#up next (probably) we'll see how the fuck nhs persuaded nmj into agreeing to this plan!

[gravitywonagain]

Can't Cheat Death While You're Digging Your Own Grave

So forever ago, @shiranai-atsune gifted me with this lovely, long list of prompts and I have been very slowly writing a few of them as warmups for a while now. This one is not yet done (none of them are done), but she's been patient enough. So here's the first draft of the first part of a response to:

-What if Nie Huaisang and Wei Wuxian were closer? Sworn brothers, even? What if NHS visited WWX in Yiling?

[T (for now?), implied Wangxian, 2k, 1/?] [part 2][part 3]

~

Wen Qing:

This is not how this was supposed to go. This is not how any of this was supposed to go.

The time they had, her and her family, was borrowed — stolen for them by a man with too little left for himself. It was always going to end in death. Theirs, his.

Theirs was a symbiotic relationship. He afforded them much needed protection and without him they would not survive. They afforded him much needed sanity and without them he would lose himself to the ghosts that constantly ate away at everything he had left. But this precarious balance had a time limit.

Wen Qing knew better than anybody that Wei Wuxian’s life was fading. She watched him surreptitiously sneak the majority of his meager rations into A’Yuan’s bowl -- just like they all did, but Wei Wuxian did not have the calories to spare. She scolded him for pouring too much of his energy into tilling the fields, spreading himself as thin as their crop and exhausting himself holding the seething resentment of the Burial Mounds at bay.

He was dying and he wasn’t doing it slowly.

With a golden core, perhaps he would be fine. She wasn’t overly confident in that assessment because the balance of yin and yang qi within a human body was delicate, but she’d seen it work with Wen Ruohan -- for a while, anyway.

But, like this, coreless and sleepless and hungry, he would die within the year. And she was tired of watching it happen.

So now, as she helps Popo fold and pack the blankets they had woven and prepared for the oncoming winter, she feels nothing short of shock. As she watches Wei Wuxian carefully lower each of his new -- and volatile -- inventions into a crate, she finds herself considering what his new workshop may look like. And as a dozen cultivators in green and silver gently and considerately move through the rickety buildings of her wretched home, she feels hope.

She had not dared to allow herself anything like hope when the heir of Qinghe Nie had first arrived at the edge of their wards.

That he was alone was surprising, but not in a soothing way. Rather, in a way that made the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention as she flexed the qi in her meridians and extended her senses outward.

Wei Wuxian, a wide, nostalgic smile on his face, invited Nie Huaisang inside, just as he had invited Lan Wangji and Jiang Wanyin, before him.

This, too, did nothing to assuage her fears. She remembered the way Wei Wuxian’s palm had been sliced to the bone after the Jiang sect leader had almost destroyed her brother. She remembered the gut wound that still hadn’t quite healed. She remembered the heartsore sobs she was certainly never supposed to hear that echoed inside that stupidly named cave for a fortnight.

She wondered what new pain this “old friend” would cause.

Wen Ning was sent to retrieve whatever might pass for tea and Wen Qing settled herself next to Wei Wuxian like a second hand, like a general. Wei Wuxian accepted her presence as if it were normal and, after a brief moment of hesitation, Nie Huaisang did, too.

The sect heir spoke with a light voice. He and Wei Wuxian exchanged pleasantries as if nothing had changed. As if they were returning to the Cloud Recesses after a few years away.

It wasn’t until the vaguely leaf-flavored hot water had been consumed that the tone of the conversation changed. Strangely, when, exactly, it had happened, Wen Qing couldn’t say. She’d never been one for court gossip or sect politics, preferring to spend her time studying and cultivating even before she was stretched thin with fear and responsibility. So perhaps it wasn’t actually that strange that she’d missed the subtle transition from idle chatter to political discourse. But by the time she realized their topics had become less-than-frivolous, the tension was already building across the table.

“Lan Wangji,” Nie Huaisang said with a sly smile, “has argued for you to be allowed to attend your nephew’s 100th day celebration.”

