#xue yang is gonna get it

[wifiwuxians]

cuddly(i) city..... a spiritual sequel of sorts to (song) lan arm strength

songxiao bonus

[ID: a two panel exchange featuring the cast of yi city. in the first panel, song lan is lifting xue yang under his arms, while he flops forward looking rather pleased with himself. his dialog reads "He just holds me a few inches off the ground sometimes. Maybe it's how he stims." song lan bitterly replies "It's so he won't run off and kill someone." in the second panel, xiao xingchen is smiling with his eyes closed while giving a-qing a piggyback ride. his dialog reads "I didn't do it often, but sometimes I'd give my junior disciples piggy back rides, so it's a bit nostalgic..." a-qing, triumphant, clings to his back and sticks her tongue out, proclaiming "I deserve it!" offscreen, song lan laments "It must be so nice to be normal". in a bonus image, a blushy song lan is lifting xiao xingchen (still carrying a-qing), who laughs, as xue yang walks off, presumably to go kill someone. /end ID]

[mistbornthief]

xue yang looking at the candy and smiling as he died broke something deep within me i haven’t been right since

[yllz-apologist]

Me, every time I reread the yi city arc: I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate mdzs I hate-

[lgbtlunaverse]

I think apologism is fun and sexy but sometimes you see people defend a character in a way that is not just wrong but antithetical to the character's actual motivations and moral framework like girl. Not even the guy you're defending thinks you're right. You are getting fired as his defense lawyer and sued for misrepresentation.

[lambify]

𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫: @youthslost 's wen qing from xue yang

He sits on the carved seating within the confines of the Burial Mounds, where Wen Qing has finally convinced him that playing Doctor wasn't a pointless endeavour. That nurture still had a place in the world of a broken child, orphaned and abandoned, left to fend for himself from the start. He hadn't completely relaxed under her observation yet, only continuing to ramble once she moves to collect her tools.

His lips remain sealed about the origin of his broken finger, and he wonders if she will press him on it, or just continue running in circles around his exclamations of arrogance where becoming Wei Wuxian's ( unofficial ) student were concerned: "I don't understand why he wants to keep everyone away, put me in his shoes and I would be letting them all come. They wouldn't last an hour against the Yiling Laozu." He's getting giddy now, lips curled back in a signature cheshire grin, wild eyes wide.

But he softens as she approaches again, steadying his expression. "Wen-guniang, you called me here with the promise of something sweet; I think you should pay up before we start." He lifts a glove clad hand to gesture at the older woman, impatient in much the way a child would have been. "Will this take long? . . . I'm very busy."

[eleanorfenyxwrites]

Soldier, Poet, King

Part 11

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

[AO3] [Masterpost]

Heavily implied SongXueXiao in this one, but it can be read as either romantic or platonic I think - they’re all living together (plus A-Qing of course), but I don’t delve at all really into their dynamic or how it happened since it’s not important to the narrative I’m telling. (SongXiao are married and Xue Yang is just kinda There and Super Healthy™ about it lol)

-/-

Lan Xichen – like most people, he would assume – is perfectly capable of recognizing Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen on sight. That doesn’t change the fact that for the long, breathless moment in which it’s silent enough in the lab to hear a pin drop, he has absolutely no idea what he’s looking at.

The last anyone had heard of the two genuinely legendary Mach 1 pilots, they’d disappeared into retirement following their hardest-won Kaiju battle, and though Shanghai’s press statements had already long dried up into the barest bones of information, this had been shocking enough that the truth had slipped through the shatterdome’s tight security.

They’d been injured – badly so, to the point of being nearly unrecognizable (according to sources that claimed to be inside the ‘dome). It had taken months more for further information to leak, and when it had Lan Xichen had selfishly wished that it hadn’t. Acid, right to both of their faces, people around the world had whispered, hushed and fascinated. Xiao Xingchen’s eyes, Song Lan’s tongue – gone! Just like that!

A rumor like that, no matter how much or how little truth it contained, was naturally bound to lead to…assumptions. Mental images that were painful to imagine, but that were nonetheless inescapable, especially for a fellow pilot – someone who lived with the reality of something similar happening at any moment in the course of their work.

And yet here, now, years after their retreat from the world, stand Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan both smiling gently at Nie Mingjue and (mostly) appearing whole and healthy.

