Within the fledgling months of their stay in the Cloud Recesses, Jiang Cheng has had a whole reincarnation’s fill of losing face from the spill-over of scrutiny on Wei Wuxian that always, inevitably, splashes back onto him. It’s any wonder how he and his thin skin managed to survive Lan Wangji catching him as an accomplice to the breakage of a not-insignificant glut of Gusu Lan Sect rules, but he’s not at all eager to lean on his luck.

And so, when he sees Nie Huaisang watching him pointedly from over the top of his fan as they are all being dismissed from their lecture, Jiang Cheng is already glaring stormily in the hopes of dissuading him from whatever absurdity he has in mind.

Nie Huaisang, be it by foolish ignorance or lack of self-preservation, is not at all deterred, and not at all subtle as he sidles into place at Jiang Cheng’s side. “Jiang Cheng, would you—”

“No,” Jiang Cheng snaps. He quickens his stride, clenching his jaw when Nie Huaisang breaks into a jog to keep up.

“I didn’t finish,” Nie Huaisang objects, stung.

“You don’t need to,” Jiang Cheng grits out. “No.”

“Please—”

“Go ask Wei Wuxian.”

Nie Huaisang looks as if he might faint. “No! No, I’d really rather— have you not seen how closely Hanguang Jun sticks to him, now? I don’t want to die!” He heaves in a great, gulping breath, and then another, wrist limp and fingers shaking around his fan as fans himself clumsily, and Jiang Cheng tries to go just a little bit faster, the backs of his thighs aching with the strain.

“If you don’t want to die, then why are you sticking to me?”

“Jiang Cheng,” Nie Huaisang wheezes, his voice tinny and pathetically unbecoming, “please— let me finish, or, at least slow down! I can’t keep up with you!”

“Who asked you to?!” Jiang Cheng shouts, whipping his head around so sharply his neck cracks. He stamps down on his own boot in his hurry, opens his mouth to swear at Nie Huaisang for it, and promptly comes careening to a halt. Nie Huaisang has no choice but to collide with him, the thwack of Jiang Cheng’s elbow to his sternum punching the breath out of his lungs.

Jiang Cheng hadn’t paid a moment’s attention to his surroundings since he left the hall, leaving it to his feet to haul him to his dormitory. Much to his belligerence and bemusement, he’s only now realising that Nie Huaisang’s distraction has caused him to stray from the known path, and resulted in the pair of them pointlessly circling the courtyard. The junior Gusu Lan Sect disciples lingering at the fringes blatantly turn their faces away when their gazes catch on Jiang Cheng’s indignant, shamefaced glare.

Nie Huaisang braces his hands on his knees, panting. “Thank you,” he sighs out, blissfully unaware. Jiang Cheng wants for nothing more in his life, at this moment in time, than to strangle him into a stupor. He suspects that doing so may break one of the Gusu Lan Sect’s nigh-infinite rules, and so Nie Huaisang is spared, for now.

“What?” Jiang Cheng says, once Nie Huaisang has caught his breath and straightened his back. At Nie Huaisang’s tilted head and puzzled silence, he stiffly adds, “You wanted to finish.”

“Oh, yes.” Nie Huaisang shields himself with his fan, leaning into Jiang Cheng in a way he undoubtedly thinks is subtle, and lowers his voice to a whisper. “Would you help me drink some wine?”

“Would I help you drink some— why?” Jiang Cheng hisses under his breath, scowling. “Why do you even still have wine to drink?”

“We didn’t drink much that night,” Nie Huaisang whispers back. Jiang Cheng disagrees, and doesn’t subdue his face from showing it accordingly. Nie Huaisang’s fanning increases in intensity. “Ah, it’s— it’s a different batch! From. Not outside.”

“From… not outside.” Jiang Cheng teeters closer, and Nie Huaisang somehow manages to fan himself even faster without snapping his own hand clean off or slapping Jiang Cheng in the mouth. “Explain.”

“It may have been fermented… here?”

Somehow, that seems like an even worse infraction than simply secreting alcohol into the Cloud Recesses. Jiang Cheng can already feel the sting of the plank against his back. “Did you forget to pack your good sense back in Qinghe?!”

Nie Huaisang flips his fan shut with a fluid pivot of his wrist and taps it to his own mouth, signalling for Jiang Cheng to lower his voice. “So you can see just how serious this is! If it’s found out, we’ll really be in some strife.”

“We?” Jiang Cheng gapes at him, and does not lower his voice at all. “We?! There is no we in this! This is a problem of your own making, it can be a problem of your own solving!”

Nie Huaisang grimaces, lips clamping down around a whimper as he visibly struggles between a selection of terrible options. He finally decides that further invoking Jiang Cheng’s ire will bring about the best of the worst outcomes, and presses his fan to Jiang Cheng’s lips, shushing him. “If I am caught, won’t they look to you as well? Please see reason.”

Jiang Cheng bats his fan away from his mouth, snarling. “Just tip it in the river! Why are you making this hard?”

“Jiang Cheng,” Nie Huaisang whines, “I have considered this! But there is far too much: if I try to sneak out of a night and dispose of it, I’ll surely take so long that I’ll be caught. Please?”

Jiang Cheng just stares at him. What a thin face the Young Master Nie has, to beg him so blatantly for something so stupid.

“Please?” Nie Huaisang persists, somehow sinking to a new low of pitiableness that Jiang Cheng did not realise was possible short of falling on one’s own sword.

“Fine!” Jiang Cheng concedes, flustered. “Fine. I’ll help you. Don’t look so delighted. And don’t make me regret this more than I already do.”