Wei Wuxian’s empty tea cup clattered to the table. “He has not.”

“He has.”

“And?”

Wei Wuxian was doing the thing with his voice where he tries not to sound over eager. It never worked very well. The man wore his emotions like he wore that bright, red hair-ribbon of his. His face was glowing with curiosity and trepidation, both. Nothing quite like hope, but maybe desire.

“And Jin Guangshan has agreed that you should attend.”

The desire dashed into dejection.

“Fuck.”

Nie Huaisang sighed, whipping open his fan and idly waving it. A restless gesture, rather than a cooling one. “Indeed.”

Silence settled between them for a moment. Wei Wuxian’s brow furrowed in the way it did when he was considering a deceptively simple solution to a particularly complex problem. He cocked his head to one side and asked, with no small amount of anxiety slowing his words, “You don’t think Lan Zhan--”

But Nie Huaisang cut him off with a snap of his fan. “No,” he said with surprising weight and confidence for all that he has spent the entire conversation up until this moment prevaricating and professing his general ignorance.

Wei Wuxian, though, seemed comforted by this, taking him at his word and nodding.

It was strange, this interaction. Nie Huaisang, or at least Wen Qing’s impression of him during the lectures at the Cloud Recesses, was a flighty and distractible disciple. He was lazy in his classwork, even lazier in his martial arts. And, though he painted beautiful fans, he used them too often to avoid difficult conversations at all cost.

The man before her now, in this moment and this moment alone, looked like a competent advisor to the venerable Chifeng-zun.

“Lan Wangji is naïve and idealistic,” said Nie Huaisang and Wei Wuxian grinned at that.

“Aren’t we all, Nie-xiong.” He raised his eyebrows like it was a joke.

After all they’d all been through, Wen Qing supposed it only could be a joke, but it was still one she wasn’t exactly in on.

“Ah, it’s true,” Nie Huaisang agreed, opening his fan with a puerile smile and becoming, for all appearances, the featherbrained boy of their youth once more. “We are, we are.”

Wen Qing schooled her face into something like understanding as she tried to fit together the pieces of conversation that the two weren’t having. So far she’d gathered that the invitation was a trap, but she could have told them that from the beginning. There was something else hiding in the words that they weren't saying, but Wen Qing didn’t have enough of anything to figure out what it was. Which was frustrating.

It was no secret that Wei Wuxian was brilliant. Fourth-ranked in their generation or not, the man was infamous for his… unique solutions to difficult problems. She knew intimately how unique those solutions could be. But Wen Qing had never seen that ingenuity extend to politics. Or people in any kind of broader sense.

He had been, however, the head disciple of Yunmeng Jiang. A position that required both political acumen and a sense for leadership. Especially if he was awarded the position over the sect heir, regardless of cultivation skill.

It was an uncomfortable realization that she, just like everybody else in the cultivation world, had underestimated him. She thought she would have known better by now.

It was similarly uncomfortable to realize just how much she had underestimated the Nie sect heir, too. Because, even now, she had no idea how intelligent and observant he was. And she had the distinct impression that her ignorance -- both of Nie Huaisang’s cleverness and of the underlying thread of this conversation -- was by design.

Nie Huaisang flapped his fan back-and-forth and stared at it like nothing more interesting than that painted scene was happening around him. “He’s still writing your invitation as we speak.”

Wen Qing couldn’t help her brow from furrowing at that. “Then how are you here so fast, Nie-er-gongzi?” she asked, barely keeping her tone genial, even as frustration mounted in her chest.

“Oh, Qing-jie,” said Wei Wuxian with a grin that she knew boded mischief. “Did you know that just southwest of here there is a rather large and impressive freshwater lake?”

Wen Qing didn’t shake her head. She didn’t groan. She didn’t grab him by the shoulders and yell, “How is that relevant?!” She had greater composure than that. If she could stand at attention in front of Wen Ruohan while he openly threatened her brother, she could contain her reaction to a simple quirk of her eyebrow.

