Chapter Text
It's a fine spring day—the unfledged wisp of his saber spirit will crunch, underfoot, like the chickweed carpeting Qishan's slopes—when Nie Huaisang goes calling for Wen Ruohan.
Not that he can ask for his quarry by name. The Jades played generously for his brother, both tight-necked and faltering and outright missing, but if Lan Wangji discovers Huaisang's new avocation he expects never to be let out of Gusu again. Er-ge, brother most truly to San-ge, is also too great a risk. At least Huaisang has always had an eye for novelties that'll come in handy; he snooped on what he could of Inquiry during the war, but in his hands it's less a conversation than a howl.
It's fine, it's fine. All he really needs is to make a racket audible even to the dead. He climbs the stairs of the Inferno Palace, picks a cleanish spot, and unpacks his sleeves onto it. There's no way to tell exactly where Wen Ruohan bled out, now: the Jin servants scrubbed the whole place down before Wei-xiong, in his tragedy's final act, undid all their work.
Being Nie does give him some advantages over the Lans. Chifeng-zun claimed one of Wen Ruohan's hands as part of his Sunshot spoils, and Huaisang has studded the fingerbones into his new qin in place of its hui. They're lovely, the bones and lacquer and extravagantly aged fir; for once Huaisang cares only for their function, but Wen Ruohan had been keen on beautifully made things.
Huaisang has also brought his saber. You have to take responsibility, Da-ge always said, and Huaisang indeed thought of the saber for many years as a horrible sort of dog to which a man had to be chained like a post. He does, in fact, take responsibility when there's no one else to whom it can run.
A Nie saber will never be an elegant weapon, or a convenient one. But it is exquisitely made to house a resentful spirit.
If you can't make mincemeat of it, at least make do: hasn't Huaisang found himself resorting to perversion of Nie philosophy, again and again? So he's about to dishonor his father, to a degree probably no Nie before him has managed; how else can he avenge the brother denied, at the end, even the knowledge of who Huaisang was? Huaisang once stood where the mountains sharpened to a brink just wide enough for two. There was a band of light peachening and solidifying at the horizon, like a nacre ring, and he and Da-ge made a promise, and he wanted to remain in that grip forever: a purity of craving no act could be worth giving up.
Thinking of Jin Guangyao's perfectly measured smile has now splintered a year of Huaisang's sleep into hour-long shards. He's gone one night into the man's old rooms—well-kept, still, as if in memoriam for whom Da-ge believed Meng Yao had been—and set each scroll and robe on fire until he was dogged awake again by the threat of gossip, and painstakingly had everything remade. More than anything Huaisang thinks that resentment will limn him, a torch in the marsh, for another man dear A-Yao stabbed unseen. Like calls to like, doesn't it?
He slices his palm along the saber's edge. Plucks without design at the qin until blood runs onto the qin's board. Smoke is billowing from the stained wood like steam fanned from a pot. Thank you, he thinks, to a spirit he never knew. The strings part easily under the blade, and—
He is breathing; he is not breathing; he is sucking in shreds of air as he stares into a sky churning mulberry-black. The saber pulses in his hands. He has a second, exhilaration or relief or terror, to feel a faint wriggling at the back of his mind before the full force of Wen Ruohan is shoved in like a coal through a grate and starts laughing, raising every hair on his spine and some below. He is—he is—
The saber slips from Huaisang's hold. The feeling of being dwarfed within his own body goes with it. He gingerly directs the saber into the air, lets a minute slide by.
Think, Huaisang; Wen Ruohan can do nothing but. He ensures he's bowing, in proper if shallow form, and in alignment with the plaza and the hall and the sun, before he wipes one hand on his robes and wraps it around the saber's hilt.
"Wen-zongzhu," Huaisang begins. Perhaps saying it will reassure himself it's true: "It's good you could come. I've invited you here for a proposal."