“You-” Nie Mingjue starts and attempts to stand before the nodes attached to his temples prevent him from doing so. He makes an irritated noise in the back of his throat and makes as if to rip them off, which thankfully galvanizes Nie Huaisang and Mo Xuanyu, at least, into scrambling forward to get them unhooked from their contraption. Wei Wuxian is still frozen staring at their guests from behind the computer bank, but Lan Xichen thinks that’s more than fair considering he knows precisely how much this means to him.

“Us,” Xiao Xingchen replies, still smiling. Lan Xichen gets slowly to his feet as well while the man steps around the desk to allow Nie Mingjue to pull him in for a hug that looks nearly violent, but Xiao Xingchen doesn’t complain. Lan Xichen glances at Song Lan to see him studying Jin Guangyao through slightly narrowed eyes, and without thought Lan Xichen steps in front of his partner to block him partially from view. The last these two had seen of Jin Guangyao, after all, had been his expulsion from Bujing Shi and Nie Mingjue’s subsequent depression after he was gone. He can’t imagine they’re thrilled to see him here now as one of Nie Mingjue’s co-pilots.

“It’s alright, Zewu-Jun.” It takes Lan Xichen a long moment to realize that the deep, smooth, vaguely mechanical voice is, in fact, Song Lan’s, though naturally his lips don’t move along with it. “We do not hold needless grudges.”

Jin Guangyao rests a careful hand on the crook of his elbow, but it still takes a reassuring nod from Song Lan before Lan Xichen steps aside again so that Jin Guangyao can offer the man a bow.

“I feel that my intention to offer further apologies for arriving unannounced is no longer necessary,” Xiao Xingchen says with a hint of a strain for being squeezed so tightly. Nie Mingjue’s suspiciously wet laughter breaks some of the awed tension in the room.

“You know you’re always welcome here, anytime,” Nie Mingjue huffs as he withdraws and slaps Xiao Xingchen’s shoulder hard enough that Lan Xichen is sure he sees the man put genuine effort into not stumbling under the impact. “I never expected to see either of you again. But it seems like things went well in the States? Fixed up your faces and everything, ah?”

Lan Xichen is at once relieved and dismayed by his partner’s shocking lack of tact. Mostly relieved – now that he’s over his shock he’s desperate to know how they’ve recovered from such horrific injuries (that he now knows from Nie Mingjue’s memories that they definitely sustained, and that in fact the gossip had actually downplayed their severity).

“Mm they did, eventually. It was difficult to track down what we needed, but we managed. One of Zichen’s eyes for each of us even though I told Zichen I was fine without it. So yes, eyes for each of us, reconstruction surgery and skin grafts to repair more superficial damage to our necks and faces, and Zichen’s throat. Cybernetic replacements for our non-functional eyes to compensate for the loss. And for a special treat, a thought-to-speech implant for Zichen – one of a kind, from Auntie Baoshan herself.”

Wei Wuxian makes a hastily-muffled noise like a dying cat and Lan Xichen has to duck his head to hide his amusement at his friend’s predicament. For as much as Mo Xuanyu is not subtle at all in his hero worship of Wei Wuxian, Lan Xichen knows that Wei Wuxian himself would be hard-pressed to hide his own worship of the Immortal pair even before they’d mentioned Baoshan Sanren (and her work with cybernetics that sound like a mad inventor’s dream).

“Good.” Nie Mingjue’s gruff pronouncement is laced with too many emotions for Lan Xichen to parse through, but he’s sure they’ll have a discussion about it later so he doesn’t mind. “Do you have quarters picked out yet?”

“Not here,” Song Lan says, turning his unreadable look – made more so by the nigh-on unnatural stillness of his face – on Nie Mingjue again. “We do not wish to be any trouble.”

“We already have a place in town, if you don’t mind sparing us in the evenings,” Xiao Xingchen adds smoothly, his smile apologetic even as his tone brooks no argument. “But we will stay and discuss whatever you’d like until curfew, we traveled at a comfortable pace and we are well-rested.”

“I need to go over the experiment we just finished with the research team,” Nie Mingjue says with a gesture towards their ‘peanut gallery’, as Jin Guangyao had called them, who are once again all behind the row of monitors watching this all play out in front of them with wide eyes. “You remember my brother Huaisang?”