“It’s true!” said Nie Huaisang, snapping his fan closed and gesturing with it. “It’s on top of a plateau and in the winter there are hundreds of species of birds--”

She cuts him off. “So, you weren’t in the room when this decision was made, then.”

“Ah, no, Wen-guniang,” he said, ducking his head as if in apology. Then, allowing a glimpse of his cleverness to show in his eyes he asked, “But have I told you yet of my fondness for birds? Of many kinds?”

Spies, she understood. He had a network of spies that could reach even into the private halls of Lanling. She understood, too, that she was being given this information with trust. That it was only a hint of what the Nie heir was capable of and that Wei Wuxian’s trust in her was transitive.

She smiled. “I’m sure I don’t need the details, Nie-er-gongzi.”

“Good, good.” He smiled back, sharp but only for a flash before it was genial and light and then hidden behind his open fan once more. “I’d hate to bore you.”

Wen Qing’s heart hammered in her chest for a moment, a fear response she knew well how to mask. She wondered what exactly her body had interpreted as a threat.

“So, what are you saying, Huaisang?” Wei Wuxian asked, not bothering to hide his agitation, but also skillfully directing Nie Huaisang’s attention back to himself and giving Wen Qing the room she needed to breathe.

“I’m saying I’ll go with you,” Nie Huaisang said, simply. Like anything about that statement was simple.

“With me?” Wei Wuxian scoffed, incredulous. “You want to walk into Lanling and declare Qinghe Nie’s support of Yiling Laozu?”

But Nie Huaisang just nodded and said, “I do.”

“Huaisang!”

“And,” he continued, plowing through Wei Wuxian’s disbelief like oxen through rice fields, “I want to shelter the Wen Remnants in Qinghe.”

Wen Qing felt her eyes bulging out of their sockets, but Wei Wuxian just laughed and waved a hand dismissively.

“I want to marry Lan Zhan and bear him children,” he said in an uncharacteristically honest admission, flippant though it was. “Not all things are possible, Nie-xiong.”

Nie Huaisang looked nothing short of delighted at his friend’s candor but, undeterred, said, “Bearing his children may be outside even your scope, but offering you the protection of Qinghe Nie is not outside of mine.”

Wen Qing considered his words carefully. Considered all of the things she had learned about him as a person in this short conversation.

“At what cost?” she asked.

“What cost?” he responded, playing the fool as easily as breathing.

Even now, even knowing all that she did, she could almost believe it again.

Luckily, Wei Wuxian was not similarly affected.

“Huaisang,” he said, chastising his friend like he might a misbehaving shidi. “We both know that you wouldn’t even be hinting at something like this without your da-ge’s permission. No matter how much porn you smuggled into the Cloud Recesses, you don’t actually have a death wish. Nie Mingjue would allow you many things, but this?”

Ignoring the comment about porn -- another shared joke Wen Qing wasn’t privy to -- she agreed. She remembered the stories her clansmen and sect members had told about Chifeng-zun during the war. She remembered her cousin’s severed head displayed proudly at the gate of the Unclean Realm. “He hates Qishan Wen more than anybody.”

Nie Huaisang, to his credit, didn’t deny it. He hesitated for a moment but conceded with a nod and a tap of his closed fan, “He does. But!” The fan opens again, “But, he’s not entirely unreasonable.”

Wen Qing could feel Wei Wuxian rolling his eyes next to her, even if she couldn't see it.

“What’s the cost, Huaisang?” he asked, impatience hard-edged in his voice.

Nie Huaisang tapped his fan on the table a few more times. Another restless gesture, perhaps, as he collected his words into an order he thought might best be presented to his friend.

In hindsight, Wen Qing thinks it very strange that this was the moment Nie Huaisang found most uncertain. Most delicate. But then, maybe this pause, this careful consideration and apparent reluctance, was all an act, too.

In the end, whether it was calculated or not never really mattered.

Nie Huaisang fixed Wei Wuxian with soft eyes and a determined frown, leaned forward enough to brace an elbow on the table, and said,

“How much do you know about the Saber Path, Wei-xiong?”