Nie Huaisang schools said delight off his face and straightens himself out in an instant, as though he never expected Jiang Cheng’s refusal to hold water in the first place. Jiang Cheng feels his blood return to boil as quickly as it had been snatched away from the fire: is he really so easily played that even Nie Huaisang can lean on his weaknesses?

Nie Huaisang cups his hand respectfully as he bows. “You’ve really saved me, Jiang Cheng.”

Jiang Cheng scrunches his eyes shut and flicks his hand, dismissing him. “Go, already. I’ll find you in your room tomorrow night. Just be prepared and never ask me for anything again for the remainder of your life.”

Nie Huaisang bustles away, and Jiang Cheng permits himself to stalk the courtyard for another half hour, cooling his temper, before he, too, departs.

Nie Huaisang looks far too relaxed when he opens his door the following night. His hair is already half-down, intricate braids unbound, dark locks spilling sloppily across his shoulders. He’s even stripped back to his middle clothes. Jiang Cheng is immediately annoyed by the sight, given that he’s been a knotted mess of irritations for the better part of the day and yet has presented himself immaculately, affording some credibility to the credence of this being an innocuous visit. The least Nie Huaisang owes him is some return on the semblance of the cordial comity.

“Come in,” Nie Huaisang beckons, and were it not for the fact that his hand has already crept out to catch Jiang Cheng by the wrist, Jiang Cheng would deny him. He steps over the raised threshold instead, and Nie Huaisang releases him only to pull the door closed behind them both.

At its foundations, Nie Huaisang’s room is much the same as his, as Wei Wuxian’s, and, Jiang Cheng suspects, as any others the Gusu Lan Sect makes available to visiting foreign disciples. Nie Huaisang, however, has built well upon those foundations, furnishing the room with luxuries and hemming it with thick embroidered draperies, silver layering cream layering sage. It’s obnoxiously lavish, sedulously homely, and wholly Nie Huaisang.

Jiang Cheng stands like a fool in the heart of the room, taking in every extravagance and every expense, until a woody, smoky scent wafts over to his nose and snaps him back to his senses. He jerks his head up just as Nie Huaisang turns away from the ceramic burner, flame dissipating from his fingertips.

“Chen xiang,” Nie Huaisang explains, reading Jiang Cheng’s complicated expression as caused by confusion in placing the scent, then, “a— ah. You have no Yin deficiency, do you? Don’t breathe too much in if so, I’ll extinguish it.”

Jiang Cheng sniffs, shaking his head sharply. It’s a powerful smell, warm and spiced, but not oppressive, and he has no heat signs to be concerned about, eliminating any respectable reason to complain. Nie Huaisang relaxes, the line of his thin shoulders sinking low, and he puts his back to Jiang Cheng once again to kneel on the floor in one swoop of motion. Jiang Cheng steps towards him in spite of the lack of summons, propping Sandu up against a silk painted screen, folded back to reveal the innermost space meant to serve as Nie Huaisang’s bedroom.

By the time Nie Huaisang has retrieved the two jars he’s hidden away and carefully slotted the loose floorboard back into place, Jiang Cheng has kicked off his boots, discarded his outer robe, and is standing with his arms furled across his chest, awaiting direction. He feels impatience unfurl in the pit of his stomach when Nie Huaisang only looks up at him for a long breath once he notices that Jiang Cheng is there, his mouth open and his hands full.

“Well?” Jiang Cheng prompts, and Nie Huaisang steadies himself, holding out the jars for Jiang Cheng to take. After Jiang Cheng does, he pulls himself to his feet without incident, brushes his hands down his sides, and swiftly seats himself on the edge of his bed, gesturing for Jiang Cheng to follow.

Jiang Cheng does, sitting astride him without argument. He’s even commendably agreeable when Nie Huaisaing elects to dodder about with his hair, unrushed, languidly pulling the last of it from its ties and tossing them into the depths of his cushion-laden bed before his attention settles on Jiang Cheng once again. He leans forward and uncaps each jar, one after the other, sniffing them both before nodding to himself. His fingers brush over Jiang Cheng’s when he reaches to take one, and Jiang Cheng suppresses a flinch at the unexpected graze of contact.

Nie Huaisang slants down and sets the second jar on the floor, bracing his hands on his knees when he rises, legs drawing up to cross beneath him on the mattress. Jiang Cheng knits his brow beneath the scrutiny and takes an impulsive sip. It takes a moment for the taste to truly register, but once it does, it seeps down his throat and up his nostrils, caustically tart, and he winces, face crumpling.

“I pray to the Heavens that you’ve poisoned me,” Jiang Cheng splutters out, “and that it kills me before I have to take another drink.” He thrusts it blindly into Nie Huaisang’s fumbling hands as he starts to choke on his own spit, slapping himself on the chest.

“It’s not that bad, is it?” Nie Huaisang asks, lips hovering above the rim of the jar. He regards Jiang Cheng with worry for a moment before he tips his chin back and takes a swig, the mouthful thankfully making its way far enough down his throat to not come shooting back up when he gags. “Oh!”

“Fuck,” Jiang Cheng agrees, hoarse, flapping his fingers at Nie Huaisang until the jar is pressed back into his grip. He takes another cautious swig; the taste is still revolting, but the shock of it has passed, and he manages to swallow with less bodily rebellion. “It’s awful.”

“Then stop drinking it!” Nie Huaisang fusses. His eyelashes are wet when Jiang Cheng casts a look at him, his jaw clenched with discomfort, the skin of his throat mottled red.

“No, it’s fine, it grows on you,” Jiang Cheng lies, handing the jar back. It’s entirely too satisfying to watch Nie Huaisang struggle through another mouthful, delicately soft features contorting into ugly vexation.

“Ah, so it does,” Nie Huaisang croaks weakly.