“We do,” Xiao Xingchen smiles. Nie Huaisang flutters his fan in a weak little wave.

“The other two are Mo Xuanyu, the youngest Kaiju genius in the world -” Mo Xuanyu flushes crimson at the praise and offers a shaky bow - “And Wei Wuxian, one of the three Heroes of Yunmeng, and Lan Wangji’s new co-pilot in Immortal Mountain.”

“Of course, your career is very impressive, Wei-gongzi. We look forward to meeting with you properly in a little while,” Xiao Xingchen says with a nod for Wei Wuxian, who looks ready to pass out any moment. “Please don’t let us keep you from your duties, we merely wanted to say hello as soon as possible, lest word of our arrival precede us. We were hoping to go see Immortal Mountain next..?”

“I can take you,” Lan Xichen offers before he can think twice about it. “I believe Wangji is observing her maintenance crew this morning, as well, if you’d like to meet him.”

Lan Xichen isn’t quite prepared for the twin bows the two offer him, genteel and graceful.

“Thank you, Zewu-Jun, we’ll follow your lead then.”

Lan Xichen isn’t often at a loss for words. For all that he was raised in relative isolation compared to the vast majority of people, it had been instilled in him since he was a young boy that he should know how to comport himself at all times. And then, following his and Lan Wangji’s descent from their mountain home into training centers and shatterdomes at the start of the war, he’d learned quickly, naturally, how to make up for his brother’s lack of speech that most people found disconcerting at best, if not downright rude.

It’s an extremely unpleasant moment, then, when he realizes that he’s alone with two of his teenage heroes, and he has absolutely no clue what to say to them. Were it not for the fact that he knows Lan Wangji genuinely doesn’t care one bit if the people around him are uncomfortable, he would wonder how his brother can stand it.

“I hope you aren’t upset to see new pilots in Immortal Mountain,” he finally manages when they come to a junction, the perpendicular corridors bustling with enough people that the noise soothes some of the awkward tension – enough for Lan Xichen to find his metaphorical footing again, anyway. People naturally stop to gawk at them as they pass through the jostling and clanging space, but neither Song Lan nor Xiao Xingchen seem to take too much notice of it.

“Not at all,” Xiao Xingchen soothes, lips tipped up at the corners again right on cue. “Surprised, I suppose, that anyone would still wish to pilot a Mach 1 even when poorer shatterdomes than Shanghai can boast much newer tech, but not at all upset.”

“My brother and Wei Wuxian are both enamored with Immortal Mountain for a variety of reasons. Wangji is quite fond of tradition and is pleased to be able to honor the first generation of pilots in this way; Wei Wuxian is an engineering genius who would probably like to take Immortal Mountain apart down to her every last nut and bolt to figure out how she works were he not asked to pilot her instead.”

“Good hands for her, then,” Song Lan says simply, and that’s that. Lan Xichen leads them along another corridor, the walls now cluttered with more and more pipes and steam vents as they approach the Jaeger bays. He’s certain that the others know this shatterdome even better than he does and need no direction through their old stomping grounds, but they allow him to lead them the rest of the way down to the echoing caverns of Bays 1 and 2 without complaint.

Unlike the day they’d arrived from Tokyo, Bay 1, home to Immortal Mountain, is now as brightly lit as Bay 2 next to it. Also unlike that first day, repairs have ceased on Sparks Amidst Snow, the Jaeger silent and gleaming perfect, ready to be sent out on the next Kaiju run. All the cacophony of a working bay is coming from Immortal Mountain, maintenance crew members everywhere he can see swarming like ants as they work on bringing the Jaeger back into working order as quickly as Jin Guangshan has demanded to save face. Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian have already taken her out for the exhibition run, of course, but a quick step out into town for a wave and publicity shots does not at all translate to the old Mach 1 behemoth being ready to get dropped into the ocean and pitted against stronger and faster Kaiju than she had been designed to fight.

Lan Xichen steps away from his companions with the excuse of looking for Lan Wangji to give them a moment of privacy as they’re faced with their Jaeger after years away from it. He spots his brother a few levels up from where they’ve entered on the ground floor, little more than a speck of white at this distance where he’s standing on one of the catwalks near Immortal Mountain’s thighs covered in massive hydraulic pistons and backup weapons the size of typical suburban houses. He snags the closest grease-smudged crew member he recognizes from Tokyo and requests that they please use their comms to get someone to tell Lan Wangji to come down and find him, and only then does he return to Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen.

