Chapter Text
Nie Mingjue's mother died one winter night when he was eight.
It had been quick and sudden. One moment he had a-niang's hands enveloping his, and the next moment her blood was spattered on his cheeks, bleeding out into the cold snow.
Later, he learned of his family's legacy, and how a-niang's death was not quick nor sudden at all. The moment any Nie first lift their saber, they are setting out in a path towards death, and the contained explosion of mother's qi was something to be expected at her age, after how difficult Mingjue's birth had allegedly been.
And yet, his mother's death had never stopped feeling like a shock to Nie Mingjue, because he never knew that she were to die. Unlike the death of his uncle, and then his father and Huaisang's mother afterwards, Nie Mingjue has always wondered what he could have done differently had he knew. If he would have held her hand tighter, had not taken her to see him practice in the courtyard, if he'd have told her he loved her more. In the straight, broad road that he has made of his life, it had been the only branching path - always on the corner of his eyes as he marches forward to the already familiar embraces of death.
This is why he had dragged Huaisang to their family tombs after the war, had forced the secrets of their clan on his didi's narrow shoulders so he knew what was coming, knew that Nie Mingjue would not be there forever to keep him safe.
This is why he is atop Baxia, braving the cold Gusu wind as he flies under the cover of night. Because Xichen would not know. In a few moons' time, Xichen would receive a dispassionate letter with the Qinghe seal telling him of Nie Mingjue's passing. Or worse still, be by his side as the qi coursing in his veins finally erupts a final time. Xichen, who had trudged a path to a wooden house every moon until suddenly the doors of the house opened no more.
Xichen must know, that Nie Mingjue only has until summer to live.
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Nie Mingjue has no penchant for drama, for the artful irony of things that Huaisang and both his sworn brothers seem to relish from songs and writings of long-dead poets. But he knows enough to find it an amusing irony that his wish to spare Xichen the suddenness of his death had instead spared him from dying as a man betrayed.
It's past hai shi when he lands silently behind the Hanshi, to the soft glow of candles through its familiar paper windows. It's not strange for Xichen to be awake at this hour, with the sect still rebuilding and healing around him and so many things eventually ending up on the desk of a Sect Leader. He would know that.
What is strange is the mingled voices coming from inside - High-pitched and breathless and familiar, too familiar in its combination.
And it is a strange thing, too, rage. Nie Mingjue has lived his whole life with rage, etched deep into his veins and the runes of his saber, fueling his cultivation and sloshing over the edges of his being like wine in an overfull cup. And yet, standing there in the snow as his beloved and his youngest sworn brother takes pleasure in each other's bodies, Nie Mingjue feels his rage to be a muted, distant thing.
Perhaps it is the already helplessly tangled lines of his meridians, so attuned to the ebb and flow of his rage that it has simply become a part of him, so close now to his end. Perhaps it's the base, animal part of him that has always known, from the way Meng Yao's smiles soften only for Xichen and Xichen's hands constantly reach to shelter the younger.
Nie Mingjue stands in the cold snow until the ragged breaths and honeyed words lapse into whispers and the lights inside the Hanshi dims, leaving him in darkness.
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Nie Mingjue doesn't remember climbing into Baxia, doesn't remember landing just outside a town somewhere between Gusu and Lanling and stumbling into the deserted streets.
He remembers enough that tomorrow he is expected to be in Jinlintai, for the new Jin heir's one-month ceremony. The plan had been to tell Xichen and comfort him, and perhaps for them to depart to Lanling together in the morning. He had promised himself to spend more time with Xichen, now that he knew, had wanted a night he could gather the younger in his arms and do his hair in the morning. Be the one to tie his forehead ribbon, leaving a kiss right beneath the silk.
Nie Mingjue thinks that no plan of his has ever gone as he hoped, ever since that day in the cold snow, the day that a-niang died. Not with the war, not with Meng Yao, not with Huaisang, not with Zonghui.
To think that Xichen -
"It's alright, er-ge, I know you don't want to worry da-ge, but er-ge deserves this too," Meng Yao whispers amidst the sound of shifting sheets, loud and roaring in his ears in the tranquil silence of the Cloud Recesses.
"Er-ge is important too. Er-ge should be cherished like this."
Nie Mingjue barges into an inn, throws a handful of silvers to the stuttering innkeeper for a room and his silence. He strips himself of heavy robes, stiff silk and leather and metal scattered on the floor as he strips his mind of when he had gone wrong. Had he not cared for Xichen enough? Had he failed to soothe and cherish Xichen with words he doesn't have? Had he failed to be enough, somewhere between his own struggle with his own beasts and Xichen's struggle of what is expected of him?
He thinks of Xichen, who reads the cold planes of Wangji's face like an open book and had read Mingjue's own rocky facade and understood everything he kept safe there. He thinks of Xichen, who hides things alike behind his smiles, things he thought he could read just as well.
More and more, Nie Mingjue knows that it does not matter what he thinks. Probably has never mattered, when it's another's heart and fate that is on the line. Just as with his qi and the beast running rampant through his veins, it has never been something under his control.