Jiang Cheng plucks the jar from the precarious loop of his fingers, slouching back as he draws his legs up onto the bed, weight pooling in the heel of his palm, elbow locking into place. The third taste of the wine barely registers, let alone offends, and he taps the mouth of the jar against his chin as he observes Nie Huaisang try to surreptitiously dab his eyes with his sleeve.

“How did you even make this?” Jiang Cheng blurts out. His curiosity surprises him, but surprises Nie Huaisang even more, who snaps to attention, his expression flitting into something strangely opaque.

“What do you mean?” he ventures softly, head tilting when Jiang Cheng just snaps his fingers together and grunts, as though that serves as adequate elaboration.

“How did you make the wine?” Jiang Cheng eventually sighs out. He unwinds his legs, stretching them across the mattress until he feels his muscles quiver with resistance, sweat beading behind his knees, damp warmth sprawling up his throat to rest on the back of his tongue. “Did you just throw things in a pot, or do you actually know the specific— art, of it?”

Nie Huaisang, as it turns out, not only knows the innumerable variations on the techniques of wine-making, from rice to grape, but he knows them and is ecstatic to be given the opportunity to explain them. In excessive detail. Jiang Cheng feels his eyes drift shut as Nie Huaisang’s excited voice lovingly describes Qu Nieh, the bricks of daqu he brought with him from Qinghe on a whim, their differences in shades and how they’d all come to be of use, in the end; the flattened balls of herbed xiaoqu that had formed the base of this batch, and this batch, but not that one; and how trying it had been, truly, to find good yields of grain in the Cloud Recesses. By the time Jiang Cheng realises Nie Huaisang has fallen silent, he’s finished the jar of wine in his hand, vision blurring at the edges when he pries his eyes back open.

“What do you think?” Nie Huaisang asks, in all seriousness.

Jiang Cheng looks at him for a breath too long, limbs lax with contentment, skin warm, breath heady in his chest. “I think,” he says, with mirrored seriousness, “that if you focus your talents less on frippery and foolishness, you won’t have to repeat another year of lectures. Probably.”

Nie Huaisang parts his lips around a muted gasp, expression falling open, baring his surprise. Jiang Cheng can see the tip of his tongue brush against the backs of his teeth before he swallows and recovers himself, mouth curving into a smile. “It’s hard to tell if Young Master Jiang is complimenting me or criticising me, hah, I’m not sure…”

Jiang Cheng kicks out at him ineffectively, scowling, embarrassment making his skin feel drawn too-thin and too-tight around his skull. “If you can’t recognise praise when it’s given then consider it unsaid!”

Nie Huaisang is laughing even as he shields himself with his hands, mollifying Jiang Cheng in hopes of inspiring his mercy. “I recognised it, I accept it most graciously! It would be beneath a gentleman such as you now to take it back.”

“I drank the jar,” Jiang Cheng says, to spare himself from having to admit Nie Huaisang is right.

A hint of Nie Huaisang’s teeth peeks out between his lips, his eyes crinkling with mirth. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Would you like more?”

He is already lifting the jar from Jiang Cheng’s hand when Jiang Cheng nods, huffing out a breath. “Pull your weight with this second one,” he chastises, then, “did you really need help to drink so little?”

Nie Huaisang makes a soft noise of discomfort as he moves, having sat in one place for long enough that his blood has clearly pooled to the base of him, his limbs aching. “The rest I left,” he explains, crouched over, dark hair veiling his profile, “I’ll pour it in the river another night.”

Jiang Cheng openly considers him, at that.

He’s always taken Nie Huaisang to be a simple man; undisciplined and unmotivated; untalented and unguarded. Too prone to flights of fancy, too susceptible to frailty. Puddle-shallow and evening-dim; so underwhelming a Young Master of Qinghe Nie that he rarely even carries a weapon. Jiang Cheng can't even recall if Nie Huaisang has ever been seen to carry his sabre at all, which, surely, he must have.

So often, when Jiang Cheng is like this with Nie Huaisang, two steps too close to vulnerable and exposed for his own liking, Wei Wuxian is their buffer. Without his brother, Jiang Cheng cannot help but wonder, through the calm crawl of his fogged thoughts, if Nie Huaisang is as unremarkable as he appears, or if his honest brightness is merely subsumed by the loudness of those he gathers around him.

When Nie Huaisang looks at him again, Jiang Cheng banishes the burgeoning fear in his chest, the bone-deep slap of need to give in to instinct when cornered by an unexpected predator. Even if Nie Huaisang is deceptively sharp, his helplessness renders him unable to harm.

The tentative cup of Nie Huaisang’s palm against his calf startles Jiang Cheng back to himself, and though Nie Huaisang’s expression suggests no judgement, he still feels himself burn with the shame of a guilty man caught in the act.

“You first,” he tells him, pinching the bridge of his nose as he squeezes his eyes shut. Nie Huaisang’s fingers tighten down on him, gently enough to be disregarded, and the drag of his palm sears through to Jiang Cheng’s skin when he draws back.

Nie Huaisang’s muffled groan tells Jiang Cheng the deed is done. “How does it compare?” he asks, hand already outstretched to meet Nie Huaisang’s own as it guides the jar into his grip.

“Mm, it, ah… doesn’t,” is Nie Huaisang’s diplomatic reply.

Jiang Cheng puffs out a breath, steels himself, and tosses his head back. The taste traverses a completely inverted trajectory to the last batch, acrid and salty, but his throat is as pliant as the rest of him, and he works it down without retching. Jiang Cheng snorts, his tongue thick behind his teeth, pressed against the cool roof of his mouth.

“Are you all right?” Nie Huaisang’s voice sounds louder, closer. Jiang Cheng cocks his head, blinking rapidly, but the cloudy-fringed outline of Nie Huaisang’s frame hasn’t moved an inch.