“Wangji will join us shortly,” he reports, and…runs out of words. Again. He must have a fever or something.

“Zewu-Jun,” Song Lan interrupts his moment of dismay, lips quirked up ever so slightly into a smirk, the most obvious facial expression he’s made yet. “You seem to have something on your mind.”

Lan Xichen smiles politely around the shape of the invasive and utterly inappropriate question that immediately springs to the tip of his tongue.

Xiao Xingchen’s gaze is shrewd over his ever-smiling lips as he says, “You would hardly be the first person to ask what happened to us, Zewu-Jun, if that’s what you’re curious about.”

Despite the flush in his ears, Lan Xichen offers them a bow that’s more than half-apology, his smile twisting towards rueful. “Ah..I have only just seen your injury for the first time in Mingjue’s memories today. I hope you will forgive me, but seeing you hale and hearty immediately after is…surprising. My apologies.”

Xiao Xingchen’s gaze softens. “No apologies necessary, Zewu-Jun. We were quite lucky to have found Auntie Baoshan when we did to help us, and the process of healing has been harder than it may seem now when you’re seeing us as healed as we'll ever be.”

It is perhaps Xiao Xingchen’s gentle understanding and Song Lan’s calm, non-judgmental aura that loosens his tongue enough to blurt, “Do you really have one of Song-daozhang’s eyes?” It’s only his years spent in Lan Qiren’s comportment lessons that keep him from clapping his hand over his mouth like a child catching themselves in a lie.

“Xingchen is an ungrateful husband and wouldn’t accept both of them,” Song Lan says, so deadpan in the flat, mechanical way of early computer speech that Lan Xichen can’t help but be shocked into laughter. It’s probably for the best that his next questions (which ones are Song Lan’s eyes? Do the prosthetic eyes do anything interesting since they were designed by the genius Baoshan Sanren?) are cut off mercifully at the knees by Lan Wangji’s arrival. Lan Xichen feels his face light up in happy recognition the moment he spots his brother over his companions’ shoulders, and so he has the pleasure of watching Lan Wangji jerk to a stop in shock when the Immortal pair turn around in synch to see what he’s looking at for themselves.

“Ah. Hanguang-Jun,” Song Lan greets with a nod that Xiao Xingchen mirrors beside him. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Lan Wangji blinks three times in quick succession before he steps forward again to finish closing the distance between them, and Lan Xichen hides an indulgent smile behind his hand at his brother’s startled awe. He covers it well enough by dipping into a deeply respectful bow, though there’s no hiding how starstruck he is (at least not from Lan Xichen anyway) when Xiao Xingchen reaches out to pull him out of it again with a gentle hand under his forearm.

“It’s alright, we’re all equals here,” Xiao Xingchen is quick to soothe. “You’re a pilot for Immortal Mountain now too, after all, aren’t you?”

“Mn,” Lan Wangji recovers enough to respond, though his eyes are still a bit too wide. “With Wei Ying.”

“Yes, of course. We just met your Wei Wuxian downstairs, and naturally everyone’s heard of his incredible innovations – even those as removed from the news cycle as we are.”

Lan Xichen doesn’t bother hiding his fond smile when praising Wei Wuxian and his work turns out to be precisely the correct way to make Lan Wangji loosen up enough to push past his surprise, his lips and the corners of his eyes softening ever so slightly as he nods (though Lan Xichen is sure he’s the only one present who can see that as a sign of his brother relaxing).

“Wangji, I should go back down to research for the debrief. Would you mind escorting our guests for the day?”

“Mn. An honor,” Lan Wangji says, as cursed with the Lan Sincerity™ (as Wei Wuxian has coined it) as Lan Xichen himself is. “I was observing the repair of a patch of deteriorated armor,” he adds, his attention solely on Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan. “If you would prefer not to do so, we may do something else.”

Song Lan’s smooth, mechanical voice is a visible balm to Lan Wangji’s startled tension, his brother’s shoulders sliding down the inch or so they’d crept up towards his ears when the man says, “No, that sounds good. We’ve already seen one old friend here, it’s time to say hello to the other.”