He needs spies. He needs to pacify an arm. He needs proof of Jin Guangyao's intent. He would like puppets, although ideally without the lolling heads or the obtrusive pupillessness, for the other tasks Nie-zongzhu cannot be seen to do competently or at all. Wei-xiong would have been the better teacher, but by all signs Wei-xiong is very, very unavailable. Huaisang has dwelled less on what he intends to offer Wen Ruohan: surely entente even with Nie Huaisang must be preferable to a dreaming death. Something in him, perhaps, also still expects pity, or the strange consideration Wen Ruohan had once allowed him behind these pillars.
Ah, it's you, Wen Ruohan says, his voice rolling like rockfall into Huaisang's head. The windswept hair is not needed, it turns out, to impart a sense of drama Huaisang envies. You must be thinking, what a surprising accomplishment for sweet little A-Sang. I told you we would meet again.
Focus. "Do you remember who came out of the palace behind you?"
Who I raised out of the gutter to kill me? Of course. But I remember you too, Nie Huaisang.
He misses his fan. He must console himself knowing it would never have survived the summoning. "Oh, please don't mistake me! I had nothing to do with your passing. In fact, I thought—easier to show you," he says.
He reaches out with a tendril of memory. Wen Ruohan seizes it. Showing him is the easiest thing in the world, as Wen Ruohan brushes right through the snowy drapery of Huaisang's grief. He pays as much attention to the complexities, the curdling, the cavity of Huaisang's love as a flood might pay the banks it overruns. All Wen Ruohan cares for is the fury boiling up in its wake: a feeling so simple, so subsuming, that Huaisang would briefly do anything at all to be able to live with nothing but.
You won't be satisfied with his death? He's passed a morsel of a thought: Meng Yao, writhing under the instruments of his own invention. Smoke, pincers, covered mirrors, veins flowing like water.
"Ah, Wen-zongzhu, that isn't really my style."
Yet you're prepared to resurrect a mad tyrant, a monstrous dog for his aid. And his silence. Huaisang breathes into his tone's spangling of interest. Don't pretend to gasp. I heard what you all cried from your banners. What do you think you can achieve?
"Qinghe Nie has a reputation, I know. We would rather hack than deliberate, no more civilized than the animals we butchered... not that anyone's really thinking of me, of course! I haven't carved so much as an apple since my brother was alive. But even I can't bear the triumph of a white-eyed wolf, just in my own way—"
For what was Huaisang raised, these twenty years and counting, if not to salt the ruins of Jin Guangyao's name in the ruins of Jin Guangyao's towers? Huaisang has to sit; it is remarkably dizzying to be examined for his naked ambitions, instead of his absence of them.
"He thought it would be kinder, Wen-zongzhu," he says, "if you didn't know he was coming. I want him to look me in the eye as he realizes what I've taken from him, and how thoroughly, and why. That's what I want him to die choking on."
Wen Ruohan already knows something about Nie Huaisang denied to any man alive: that Huaisang can always lie, when it matters, no matter how he looks. No matter the disgrace. Why would he ever protest his own embarrassment, or fear, or abnegation? Let them swarm his face. They enshroud his heart as effectively as locusts cover the field.
Huaisang already told him the truth about Jin Guangyao. He shouldn't be surprised that Wen Ruohan wants to feel firsthand how low he can sink for it.
Call me Xiandu, Wen Ruohan says, and Huaisang agrees. Undress, Wen Ruohan says, and Huaisang hesitates for what should only be a moment. He won't renege, having already set his honor aflame like so much joss paper, and entrusted his life's work into—
Well. Currently they are as much Wen Ruohan's hands as they are his own. The agreement was that they would cultivate together, in the privacy of the Unclean Realm, until enough of Huaisang's golden core is siphoned off that Wen Ruohan can embody himself on his own. In theory Huaisang can throw this saber across the room, and Wen Ruohan will snuff out in Huaisang's mind until he touches the saber again with bare skin.