[shiranai-atsune]

Thank you so much for writing this fanfic request! I'm looking forward to more! 💖

Can't Cheat Death While You're Digging Your Own Grave

So forever ago, @shiranai-atsune gifted me with this lovely, long list of prompts and I have been very slowly writing a few of them as warmups for a while now. This one is not yet done (none of them are done), but she's been patient enough. So here's the first draft of the first part of a response to:

-What if Nie Huaisang and Wei Wuxian were closer? Sworn brothers, even? What if NHS visited WWX in Yiling?

[T (for now?), implied Wangxian, 2k, 1/?]

~

Wen Qing:

This is not how this was supposed to go. This is not how any of this was supposed to go.

The time they had, her and her family, was borrowed — stolen for them by a man with too little left for himself. It was always going to end in death. Theirs, his.

Theirs was a symbiotic relationship. He afforded them much needed protection and without him they would not survive. They afforded him much needed sanity and without them he would lose himself to the ghosts that constantly ate away at everything he had left. But this precarious balance had a time limit.

Wen Qing knew better than anybody that Wei Wuxian’s life was fading. She watched him surreptitiously sneak the majority of his meager rations into A’Yuan’s bowl -- just like they all did, but Wei Wuxian did not have the calories to spare. She scolded him for pouring too much of his energy into tilling the fields, spreading himself as thin as their crop and exhausting himself holding the seething resentment of the Burial Mounds at bay.

He was dying and he wasn’t doing it slowly.

With a golden core, perhaps he would be fine. She wasn’t overly confident in that assessment because the balance of yin and yang qi within a human body was delicate, but she’d seen it work with Wen Ruohan -- for a while, anyway.

But, like this, coreless and sleepless and hungry, he would die within the year. And she was tired of watching it happen.

So now, as she helps Popo fold and pack the blankets they had woven and prepared for the oncoming winter, she feels nothing short of shock. As she watches Wei Wuxian carefully lower each of his new -- and volatile -- inventions into a crate, she finds herself considering what his new workshop may look like. And as a dozen cultivators in green and silver gently and considerately move through the rickety buildings of her wretched home, she feels hope.

She had not dared to allow herself anything like hope when the heir of Qinghe Nie had first arrived at the edge of their wards.

That he was alone was surprising, but not in a soothing way. Rather, in a way that made the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention as she flexed the qi in her meridians and extended her senses outward.

Wei Wuxian, a wide, nostalgic smile on his face, invited Nie Huaisang inside, just as he had invited Lan Wangji and Jiang Wanyin, before him.

This, too, did nothing to assuage her fears. She remembered the way Wei Wuxian’s palm had been sliced to the bone after the Jiang sect leader had almost destroyed her brother. She remembered the gut wound that still hadn’t quite healed. She remembered the heartsore sobs she was certainly never supposed to hear that echoed inside that stupidly named cave for a fortnight.

She wondered what new pain this “old friend” would cause.

Wen Ning was sent to retrieve whatever might pass for tea and Wen Qing settled herself next to Wei Wuxian like a second hand, like a general. Wei Wuxian accepted her presence as if it were normal and, after a brief moment of hesitation, Nie Huaisang did, too.

The sect heir spoke with a light voice. He and Wei Wuxian exchanged pleasantries as if nothing had changed. As if they were returning to the Cloud Recesses after a few years away.

It wasn’t until the vaguely leaf-flavored hot water had been consumed that the tone of the conversation changed. Strangely, when, exactly, it had happened, Wen Qing couldn’t say. She’d never been one for court gossip or sect politics, preferring to spend her time studying and cultivating even before she was stretched thin with fear and responsibility. So perhaps it wasn’t actually that strange that she’d missed the subtle transition from idle chatter to political discourse. But by the time she realized their topics had become less-than-frivolous, the tension was already building across the table.

“Lan Wangji,” Nie Huaisang said with a sly smile, “has argued for you to be allowed to attend your nephew’s 100th day celebration.”