“Mn.” Lan Wangji says nothing else before he turns on his heel to march back the way he’d come, slowly enough that Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan have enough time to offer Lan Xichen small twin smiles and quiet thanks before they take their leave. Lan Xichen watches them go until they disappear back in the direction of the lifts to the upper levels of the bay. Only once they’re out of sight does he give into the temptation to shake himself all over like a wet dog and pinch himself on the arm for good measure.

If anyone had told him when he’d still been in Tokyo that coming to Shanghai would mean meeting and befriending (and romancing) so many fascinating people – people that he’s looked up to for so many years – he never would have believed it. Still can’t entirely believe it, honestly, though his completed drift with Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao is strong evidence that he can’t possibly refute that all of this is really happening.

Teeth and brain thoroughly rattled (yet everything still exactly as it had been moments before), Lan Xichen turns his feet once again towards the corridors that’ll take him back to his partners, and has to put genuine effort into keeping himself from running pell mell down them just to see them sooner. 

 -/-

 “Close your mouth, Wei,” Nie Mingjue gruffs once Lan Xichen has left with Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen in tow. When Wei Wuxian stays frozen staring at the doorway, Nie Mingjue cuffs him (lightly) on the back of the head to get him in gear and the man startles out of his stunned stupor with a little yelp and an overly-theatrical rub at the back of his head that can’t possibly be smarting just from that.

“Holy shit,” he breathes and looks around as if to check that everyone else saw what he did. “Holy fucking shit!!”

“You have a job to do before you’re free to go ask for their autograph,” Nie Mingjue reminds him, though he’s relatively sure he can trust Wei Wuxian not to do something so shameless as that, even if they are his heroes. (He abruptly remembers his and Lan Wangji’s extremely shameless nightly endeavors and adjusts that ‘relatively sure’ to something more like ‘desperately hopes’.)

With a loud snap of his fingers in front of Wei Wuxian’s shining eyes he adds,“Talk to me about the Drift, Wei,” and that, finally, seems to get the man’s hyperactive mind back on the right track. Talking about his work usually does, even if little else is capable of doing so.

“Right! Drift. Uhhhh yep, yeah, here’s your readout, everything is honestly textbook perfect. We’ll probably get you to do it here in the simulator again a few more times under slightly different conditions each time just to make sure everything goes smoothly each time you Drift and make sure it can happen as quickly as it needs to now that you’ve established the connection, but yeah you guys are good. You won’t be able to Drift without the accommodations we made, that’s already well established, but with all three of you in there to distribute the neural load and with the dampers on each of your connections to make sure you don’t burn yourselves out like me, you can Drift just like anyone else out in the field, no problem.”

Nie Mingjue glares down at the long roll of paper covered in incomprehensible figures that Wei Wuxian had handed him and is eternally glad that the only men in the room who can likely tell he’s about to cry are his brother and Jin Guangyao, both of whom are too busy fussing over their precious Drift rig to notice.

He can Drift again. Properly. Without hurting either of his partners – men he would die for in a heartbeat, without an ounce of regret. He doesn’t have to hold Jin Guangyao back anymore. He can be who his partner wants. Who Jin Guangyao needs.

“I mean not that I’d recommend the three of you hopping in a Jaeger to join the rotation – ah..hah not that I’m doubting your judgment, Chifeng-zun! Do whatever you think best, of course. But obviously one of the biggest risks with three-man teams is losing all three pilots in a fight, which is just…numerically a bigger problem than losing two! But of course you already know that, ha..”

“Wei Wuxian, if you don’t get ahold of yourself in the next ten seconds I’m grounding you for the next two weeks,” Nie Mingjue growls to try to cover his own Moment, though Jin Guangyao looks up at him at that precise moment and it’s no use trying to hide how much he’s affected by all of this.

“Mingjue, be nice,” his partner chastises. “You’re just as rattled as he is to see the Immortals, and they’re not even your childhood crushes.”

“Crushes?!” Wei Wuxian yelps. “They’re not..I didn’t…Their work is just very inspiring, okay?! Everyone in Asia is fascinated by them!”

“It’s okay, Wei-laoshi,” Mo Xuanyu says sweetly, his own celebrity crush still apparently going strong even after spending weeks working in close quarters with all of Wei Wuxian’s chaos. If anything it’s probably gotten a bit worse. “I understand perfectly.”