“Just drink.” He waves him off, holding out the jar. Jiang Cheng expects Nie Huaisang to take it from him, as he has all times before, their fingers bumping and stumbling together for a breath before they part.

Nie Huaisang doesn’t. He grasps Jiang Cheng’s wrist, the pad of his thumb dimpling the thin skin over the flutter of his pulse, and raises Jiang Cheng’s arm, Nie Huaisang’s frame curving forward, the bend of his spine like a three-stone bow drawn back to heng. The line of his throat is flushed, thin, and bare, bobbing when he drinks from Jiang Cheng’s hand.

Jiang Cheng strains around a swallow, mouth dry, but whatever spell Nie Huaisang has cast on him breaks the moment he opens his eyes, features pulled into a wince, shoulders hitching behind the force of a shudder.

“I think it’s getting better?” Nie Huaisang remarks, as unconvincing as he himself is unconvinced. “Are you sure you’re… would you like water?”

“Don’t need it.” Jiang Cheng takes another pull from the jar. The air in his throat feels tacky, honey-thick, his skin running too-hot even as his blood runs too-cold. The sensation is neither pleasant nor painful; merely sufferable.

The mattress slants beneath him as Jiang Cheng shifts, thoughts upending themselves; he swallows, and swallows again, but can’t get his mouth to stay wet, can’t dislodge the discomfort from the back of his throat. When he sucks in a breath, he can’t get it far enough down to stop his lungs from burning, desperate, straining, the cage of his ribs drawn taut, his heart racing.

“Oh,” Nie Huaisang whispers, “oh. This may not be…” his voice fades out, and then in again, not quite there, barely perceptible, like he’s holding a conversation behind a door, and Jiang Cheng is struggling to overhear something he shouldn’t. “Oh no.”

“Oh no?” Jiang Cheng repeats, laboured. He tries to gather himself, his limbs feeling heavy and severed between seconds, cycling incomprehensibly; the effort feels as if it’s tearing him open, as if his whole body is a wound, and he moans through the grit of his teeth.

“Oh no,” is all he gets from an audibly panicked Nie Huaisang. Jiang Cheng is suffocating, fingers clawing at the sheets, white-knuckled and primal, he feels his elbows buckle and falls forward only to meet the clasp of Nie Huaisang’s hands on his biceps mid-plummet. The snatch of contact, the two-pronged brace of pressure, the rope of his fingers— it pulls Jiang Cheng’s head far enough above the surface of the depths he’s drowning in that he can choke up water, can steady himself enough to gulp down frenzied, frayed breaths.

“What did you do?” Jiang Cheng rasps, fraught, when he’s regained enough sense to speak.

Nie Huaisang’s thumbs knead nervous circles against his creased sleeves. Jiang Cheng opens his eyes, looking at Nie Huaisang without seeing him through the mist in his head. “I really didn’t—” he babbles, “I’m sorry, please don’t ask. Don’t ask me that, I really can’t answer.”

“Nie Huaisang.” Nie Huaisang quakes, his grip loosening, and though he hasn’t retreated that scrap of loss of something slams into Jiang Cheng like a flash flood, splintering his bones with the violence of it. Tears prick the edges of his eyes, hot, and he’s powerless to stop the moan that’s ripped free of him.

“Please believe me when I say that I really, really, really only wanted to help, and this was entirely unintended,” Nie Huaisang begs. One of his hands leaves Jiang Cheng and he clamps his jaw so viciously his teeth creak, wrecked, only for relief to wash back over him like the tide when Nie Huaisang smoothes his sweat-damp hair back from his forehead.

“Just come out and say it,” Jiang Cheng hisses. Nie Huaisang’s fingers judder against his temples, and his heart bottoms out with realisation. “The wine. You actually did poison me.” Even as the accusation leaves him in an arcing lash, Jiang Cheng has lost his faith in it, but he hasn’t lost his pride enough to not dig his heels in and stand his ground for it.

“I didn’t!” Nie Huaisang protests. “I really— it’s… not entirely… accurately a poison. Precisely.” He pets Jiang Cheng’s hair, smoothing it back again, and Jiang Cheng snarls as he leans into it.

“It’s not affecting you,” Jiang Cheng observes, curt.

Nie Huaisang freezes, contrite. “I cycled the toxins through my golden core to break most of them down— but it wasn’t with ill intent, I swear! It’s just habit! I wasn’t even thinking as I did it!”

Jiang Cheng sobs out in impotent frustration. “What’s in it?” he forces out, every syllable a struggle, every breath a battle.

“Ba ji tian,” Nie Huaisang lists off, rueful, “xian mao, wu bei zi, and, uh— bai ji li.”

Jiang Cheng can place half of them, though the recognition brings with it no consolation. They’re not names he’s read in books, or heard in lessons; they’re names he’s heard in passing, sliding from the mouths of unscrupulous and unsavoury men, made brave by liquor and company kept to speak of disgraceful things that should stay unsaid.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Nie Huaisang implores him, “I really wasn’t thinking of that. I only wanted to help. Strengthen and anchor Yang, disperse wind-cold-damp Bi, balance liver Wood Qi. I knew how they’d react to your Yin, but I didn’t consider how they’d react with one another.”

“Let me go,” Jiang Cheng seethes.

“Let me help,” Nie Huaisang declines. He flattens his palm against Jiang Cheng’s forehead, his other hand wrapping around his wrist, and Jiang Cheng feels the prod of his energy, feeding through his meridians. It’s a moment of solace heralding an inevitable torment; Jiang Cheng doesn’t even get to enjoy the deception before he’s overwhelmed by an excruciating torrent of pain, his body rejecting the cleansing measures Nie Huaisang is trying to make it bend the knee to.