Wei Wuxian’s empty tea cup clattered to the table. “He has not.”

“He has.”

“And?”

Wei Wuxian was doing the thing with his voice where he tries not to sound over eager. It never worked very well. The man wore his emotions like he wore that bright, red hair-ribbon of his. His face was glowing with curiosity and trepidation, both. Nothing quite like hope, but maybe desire.

“And Jin Guangshan has agreed that you should attend.”

The desire dashed into dejection.

“Fuck.”

Nie Huaisang sighed, whipping open his fan and idly waving it. A restless gesture, rather than a cooling one. “Indeed.”

Silence settled between them for a moment. Wei Wuxian’s brow furrowed in the way it did when he was considering a deceptively simple solution to a particularly complex problem. He cocked his head to one side and asked, with no small amount of anxiety slowing his words, “You don’t think Lan Zhan--”

But Nie Huaisang cut him off with a snap of his fan. “No,” he said with surprising weight and confidence for all that he has spent the entire conversation up until this moment prevaricating and professing his general ignorance.

Wei Wuxian, though, seemed comforted by this, taking him at his word and nodding.

It was strange, this interaction. Nie Huaisang, or at least Wen Qing’s impression of him during the lectures at the Cloud Recesses, was a flighty and distractible disciple. He was lazy in his classwork, even lazier in his martial arts. And, though he painted beautiful fans, he used them too often to avoid difficult conversations at all cost.

The man before her now, in this moment and this moment alone, looked like a competent advisor to the venerable Chifeng-zun.

“Lan Wangji is naïve and idealistic,” said Nie Huaisang and Wei Wuxian grinned at that.

“Aren’t we all, Nie-xiong.” He raised his eyebrows like it was a joke.

After all they’d all been through, Wen Qing supposed it only could be a joke, but it was still one she wasn’t exactly in on.

“Ah, it’s true,” Nie Huaisang agreed, opening his fan with a puerile smile and becoming, for all appearances, the featherbrained boy of their youth once more. “We are, we are.”

Wen Qing schooled her face into something like understanding as she tried to fit together the pieces of conversation that the two weren’t having. So far she’d gathered that the invitation was a trap, but she could have told them that from the beginning. There was something else hiding in the words that they weren't saying, but Wen Qing didn’t have enough of anything to figure out what it was. Which was frustrating.

It was no secret that Wei Wuxian was brilliant. Fourth-ranked in their generation or not, the man was infamous for his… unique solutions to difficult problems. She knew intimately how unique those solutions could be. But Wen Qing had never seen that ingenuity extend to politics. Or people in any kind of broader sense.

He had been, however, the head disciple of Yunmeng Jiang. A position that required both political acumen and a sense for leadership. Especially if he was awarded the position over the sect heir, regardless of cultivation skill.

It was an uncomfortable realization that she, just like everybody else in the cultivation world, had underestimated him. She thought she would have known better by now.

It was similarly uncomfortable to realize just how much she had underestimated the Nie sect heir, too. Because, even now, she had no idea how intelligent and observant he was. And she had the distinct impression that her ignorance -- both of Nie Huaisang’s cleverness and of the underlying thread of this conversation -- was by design.

Nie Huaisang flapped his fan back-and-forth and stared at it like nothing more interesting than that painted scene was happening around him. “He’s still writing your invitation as we speak.”

Wen Qing couldn’t help her brow from furrowing at that. “Then how are you here so fast, Nie-er-gongzi?” she asked, barely keeping her tone genial, even as frustration mounted in her chest.

“Oh, Qing-jie,” said Wei Wuxian with a grin that she knew boded mischief. “Did you know that just southwest of here there is a rather large and impressive freshwater lake?”

Wen Qing didn’t shake her head. She didn’t groan. She didn’t grab him by the shoulders and yell, “How is that relevant?!” She had greater composure than that. If she could stand at attention in front of Wen Ruohan while he openly threatened her brother, she could contain her reaction to a simple quirk of her eyebrow.

