nie Huaisang’s cleaned face and dried eyes, his expression tired.

Lan Xichen is tired, too. There is no release in this, this restless rending and reopening, but he has been given what he came here to take.

“No one will do,” Lan Xichen repeats. He is consoled, feebly, by the unfitting steadiness of his voice as he raises it. “Will even I not suit?”

“My brother is not a sword for you to fall on!” Nie Huaisang snaps back, shrill. His contrition follows in the next stunned breath, and Lan Xichen hears, through the ringing in his ears, Nie Huaisang hiss through his gritted teeth. “I— that was— undue.”

Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is not.

“I am not seeking this as a punishment,” Lan Xichen assures him, voice ragged from where it roughs up the length of his too-raw throat. “I do not see it as a sacrifice.”

I don’t intend to hurt you, he thinks to himself. I don’t want to hurt him. It’s too much. He cannot say it.

The way that Nie Huaisang’s features gentle shows that he at least believes his words, even if he may not believe the man behind them. “Did... you love him?”

He permits himself to ask it with such brittle sincerity that Lan Xichen flinches, bodily, tension strumming up the rungs of his spine. It sinks deeper than any scorn, stings harder than any slap.

“I did,” Lan Xichen answers. “I do.” The truth is more reprehensible than any lie he could think to tell. He had loved Nie Mingjue, with an unbecoming and unmerited complacency. Had contented himself to undertake it from afar, as if it was foregone to remain unrequited, as though it was sufferance for him to stand. Had taken it, and them, for granted. He loves Nie Mingjue, with the profound grief of the foolish and remorseful, for all of their could-have-beens.

Lan Xichen thought he would have all the years with Nie Mingjue that he caused him to lose. Who knows how brave he might have become, had he been given them.

But that was never how their story was meant to go. Lan Xichen looks across to Nie Huaisang, numbed by his confession, and Nie Huaisang looks back, carved out, the same.

“All right, Er-ge.” Nie Huaisang dips his chin, bracing his weight against the table as he moves to rise. “You’ll do. I’ll have your old room prepared for you.” He strokes his palms down his thighs, smoothing out the creases in his robes, and when he meets Lan Xichen’s eyes again, he has pulled the careful guise over himself of a man at ease, put together. Lan Xichen hopes, despite it, that there is an honesty to the small smile that plays on his lips, the hushed sorrow that creases his brow. “Stay tonight. It can be done in the morning.”

Lan Xichen is not sure how long it takes for him to get his feet beneath him, to stand up from the table, to excuse himself with a stiff bow. He follows the rote of his recollections, dimmed by desuetude, through the frigid halls of the Unclean Realm, until they take him to his quarters.

Everything is ready for him when he arrives, and Lan Xichen stumbles his way to the mattress, arms limp at his sides as he perches, rigid, on the edge of it. He looks at his surrounds; how they seem, to his naked eye, unchanged from when he last laid eyes on them, not long after Nie Mingjue died. His mind feels all at once full to bursting and hollowed out, thoughts an ebb and flow, a perpetual tide that sweeps him out from shore to sea and abandons him there to drown.

It is a blessing, come dawn, that Qinghe Nie’s characteristic brevity extends even to worship, to ritual. Many allowances are made, to accommodate both punctuality and prudence.

Lan Xichen does not wear red, for the former. Nie Mingjue’s body is not exhumed, for the latter.

“I had forgotten,” says Lan Xichen, voice still lilting with the lingering tiredness he has carried into waking, “how fussy Qinghe Nie’s traditional braids are.”

Nie Huaisang’s soft laugh gusts against his hair where he has gathered it up to work the tussled knots free with a comb. “There is a trick to it, when you are alone. I can show you.”

Lan Xichen feels a tremor bolt through him as the backs of Nie Huaisang’s knuckles scrape between the blades of his shoulders, and he bites down on his bottom lip to stifle the gasp it unseats in his mouth. “Would it be appropriate?”