“Stop!” he cries out, “stop, stop—” and thankfully, thankfully, Nie Huaisang does.

Jiang Cheng puts everything that’s left within him into gathering his parts together, whimpering at the wet heat of the tears streaking his face, the pulse of his cock where the drape of his middle clothes has pinned it to his inner thigh. If he could stand, if he could get back to his room, he could, he could debase himself out of sight and pray that it’d be enough to work the concoction through its course, he could—

Every half-spun idea falls out of his head as quickly as it falls into it. He can barely move, and if he could, there is no way he can then endure the penalty of Nie Huaisang’s hands leaving him for long enough to stand, let alone— let alone anything else, let alone that.

He feels like he’s dying; he feels like he wants to. In Jiang Cheng’s silence and underneath his unfocused glower, Nie Huaisang seems to arrive at a decision of his own accord, for he yanks his hand from Jiang Cheng’s forehead quicker than Jiang Cheng can whine, snatching up the jar that’s fallen astride them in the madness. Some of it has sloshed out onto the sheets, but most of the remnants are unspent, and Jiang Cheng looks on as Nie Huaisang downs it.

“What are you doing?!” Jiang Cheng spits out, horrified.

Nie Huaisang thrusts the jar away from them and takes Jiang Cheng back in hand, his fingers trembling around his wrists a jagged counterpoint to the certitude in his narrowed gaze. “It’s my fault,” he says softly, surely. “I didn’t think it through, and swept you up in my own folly. You— could have left me to the consequences and I, I would have fairly deserved it, but, ah, you took pity on me. That’s all.”

It’s an out. Nie Huaisang is giving him an explanation, taking in exchange the role of the victim. If they’re both suffering, the shame is halved and shared. If they’re both vulnerable, Jiang Cheng is baring flaws that can be held against him, but Nie Huaisang is baring flaws that Jiang Cheng can hold against him in turn. One blow felt and one blow dealt, leaving them in a stalemate.

Jiang Cheng throws his weight forward in answer, the bar of his forearm against his collarbone pinning Nie Huaisang beneath him, his legs falling open around the shove of Jiang Cheng’s knees, the backs of his thighs held wide by Jiang Cheng’s own. Any mistrust he rightly holds, that Nie Huaisang might have only made the gesture a grand one for the show of it and not followed through, leaves him the moment he sees his eyes turn glassy, his lips parting around a breath he can’t take in.

“It hurts.” Nie Huaisang’s voice lilts, as though it’s as much a question as an observation, as if it’s a surprise.

Jiang Cheng nods in agreement. It does hurt, but it hurts— not quite less, the more of Nie Huaisang he’s touching, but more tolerably. He tests it, furtive, hands skimming across Nie Huaisang’s fluttering chest, his quivering shoulders, his squirming hips, the sounds spilling out of Nie Huaisang’s mouth in answer unintelligible, deafening over the roar of Jiang Cheng’s own blood and the pants scraping down his tongue.

Jiang Cheng thumbs his waist, the line of him so slight beneath his clothes, his belly twitching under the span of his hands. He can’t get a grip on any of the thoughts in his head, each one slipping between his fingers like water, and Jiang Cheng loses long seconds to trying, pain waxing and waning, the tide of it brought into the pull of the moon that is Nie Huaisang, caged underneath him. He’s so caught up in himself that he doesn’t even realise Nie Huaisang is clawing himself up onto his elbows, swaying gracelessly.

He says something that Jiang Cheng doesn’t hear, but Jiang Cheng doesn’t even get to ask him to repeat it before the pads of Nie Huaisang’s fingers are closing around his cock, the heel of his palm kneading at his tip. Jiang Cheng seizes up; sobs, wretchedly, as he comes, harsh and wet, soaking his pants, streaking up the cup of Nie Huaisang’s hand. His vision fizzles out; he blinks until it’s back, and when he comes to, his sight fills out with Nie Huaisang, looking up at him, eyes blown wide, hand wet, lips shaking.

Jiang Cheng has never thought about touching another man’s cock before, and he doesn’t think about it now, one hand pinning Nie Huaisang flat against the mattress by the shoulder, his own body following the flow of it, looming. He fumbles between the tangle of their legs, scrapes his nails up the hot swell of his shaft, feels it throb under his hand as he tugs at Nie Huaisang’s waistband. He gets it down just enough to trap the swollen, flushed tip between his navel and the cotton before Nie Huaisang comes, the arch of his spine cruel, bent just shy of breaking. He cries out, the sound of it guttural, intoxicating, and then he doesn’t stop, whimpering and writhing up against the brace of Jiang Cheng’s body. Jiang Cheng starts to pull away, starts to release him, but Nie Huaisang clutches his elbow in a death grip, urging Jiang Cheng’s weight to settle back into the fetter of his palm, keeping Nie Huaisang locked in place.

“Again?” he mumbles, “already, I—” and Jiang Cheng doesn’t understand him, not at all, not until Nie Huaisang’s gaze drifts down between them, low, to the hard line of his shaft, still caught in his pants, and lower, to the obscene jut of Jiang Cheng’s own cock between his legs.

“Of all the things to commit to,” Jiang Cheng gripes, thready. “You really weren’t careless at all.”

“Now I know that’s— that’s Young Master Jiang criticising me, for certain,” wheezes Nie Huaisang, who dares to show his spine enough to jest, even as he’s hooking his fingers in Jiang Cheng’s waistband. “I’m sorry.”

“Forget it,” Jiang Cheng tells him, twisting himself out of his pants as Nie Huaisang peels them away, “what does your apology help? Just—” whatever he’s about to say spirits itself from his head, voice tapering into a groan, as Nie Huaisang’s hands slip beneath his shirt, gliding up to trace the plain of his chest.