“It’s true!” said Nie Huaisang, snapping his fan closed and gesturing with it. “It’s on top of a plateau and in the winter there are hundreds of species of birds--”

She cuts him off. “So, you weren’t in the room when this decision was made, then.”

“Ah, no, Wen-guniang,” he said, ducking his head as if in apology. Then, allowing a glimpse of his cleverness to show in his eyes he asked, “But have I told you yet of my fondness for birds? Of many kinds?”

Spies, she understood. He had a network of spies that could reach even into the private halls of Lanling. She understood, too, that she was being given this information with trust. That it was only a hint of what the Nie heir was capable of and that Wei Wuxian’s trust in her was transitive.

She smiled. “I’m sure I don’t need the details, Nie-er-gongzi.”

“Good, good.” He smiled back, sharp but only for a flash before it was genial and light and then hidden behind his open fan once more. “I’d hate to bore you.”

Wen Qing’s heart hammered in her chest for a moment, a fear response she knew well how to mask. She wondered what exactly her body had interpreted as a threat.

“So, what are you saying, Huaisang?” Wei Wuxian asked, not bothering to hide his agitation, but also skillfully directing Nie Huaisang’s attention back to himself and giving Wen Qing the room she needed to breathe.

“I’m saying I’ll go with you,” Nie Huaisang said, simply. Like anything about that statement was simple.

“With me?” Wei Wuxian scoffed, incredulous. “You want to walk into Lanling and declare Qinghe Nie’s support of Yiling Laozu?”

But Nie Huaisang just nodded and said, “I do.”

“Huaisang!”

“And,” he continued, plowing through Wei Wuxian’s disbelief like oxen through rice fields, “I want to shelter the Wen Remnants in Qinghe.”

Wen Qing felt her eyes bulging out of their sockets, but Wei Wuxian just laughed and waved a hand dismissively.

“I want to marry Lan Zhan and bear him children,” he said in an uncharacteristically honest admission, flippant though it was. “Not all things are possible, Nie-xiong.”

Nie Huaisang looked nothing short of delighted at his friend’s candor but, undeterred, said, “Bearing his children may be outside even your scope, but offering you the protection of Qinghe Nie is not outside of mine.”

Wen Qing considered his words carefully. Considered all of the things she had learned about him as a person in this short conversation.

“At what cost?” she asked.

“What cost?” he responded, playing the fool as easily as breathing.

Even now, even knowing all that she did, she could almost believe it again.

Luckily, Wei Wuxian was not similarly affected.

“Huaisang,” he said, chastising his friend like he might a misbehaving shidi. “We both know that you wouldn’t even be hinting at something like this without your da-ge’s permission. No matter how much porn you smuggled into the Cloud Recesses, you don’t actually have a death wish. Nie Mingjue would allow you many things, but this?”

Ignoring the comment about porn -- another shared joke Wen Qing wasn’t privy to -- she agreed. She remembered the stories her clansmen and sect members had told about Chifeng-zun during the war. She remembered her cousin’s severed head displayed proudly at the gate of the Unclean Realm. “He hates Qishan Wen more than anybody.”

Nie Huaisang, to his credit, didn’t deny it. He hesitated for a moment but conceded with a nod and a tap of his closed fan, “He does. But!” The fan opens again, “But, he’s not entirely unreasonable.”

Wen Qing could feel Wei Wuxian rolling his eyes next to her, even if she couldn't see it.

“What’s the cost, Huaisang?” he asked, impatience hard-edged in his voice.

Nie Huaisang tapped his fan on the table a few more times. Another restless gesture, perhaps, as he collected his words into an order he thought might best be presented to his friend.

In hindsight, Wen Qing thinks it very strange that this was the moment Nie Huaisang found most uncertain. Most delicate. But then, maybe this pause, this careful consideration and apparent reluctance, was all an act, too.

In the end, whether it was calculated or not never really mattered.

Nie Huaisang fixed Wei Wuxian with soft eyes and a determined frown, leaned forward enough to brace an elbow on the table, and said,

“How much do you know about the Saber Path, Wei-xiong?”