He feels the undulation of Nie Huaisang’s shrug as the motion ripples down from his shoulders to his hands. “What is ours will be yours. You can do with it all as you like.”

Nie Huaisang works with a swift diligence, in the ensuing silence. When he is done, he leans back, comb cinched between his lips, to admire his work, before he reaches, unthinkingly, for Lan Xichen’s ribbon. He remembers himself just as his nails skim the setting, and Lan Xichen watches as he blends the fumble in his fingers effortlessly into a casual pause.

“Family is permitted to touch it,” Lan Xichen reminds him. Nie Huaisang laughs again, the sound made threadbare by its fraught repetition, and he wraps the ribbon up in his fingers without further encouragement. To know that Nie Huaisang feels as unbalanced by all of this as Lan Xichen is— not quite a relief, and not quite a comfort, but something snared in the in between.

It has escaped neither of them that this feels more like a trade of blows than an allowance of intimacies.

Lan Xichen rises from the bed. He is not in want of a mirror to see himself, but he finds himself mapping the braids pulled taut along his scalp with his fingertips, anyway, learning their appearance by touch before he can busy his hands with retrieving Shuoyue and Liebing from the weapon rack. There is no need for them to stay; the intention has always been to leave, after the ceremony, and returning to his room to collect them after would only serve to delay his departure.

Nie Huaisang falls into step with him as they walk the halls, hands folded behind his back. His lips purse when he casts a glance askance, up towards Lan Xichen, expression middling between conciliating and condoling. Though the sun is high in the sky, every corridor they turn down is barren of any life but them. Nie Huaisang has made it all too easy to dismiss as a coincidence, but Lan Xichen knows that it is a consideration for his— privacy.

He catches Nie Huaisang by the elbow as they step over the threshold into the main hall, stalling them beneath the arch of the doorway. “Huaisang.”

Nie Huaisang turns towards him, palm cupping the backs of Lan Xichen’s knuckles where he’s gathered the plush fabric of his sleeve into his fist.

“You asked me if I loved him.” It spills out of him in a rush; Lan Xichen knows that if he tarries with it he will lose all nerve to persevere. “Did he ever feel— the same?”

“Will knowing that today change anything, Er-ge?” Nie Huaisang asks, with a tenderness that seems preemptive, rising from a place where the needed healing is yet to take place.

“No.” That had been the first question Lan Xichen had asked himself. It remained the easiest for him to answer.

Nie Huaisang pats his hand before he draws away, and Lan Xichen finds himself unlatching his fingers from his sleeve in turn, falling into the flow of it.

“Then wait.” Nie Huaisang turns away, the spill of his free hair framing his profile, veiling the fringes of his shuttered expression. “Better to hear it from him than from me.”

Lan Xichen is not so sure of that, not so easily convinced. And yet, he does not need to be, not to follow Nie Huaisang into the room, towards the acerbic scent of lit incense and the jutting tower of Nie Mingjue’s ancestral tablet.

So little is different for Lan Xichen, after.

He returns to the Cloud Recesses, somehow irreparably changed and indistinguishable from the man who had left. He confines himself in the hanshi only for the time it takes to deal with the possessions he will no longer need; every yaopei and guan bound in linen and packed away, every coloured sash discarded, replaced by white.

If it is Qinghe Nie who are unparalleled in matters of love, it is Gusu Lan who are unmatched in grief. Lan An, himself, had walked himself and his bereavement into the mountains, renouncing his cultivation and legacy to rot, alone, within the monastery he began in, until death. All of his descendants were cursed to suffer similar tragedies, unable to centre themselves between the extremes of loving too passionately, too desperately, too pitifully, or not and never at all.

It will be many years yet before Lan Xichen dies, bringing with it closure to his separation. It is not too terrible a fate. There is more than hope left in its wake, after all, that he will see the one he loves again.

For such a promise — for Nie Mingjue — Lan Xichen can wait.