“Right, right,” Nie Huaisang murmurs. Jiang Cheng sags over him, gasping out, struggling with the ties as Nie Huaisang’s knuckles ease the cloth from his shoulders. “A-ah, it still hurts? It still…”

Jiang Cheng shrugs his shirt away, then frees his dishevelled hair from its dislodged clasp and slackened ties. He drapes himself back over Nie Huaisang’s body, eyes falling to his own by instinct, on accident, his hand flitting up the inside of Nie Huaisang’s jittering thigh, still clothed. He finds Nie Huaisang midway, palms the backs of his fingers, guides him with a surety he doesn’t feel to take them both in hand. Nie Huaisang can’t quite close his fist around them, so Jiang Cheng seals the gap, squeezing down on them both with a grunt as he thrusts, cock rutting against the sweltering curve of him, sweat-damp and come-slick.

Nie Huaisang moans out, hips bucking, mouth working around his words before he retrieves enough of the shards of his voice to actually speak them. “There, there, harder— I think, it’s, almost—”

Jiang Cheng jerks him with a sloppy snap of his wrist, dragging Nie Huaisang’s hand along with him, snubbing his slit with his thumbnail, and Nie Huaisang spills all over himself with an agonised wail, head thrown back to bare his throat, shoulder blades pinned to the sheets. It shouldn’t be as good a sight as it is; it shouldn’t get to him as much as it does. Jiang Cheng buckles in on himself as he comes, forearm bracing on Nie Huaisang’s chest for balance, come painting the steeple of their entwined fingers and the sliver of Nie Huaisang’s belly, bared by the ridden-up hem of his shirt.

Nie Huaisang is already moving beneath him before Jiang Cheng can catch his breath, wriggling until he has gotten his pants far enough down his knees to kick his way out of them, the hand trapped beneath Jiang Cheng’s own kneading at their cocks, still achingly hard and pulsing in their grip. Jiang Cheng growls, low, bears his weight down on Nie Huaisang as another orgasm is jerked out of him with sparse, clumsy strokes.

“Still…” Nie Huaisang pants out, awed, transfixed by the sight bridging their bodies, the rope of their hands, the flex of Jiang Cheng’s thighs as he tries to keep himself upright.

He looks as ruined as Jiang Cheng feels; eyes black, mouth bitten red, skin florid from the fan of his ribs, peering through the gaping neck of his shirt, to the slope of his throat. He chokes out a breath when Jiang Cheng lurches, manages to catch him beneath the arm and roll the dead weight of his body onto his side, nails scraping across his shoulderblades, other hand still wound around their obtruding cocks, snared.

Jiang Cheng snarls at himself, a humiliated whimper slipping through the cinch of his teeth. The searing, formless pain that had at first engulfed him has now evened out into the sensation of feeling stripped back, rubbed raw, and still he’s wracked with an incomprehensible, insufferable need. He’s hungry for the friction of Nie Huaisang against him and desperate to come, again, and again, even though he’s already wrung out just from this.

Nie Huaisang says something to him that might be his name, then pries his hand away, comforting him wordlessly when Jiang Cheng groans out in protest, eyes squeezing shut. “Here,” Nie Huaisang says, and Jiang Cheng feels the mattress sink as his arm is lifted. Nie Huaisang’s back is pressed to his chest in a heartbeat, the thin line of his shorter frame wriggling up against him, Jiang Cheng’s arm pulled to drape over his side. “Here, like, like this, that’s it.”

Jiang Cheng opens his eyes to the mussed tangle of Nie Huaisang’s hair, sprawled like a spider’s web over the pillow, to the jostle of Nie Huaisang’s leg draping over his own as he parts his knees. “Like this,” Nie Huaisang tells him, and Jiang Cheng grapples for the bony hill of his hip as he shifts forward, gasping out when his cock nudges along the inside of his thigh. He’s urged higher as Nie Huaisang adjusts to accommodate him, rolling his hips obediently until his cockhead skids along his perineum, prodding at his balls. Nie Huaisang makes a pleased sound, clamping his thighs together, reaching the span of Jiang Cheng’s hand to lace their fingers together.

“Harder,” Nie Huaisang says, with all the insistence of a command, and Jiang Cheng submits to it. He winds his other arm beneath Nie Huaisang to drag him against his chest, pinning him there, hand to his throat, mouth pressed to his hair, and slams his hips against the soft curve of his ass, each shove unrelenting, forcing his cock through the tight heat of his vised thighs. Jiang Cheng feels too tightly wound, on edge, battered to the brink of unconsciousness, but he can’t get himself to come, even though he feels it, right there, just out of arm’s reach, and he sobs out, rhythm stuttering, strength failing him in a surge.

“Ah— Jiang Cheng, almost, you’re almost,” Nie Huaisang’s voice is close and far all at once, but inexplicably, fondly gentle. He lifts their joined hands from his hip, leads them, the heel of Jiang Cheng’s palm ghosting down his skin until he’s pressing it to the line of his own cock, pinning it between his belly and Jiang Cheng’s scalding hand. Jiang Cheng circles his fingers around him loosely, petting and rubbing at the underside of his shaft, his swollen tip, groaning in sympathy when he at last drags the all-but-dry orgasm out of him, wrist cramping.

Jiang Cheng’s cock feels chafed, in spite of the slickness of Nie Huaisang’s thighs, and he whines, the whole of him tender, used, unsatisfied. He falls limply onto his back when Nie Huaisang’s weight sinks against him, flinches weakly as Nie Huaisang’s hands gingerly rearrange him, tilting his head back against the pillows, easing his legs apart, lowering his arms to his sides.

“Jiang Cheng,” Nie Huaisang croaks out, “it’s almost, I think— can you endure it for a bit longer?”