"A-Yao is important too," Xichen had sounded breathless, almost urgent in his devotion, in his desire to enfold and protect. Even behind the thick white of Gusu Lan's walls, Nie Mingjue knows the intensity of his gaze as he says that, "Whatever others might say. Whatever da-ge might say."
Nie Mingjue curls in the middle of an empty bed, as he had when he was eight years old and alone, a-niang's blood in his cheeks. And the snow falls and falls outside the window.
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In the battlefield, you know when you're facing someone who's taken a life before. It leaves a mark on your eyes, on the set of your mouth and the swing of your blade - The more you fight, the more you kill, the marks etches itself deeper. Hovering above the mayhem that is Qiongqi path on Baxia, Nie Mingjue thinks that perhaps betrayal too, leaves a similar mark.
There is betrayal painted across Wei Wuxian's face as he stands back to back with his Ghost General, surrounded in all sides by a veritable army of gold. Nie Mingjue remembers Xichen's stories of Wangji's deep friendship with Wei Wuxian and how he had pleaded to be the one to bring the invitation of Jin Rulan's one-month ceremony to Wei Wuxian.
Wei Wuxian's face is of a man betrayed, of having the ground disappear beneath him as the last blade of grass he'd been holding on to turned out to be a snake instead. Wei Wuxian accepted an invitation from his Zhiji and went to see his baby nephew, only to walk into an ambush of three hundred cultivators.
For a moment, Nie Mingjue is torn between flying down to intervene and racing to Jinlintai to inform Jiang Wanyin of the ambush - Even if Jin Zixuan seems to be trying to talk down both parties. But the decision is taken from him when an arrow loosens from the sea of gold and the shrill, haunting wail of a flute pierces the dry air.
As he swoops down and snatches up both Wei Wuxian and the dazed Jin Zixuan into Baxia with him, the sound of a ghostly flute still echoing all around them, Nie Mingjue realizes that chenqing is still firmly tucked into Wei Wuxian's belt.
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He lands in a copse of trees, far enough from Lanling territory that they don't risk any chasing Jin cultivators. He lands heavily, the toll of carrying three people on a sword meant for one catching up much too quickly for his own liking.
Both men had been silent along the ride, but now that he's on solid ground, Wei Wuxian wrenches himself from Nie Mingjue's grasp and whirls to face a still shell-shocked Jin Zixuan. There is an arrow still protruding from Wei Wuxian's shoulder, a long gash across his cheek where another must have grazed him, and there is a world of difference between him and Jin Zixuan, who had hung back on the back lines of the Sunshot campaign as Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji had wreaked havoc on its fronts.
"Find shijie," Wei Wuxian rasps, eyes wild as he grabs the Jin heir's shoulders with bloody fingers "Find shijie and A-Ling and get them somewhere safe. You saw what I saw, Jinlintai is not safe right now."
"I will," to his credit, Jin Zixuan nods despite his still shaking shoulders, "I promise on my life, A-Li and our child will be safe. What Zixun did, I wasn't aware-"
"It doesn't matter," there is something derisive yet resigned in Wei Wuxian's voice, "They've been trying to get to me anyway, I really should have expected something like this. Now go. Shijie and A-Ling is the most important right now."
"Wei Wuxian," Nie Mingjue says slowly, after it's just the two of them among the trees, as both their breathing slow down. The boy might be a demonic cultivator harboring an army of Wens, but he had been Huaisang's friend, had been a comrade in battle. And at the end of the day, he is yet just a young man, barely older than A-Sang, and to hear him so plainly state that he'd expected to be betrayed so easily jostles something hard and bitter inside Mingjue's chest.
"What are you planning to do now?"
"I'll have to find Wen Ning somehow, then go back to Yiling. Without the both of us, the Wens are without protection."
"What protection do they need, when they're significant in numbers?"
"Chifeng Zun," Wei Wuxian chuckles, mirthless and cold, "There are barely fifty people in that mountain, and most of them are elderlies. Fuck, didn't Lan Zhan or Jiang Cheng tell any of you this? There is a child-"
"Jin Guangyao said-"
"Look, fuck what-"
It's merely years of trained reflex that made Nie Mingjue catch Wei Wuxian in time as the younger man simply collapses, like a puppet cut of its strings.
"Wei Wuxian!" He frowns, taking in the boy's sickly pallor and labored breath, the clammy feel of his skin against his fingers as he checks the flow of his meridians. It's strange that a single arrow would be able to take down such a strong cultivator as Wei Wuxian.
Nie Mingjue channels a flow of spiritual energy into Wei Wuxian's wrist before he feels it dissipate, feels his frown deepens as he moves to his temples with the same effect. There is a mounting sense of dread in his veins as he remembers the sword he never sees on Wei Wuxian's person anymore, as he places a shaky hand on the boy's lower dantian and barely manages not to recoil in horror at what he finds.
Wei Wuxian is empty.
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