“You still have posters of Wei-xiong wallpapering your bunk, of course you understand,” Nie Huaisang snorts and their stupid back and forth helps settle some of the things that have rattled loose in Nie Mingjue’s chest, at least for now. He’ll probably have to talk about it all with Jin Guangyao and Lan Xichen later, but for now he doesn’t have the luxury of giving into his emotions – nor would he want to, what with their current audience being what it is.

“Da-ge,” Jin Guangyao murmurs at his side as the other three bicker happily back and forth, none of them apparently embarrassed at all by their own behavior. He doesn’t say anything else; he doesn’t have to. Nie Mingjue slings his free arm around his slender waist (a rare show of PDA that he normally wouldn’t allow) then decides to just go for broke and ducks down to press a lingering kiss to the top of his head. Jin Guangyao leans into him easily and reaches over to take the readout from his other hand. Nie Mingjue relinquishes it easily of course – it’s Jin Guangyao who reads the same sorts of data from the computers up in the comms tower anyway, Nie Mingjue can never get his eyes to focus long enough to make heads or tails of them and usually just winds up with migraines for trying.

“Thoughts?”

“Wei Wuxian is correct. It’s textbook, right down to our heartbeats once we completed the Drift.”

Nie Mingjue takes a deep breath in and turns slightly, just enough to block Jin Guangyao from the view of the others in the room with his body. His partner blinks up at him, eyes deep and unfathomable.

“You can be a pilot, A-Yao. With me.”

The naked want that crosses Jin Guangyao’s expression nearly hurts to look at, but Nie Mingjue doesn’t look away. They haven’t gotten as far as they have now by flinching in the face of each other’s most vulnerable moments.

“We…We have to talk it over with Huan-ge,” Jin Guangyao says with clear difficulty. “And approach battle cautiously, as Wei Wuxian has suggested. Just because we can Drift properly does not mean we can fight, particularly with the issues you and I have with just seeing a Kaiju on a screen. And we can’t exactly leave the ‘dome in just anyone’s hands if all three of us are out there anyway.”

“I know. But-”

“Not yet,” Jin Guangyao interrupts him, softening the sharp bite in his tone with soft, apologetic hands petting the lapels of his jacket, smoothing over his chest as Jin Guangyao looks up at him again with a tiny smile. “I’ll tell you when, alright? Just trust me.”

“Always do,” Nie Mingjue says, because these days it’s the unquestionable truth. Jin Guangyao smiles a little more widely up at him, dimples in his cheeks, and it’s only the sound of the other three horsing around behind him that keeps him from leaning down to kiss those dimples as he and Lan Xichen both love so much to do.

“Ah…Chifeng-Zun?” Mo Xuanyu hazards a moment later. Nie Mingjue has had more than enough bad news delivered to him in his life to know that he’s not going to like whatever the boy has to say next. Still, he doesn’t even sigh before he turns around to look down at him, one eyebrow raised ever so slightly.

“What is it?”

“I wanted to wait until after your Drift to tell you, but..I’ve finished decoding what I can understand of Xue-laoshi’s notes.”

It takes a supreme act of will not to curl his lip in disgust at the respectful title for that rabid dog of a man, but it’s not an argument he wants to have right now – not with Mo Xuanyu, and not with Jin Guangyao either, despite the fact that he knows that the main reason the man hasn’t been put down yet is because of Jin Guangyao’s protection and assurances to Jin Guangshan that Xue Yang is more useful than he is harmful, at least for their purposes. Nie Mingjue disagrees – heartily and vocally – but he’s not feeling up for a shouting match at the moment so he lets it slide. For now.

“And?”

“Wen-daifu wasn’t lying to Yao-ge before. It’s his fault the Kaiju are coming faster, and that they know who to target and where and how.”

Nie Mingjue takes a deep breath in, holds it, and releases Jin Guangyao’s waist to turn around properly with his arms crossed over his chest as he exhales again to try to find his very shallow reserves of patience. “Tell me. Start from the beginning.”