He shouldn't even fear for the furnishings or for being seen; he never moved to the sect leader's chamber, meant for great men in the mold of his ancestors and brother, who needed their windows to stare out at the fields in which they'd learn to die. Huaisang shuffles across the disheveled room of a grief-drained layabout. He's kept it too dark to appreciate its old artwork, which has all been stored or parceled out to public halls, the less excuse for Jin Guangyao to invite himself within. Huaisang still thinks of himself as just Huaisang. Wen Ruohan is just somewhere between a work in progress and a ghost.
In practice Wen Ruohan says You were so much quicker to accept my side of the bargain, hmm, and even as a ghost he flares with such presence Huaisang feels pushed out of his own body.
Once a master of puppets, Huaisang thinks. It's not quite funny. The saber-free hand trembles, finely, resonant as a string, before he does as he's told.
His belt tugs open, his outer robe shrugs off, clumsy in that one hand while the other strains to keep the saber steady. Hairpiece. The unwinding braid slaps shockingly against his back. Middle robe, inner robe. He isn't thinking to buy time—wasn't this his proposal—so much as startled into sluggishness by the unnerving perspective on this body. He knows what the youth presented as Nie-er-gongzi looked like, what Nie-zongzhu must look like, and, from the spring books, how each might be flatteringly depicted naked; but it's not as though he regularly looks at the crease of this belly, the soft rises and spoons of flesh these thighs form as he fumbles toward the bed. He seats himself with the saber across his lap to fold his clothes as Meng Yao once showed him, and wonders if what is exposed satisfies the man behind his eyes.
Nie Huaisang was Chifeng-zun's beloved didi. When anyone was willing to take liberties with him at all, they would never have dared to call him inadequate.
You have nothing to be ashamed of, Nie Huaisang, Wen Ruohan says. You would have been a worthwhile distraction from my yin iron if you had appeared before me like this.
Huaisang pinkens to his toes. He wishes Wen Ruohan would condescend to him as A-Sang, or Sang'er, or even Sangsang: pretend some diminution of Huaisang participates, instead of his whole self. Or for Wen Ruohan to be present, separately, on these sheets; it would give him an opportunity to return whatever is done to his own body, to bury Wen Ruohan too completely in his own experience to consider Huaisang. Here Huaisang is the only canvas. No one's legs will spread for him but his own.
What happened to the firecracker on my doorstep, Nie Huaisang?
"You listened to what I want," he deflects. "Xiandu, I wouldn't cheat you of your turn."
There's a shift to the pressure in his mind. It spreads, engulfs new clusters of sensation, draws sticky connections between pain and nerve. A headache made out of oil. Let me further in.
What can he do directly that Huaisang would not ultimately agree to pass as an intermediary between the command and the body? Isn't it better to trust Wen Ruohan less like the way he'd trusted Jin Guangyao, expecting kindness or restraint, and more like the way he trusts, without false hope, in the inevitability of qi deviation? At least he can tell himself, after, that he did not choose every individual act at the moment he performed it.
He lies on his back. He errs in glancing down the length of the bed, and will not be able to lie to himself that his cock hasn't been half-hard since Wen Ruohan said Undress. He closes his eyes, and waits to feel what he's supposed to be worth.
The pressure relents: a knife stops pressing upon the rind when it has sliced through. Wen Ruohan smiles with his mouth. He lifts the saber to turn it this way and that, testing the give of his wrist, before the cool metal of the unsheathed blade lands on his chest.
Huaisang's hand clenches against anyone's bidding, narrowly missing paring off a nipple; he just can't help it. I haven't had a chance to be this close to someone in a long time, Wen Ruohan comments, as though the prospect of his current bodily tether bleeding out under his current bodily cage amuses him. It's a good reminder of whom Huaisang has committed himself to: to clutch the saber to himself, as his brother had held him, would be asking for a wound it would be wildly difficult to explain.
You know how to lie still. You were so good at that just now.
Wen Ruohan thrusts three fingers into his mouth, and when Huaisang doesn't react, with sleek menace toward his throat. Huaisang hastily slides his tongue up and around the pads of those fingers, before he has to discover what will happen if he gags.