He brushes Jiang Cheng’s hair back from his face, easing the wayward strands free from his parted mouth, trying to touch him as little as possible, and as lightly when it’s unavoidable. Jiang Cheng musters his strength enough to reach for him, fingers scrabbling bluntly along his thigh, dimpling the fat there, smoothed over the barest hint of muscle. He nods his head, grimacing, eyelashes fluttering as Nie Huaisang moves, enabled and emboldened by his commitment, the bracket of his knees around his waist the only warning before Nie Huaisang’s weight settles into his lap.

“Can you take it?” Nie Huaisang asks, and Jiang Cheng burns, blushing, maddened and mortified, his breath whistling out of him in a pinched whine. He hasn’t even finished nodding when Nie Huaisang begins to move, rocking down on him, the roll of his hips grinding across every inch of his throbbing cock.

“That’s it,” Nie Huaisang reassures him, exasperatingly indulgent, and Jiang Cheng wants— wants him to be quiet, can’t take it, can’t stand the weight of him bearing down on his cock and can’t suffer his sweetness, so he seizes him by the elbows, crumpling his shirt, and yanks him down. He still has enough in him to take Nie Huaisang by surprise, slipping beneath the knife’s edge of his guard, and their teeth clack together loudly as Jiang Cheng cranes his neck. Nie Huaisang exhales in a shocked rush, a moan snagging in his chest, before he recovers, lips dragging against the corner of Jiang Cheng’s mouth as he rights them both. Jiang Cheng sighs, broken, breath shallowing. His chest hitches as Nie Huaisang’s tongue laves over his teeth, coaxing them apart, and, pinned down and pried open, he blacks out.

Jiang Cheng’s body surfaces before the rest of him, the ache of muscles well worked pulling him over the span between dreaming and waking. It’s peaceful, when he opens his eyes; quiet, save for the crackle of the lit candle and Nie Huaisang’s soft, level breaths.

He turns his face, ever so slightly, cheek rubbing into his pillow. In the time Jiang Cheng has lost, Nie Huaisang has cleaned him down and gathered the sheet up to tuck beneath his armpits, sheltering his modesty. He’s now taking his own rest, however well-earned or not, at Jiang Cheng’s side, his back turned to him, his shoulders drawn in, frame furled in on itself. Jiang Cheng doesn’t question himself when the impulse unwinds in the pulse in his wrist to reach out, merely gratifying it, the backs of his fingers stroking down Nie Huaisang’s spine, catching on each rise, the vertebrae stark beneath the thin pull of his fair skin.

“What time is it?” Jiang Cheng asks, when Nie Huaisang rouses with a puzzled mumble.

Nie Huaisang rolls himself over tentatively, Jiang Cheng’s fingers tracing along the fan of his ribs before coming to rest on his chest, grazing his nipple. He squints, blearily, over the incline of Jiang Cheng’s shoulder, brow furrowing in concentration.

“Mm, choushi? I think?” he slumps back down, scrubbing at his eyes. “Too early.”

“You can see the lines on your candle from this far?”

Nie Huaisang blushes, teeth worrying his bottom lip, the skin still puffy, kiss-bruised. “I can see the pin that is meant to wake me soon,” he admits.

“Ah,” says Jiang Cheng. His fingers pet at the slight swell of Nie Huaisang’s pectoral absently, gaze fixed half on Nie Huaisang and half elsewhere, deliberately reticent. He has to stop himself from retreating when Nie Huaisang extends his hand, tension coiling up his nape as Nie Huaisang feels his sternum through the sheet, the fabric creasing beneath the glide of his palm, until it finally lands atop his golden core and settles into place.

“It’s gone,” Nie Huaisang states, confirming what Jiang Cheng already knows. “Are you all right? Would you like water?”

Jiang Cheng sits up, shying out from underneath his hand, the sheet pooling in his lap. “Where are my clothes?” he evades, nearly biting through his tongue to curb the other words that want to follow, the protestations that he is not spun glass or a deflowered maiden, the pleas for Nie Huaisang to put the night behind him and not look back.

It’s hard to tell, in the candlelight, if Nie Huaisang’s expression shifts, or if it’s a trick of the eyes. “Over there,” Nie Huaisang tells him, using the hand that has fallen from Jiang Cheng’s chest to gesture.

Jiang Cheng rises with just enough haste to still be thought of as polite, and sets about piecing himself back together. He gathers his hair and ties it into a messy bun, pins the rise of it to the crown of his head; pulls on his middle clothes, cringing at where the fabric has stiffened. Jiang Cheng binds his outer robe too firmly around himself, the knot of his sash too severe, his movements jarred as he picks up Sandu. All the while, he feels as if Nie Huaisang is watching him, the weight of his gaze an iron brand on his back, neck chilled with gooseflesh.

And yet, when Jiang Cheng spins on his heel, hackles raised, mouth open around a bark, he is met with the sight of Nie Huaisang’s back, still with sleep. Berating himself for his paranoia, Jiang Cheng toes his way out of the room as quietly as he can, and is sure to pull the door shut tight.

Jiang Cheng wakes feeling all the more tired than when he’d slept for good, face down in his own mattress. Despite it, he manages to rise early enough for breakfast, and to walk with Jiang Yanli to the first lecture of the day, awkwardly sidestepping her gentle inquiries.

He feels off, all throughout the morning, in a way he can’t place. As though he’s forgotten something; which, he’s sure he has not. As if he’s being watched; which, he knows he is, just as much as the rest of them are within the Cloud Recesses.

It takes Nie Huaisang approaching him between lessons for it to click.

“Jiang Cheng,” Nie Huaisang says, nervously turning his fan over in the spindly cage of his hands, “may I speak with you? Ah, somewhere— private?”