Hook and withdraw. His teeth scrape over the thin skin of his knuckles. Warmth washes behind his eyelids, down his face and down his cock. The wet fingers skim at intervals, unpredictable, unbearably light, over the prickly hairs of his legs. When they nudge his thighs open, Huaisang supposes Wen Ruohan has no idea how recently he's been fucked and would rather not make his own body too miserable dry.
But he just curls his fingers around the delicate shape of Huaisang's balls. Is he measuring them, Huaisang thinks in incredulity, is this what will be found deficient about Nie Huaisang, before Wen Ruohan abandons this project to dip his fingers back between his lips, as if re-drafting from the well. Gradually every plain and cranny of Huaisang's skin is touched and he understands: for Wen Ruohan this is a consecration, however grotesque. Huaisang is panting, shallowly, lest the saber clatter down his ribs. Wen Ruohan doesn't have to reopen his mouth. He keeps using it, anyway, to say things like Look at you, and Shall I get on with it?
Yes. His fingers are prunes, by spit and sweat. And the sense of heat, of being dragged down by his own weight, has been swelling queasily within Huaisang, like the rainclouds he's seen besiege the low Qinghe canyons before they burst.
His hand scrambles across the bed. The robes it finds are wrapped around the saber blade—fine Lanling weaves, Lan-reinforced, they may not even shred off. The jar of sword oil is poured messily over the hilt. He's buckled at the knees, one hand supporting the blade while the other aims the hilt, where—ah. Huaisang is widely known as a disgrace, more narrowly as a degenerate. He can plead wide-eyed for a man, or even a woman, to sheathe themselves inside him. But he's never tried snake venom just for its bite. He truly never thought about being fucked open by a real weapon, before Wen Ruohan said: How else can I be inside you?
So. Wen Ruohan sinks inside of him.
Huaisang occasionally does unpleasant things. These build, he's been told, core and character. He should hurt, and he does; a piece of his golden core is being shaved away, after all, as the hilt slides in. But he's also lifted his hips, though he hasn't a hand to touch himself with, and even without that comfort his cock is stiff and pearling at the tip. Warm evidence of his pleasure smears wetly onto his legs. His whole body throbs, synecdoche or sympathy, as he pulls the hilt out, tucks it almost gently back into his hole, then shoves it nearly to the guard, and he has let out—he can't describe it. A noise. That, with no other body to smother it, rings and rings and distorts within his skull, as his body shakes and goes taut for Wen Ruohan.
There's a soft flicker of pressure at Huaisang's lip. Huaisang's qi, already drawn from its new reservoir. He allows the point to tip him over, thinking of anything but the raw shock of victory upon his own face, and then of nothing at all.
Afterwards Huaisang doesn't force his eyes open. He knows what he'll see. The shivery glimmer where something has moved and passed on, like a lynx in the dark, leaving nothing behind but the unrooted unease.
Look at you, Wen Ruohan says. I could not have made you better for me than this. All that fire, but just look at how you let go.
Huaisang has never considered himself an addict of control. He's not Jin Guangyao, for example, or Wen Ruohan, except when he was focused on the flexing tendons of his wrist and he was. He enjoys being fucked, and he doesn't bother to hide it, in the privacy of his own rooms. But it turns out there is still some levee low enough that the river of shame can breach him and flush him clean, and back into his own head.
He has lain down for his father's murderer, his brother's would-have-been murderer, the to-be murderer of what was once his best friend. Why not, why not. Even for peasants and beggars, there's no way to entwine so with someone, so deeply inside them, without taking some of them back into you. They are cultivators, and the literal materials of Wen Ruohan's resurrection are Huaisang's discards that Huaisang chooses. The sweetness once in him, the thoughtless kindness. May they become the final leash against Wen Ruohan's impulses, and an invisible one.
He is Nie Huaisang; he is willing to be used; but eventually he must give as good as he gets.