Jiang Cheng has no reason to refuse, but even if he did, he wouldn’t. He stands, hand folding against the small of his back, and gestures with his chin for Nie Huaisang to lead the way.

“I panicked,” is what Nie Huaisang finally tells him, when they’ve slipped away from their fellow disciples and made their way into the main siheyuan, looking all the part innocent, wandering admirers of the architecture, for the sake of any prying eyes.

Jiang Cheng looks at him, brow raised. Nie Huaisang does not elaborate, not until Jiang Cheng sighs, put-upon, and says, “Panicked?”

Nie Huaisang bobs his head, tapping his fan against his cupped palm. “Will you promise you won’t be too furious?”

“I won’t make that promise,” Jiang Cheng replies, “given that you’re already starting to make me furious. Can’t you just be out with whatever it is, already?”

He grimaces, paling, eyes darting off towards the wall of the passageway they’ve stalled in. “Your brother visited me last night. It must have been not long after you left, because the first thing he told me was how he’d seen you go.”

Jiang Cheng feels the twinge of an oncoming headache behind his eyes, sweat prickling against the backs of his knees. “And?” he prompts. Very, very carefully.

“Well,” continues Nie Huaisang, voice hitching, “he, of course, wanted to know why you had been there— as anyone would.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I panicked, as I said!”

“Nie Huaisang, what is that supposed to explain?!” Jiang Cheng leans in, pitching his tone into a low hiss. “What did you say?”

“I said,” Nie Huaisang says, looking perturbingly glum, “that we, that, well…”

“You didn’t!” Jiang Cheng erupts, livid.

“I didn’t!” Nie Huaisang yelps back, flicking out his fan to hide himself. “I didn’t put it so indelicately! But I did— put it, in some manner, like that. That we’re… what else could I have said?”

“Anything!” Jiang Cheng lambasts him, “literally anything else but that! You couldn’t even think to just say we were drinking?!”

Nie Huaisang shrinks further behind his fan, fluttering it miserably. “I wasn’t thinking, I was under a lot of pressure! And once it came out, I couldn’t take it back.” He sneaks a glance up at him over the top of his fan. “I’m sorry?”

Jiang Cheng squeezes his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose. “At least try to speak your apology as though it’s not a question,” he gripes, drained. Truly, his is a trying existence. Just what deities has he angered to earn the punishment of being Jiang Cheng?

“I’m sorry,” Nie Huaisang repeats, more convincingly.

“It’s fine,” Jiang Cheng retorts. He can’t help but shake his head in disbelief, a hysterical smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “Really. It’s fine! Just leave it as it is.”

Nie Huaisang straightens slowly, brow furrowing in reservation. “Just… leave it?” he prompts, wary.

“Just leave it,” he reiterates. “So we’ll be that for a while. After we return to Lotus Pier, I’ll tell him we’ve broken off our— this.”

“Is it really fine?” Nie Huaisang’s features have become carefully inscrutable.

“What,” Jiang Cheng sneers, unable to clamp down on the surge of offence that whips through him, “are you afraid I’ll lose you face? Don’t be. Wei Wuxian will tell no one. Our reputations will remain intact.”

He must imagine the streak of hurt that paints Nie Huaisang’s face, for his voice is so agreeably relieved when he says, smiling dimly, “All right.”

And that settles that.

Jiang Cheng does remember Nie Huaisang, after, and the underlying promise of one of their last private conversations. But he forgets him, too.

There are other thoughts to have, in Lotus Pier and further elsewhere, and other feelings to deny. In the end, it is but one of many secrets Wei Wuxian takes to the grave Jiang Cheng puts him in.

When his brother returns— well. It’s been years, and years, and years. So much has happened, and so little. With Wei Wuxian back, it all begins to happen too much.

If Jiang Cheng thinks of times gone by, if he thinks of Nie Huaisang, it is in the few and far-between moments where he can’t be held accountable for it: in the dark of his room, in the minutes stretched too thinly between resting and rising. Where he never need admit he dwells on Nie Huaisang at all, never need consider just how deeply he wonders how things could have been, if only for something, if only for anything at all.

At Guanyin Temple, he sees the true Nie Huaisang for the second time.

Jiang Cheng is standing beyond the gate, having already watched Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji leave, not at all as secretly as they both believed themselves to. His mind is on everything, and it is on nothing at all, when he sees Nie Huaisang limp across his periphery.

He walks like a dead man possessed; stilted, staggering, small. His dark eyes are wide and wet, his face steeled, mouth tight. Jiang Cheng looks at him. Looks at how he appears every minute as old as the years that have passed, and as young as he’d been where Jiang Cheng’s dreams now keep him, back in the Cloud Recesses.

Jiang Cheng had seen through Nie Huaisang’s cunning, then, too. And still, Nie Huaisang had made him out to be a fool, for Jiang Cheng had thought Nie Huaisang to have no aptitude for cruelty. In the end, as with many other things, Jiang Cheng had thought wrong.

“Where are you going?” Jiang Cheng calls out to him, too torn open and spread apart to care how he might look, or how he might sound.

Nie Huaisang does not look at him, but he does stop. “Qinghe,” he replies, sounding almost conversational, just a heel-turn off normal.

“Not home?” Jiang Cheng asks, quiet.

“Not home,” says Nie Huaisang. He turns himself enough to offer Jiang Cheng a polite smile and a courteous bow. The warmth of it does not reach his eyes.

Jiang Cheng nods his head. “Take care.”

“And you,” Nie Huaisang imparts.

Jiang Cheng watches the fragile slope of his drooping shoulders as he goes, ignoring the scream of desire that rends him from soul to sinew to stand in Nie Huaisang’s way, to stop him on his forlorn path, already too far trekked.