Mo Xuanyu takes a deep breath in of his own as he turns to his computer to start furiously clicking and typing through screen after screen in quick succession until Nie Mingjue is fairly sure they’re all looking at the unencrypted contents of the hard drive that Wen Qing had said contains Xue Yang’s records. The labels of the files are incomprehensible to Nie Mingjue, but Mo Xuanyu starts navigating them with the ease of the hours he’s spent poring over them in between his study of past battles and Kaiju biology.

(Nie Mingjue thinks a bit ruefully that he works his brother and Mo Xuanyu far too hard, but there’s just no one else he trusts to handle such sensitive material, and the fewer hands it passes through the better anyway. Unfortunately, it seems to be his lot in life to make all sorts of uncomfortable or less-than-savory decisions such as this, even when it’s his family involved. He just has to hope that the time in which it’s necessary is coming to an end soon.)

“Okay. So – Xue Yang. Obsessed with Wei Wuxian’s work in Kaiju research, we all know this, he’s never bothered to hide it. But Wei-laoshi has had a lot of ideas that have never been put to the test – because they shouldn’t be, either because they’re either extremely dangerous, highly unethical, or both. Usually both.”

Wei Wuxian laughs a little sheepishly but pointedly doesn’t correct his newest mentee in these assertions. He doesn’t have to – they all know Mo Xuanyu is telling nothing but the truth.

“The difference between Wei-laoshi and Xue-laoshi though is that Xue-laoshi will do anything if it sounds interesting enough, no matter how much he really shouldn’t, especially when he’s not here for us to keep an eye on.”

“You don’t have to explain that dog or his madness to me,” Nie Mingjue growls. “Just tell me what he did so we can fix it.”

“Sure, boss. He Drifted with a Kaiju.”

The silence that follows that statement is absolute, and for a brief moment Nie Mingjue has the blissful thought that he’s definitely misheard, or at least misunderstood. The momentary illusion is shattered by Wei Wuxian leaning in close enough to grab Mo Xuanyu by the shoulder and turn him around, his ancient leather office chair squeaking in protest at the sudden movement.

“He did what?!” Wei Wuxian yelps, sounding far more terrified than Nie Mingjue would have ever guessed he could.

“Drifted with a Kaiju brain, harvested fresh right after a battle near Tokyo when it was still alive enough to talk to the rest of them wherever they are. So…I don’t think we actually can fix this one, if I’m being honest, if my guesses are correct about what this all means in the long run.”

“That’s…I thought about doing that once! And I immediately followed it up with at least a dozen reasons not to do it right off the top of my head! Even at my worst I wasn’t insane enough to actually try it!!”

“Reasons which I’m sure he saw in your journal and immediately ignored because as we all know, he’s fucking insane,” Mo Xuanyu says with a shrug. Nie Mingjue has to fight the urge to rub at his temple to alleviate a tension headache he can feel looming, completely irrespective of the Drift experiment he’d just finished with his partners.

“Alright, so Xue Yang Drifted with a motherfucking Kaiju. What now? How did this happen, and will it happen again?”

“I’m so glad you asked,” Mo Xuanyu trills and turns back to his computer to begin pulling up a new round of records as he talks. “The short answer is no, it won’t happen again. It really fried up Xue Yang’s brain according to Tokyo’s head doctor’s notes during his assessment of him afterwards, I don’t think even Wei-laoshi could design something to accommodate him in the Drift. I don’t think Baoshan Sanren could design him something, and I’ll bet a month’s worth of snack rations that he tried to ask for it while he was following the Immortals around the States during their miracle healing.

“But to answer how he made it happen –” Mo Xuanyu sits back again and gestures at the rows and rows of figures on his screen, each one attached to a coded name that he’s decoded into a separate document pulled up next to it for their benefit.

“Wen Ruohan’s finances?” Jin Guangyao asks, startled. “Why did he keep — ah, of course. Insurance.”

“Blackmail, Yao-ge, call it what it is,” Mo Xuanyu huffs. “~Blackmail for a black soul doing black deeds for the black market~,” he singsongs in falsetto under his breath next and for a moment it’s eerily like Xue Yang and his love for levity when it’s least appropriate. Nie Mingjue swallows back the urge to tell him to cut it out in favor of asking something much more pressing.

“Are we implicated in this should any of it be found out by the public?”

“Hmmmm yes and no, Chifeng-Zun,” Mo Xuanyu shrugs again and swivels his chair around again to blink up at them. “ ‘We’ as in Shanghai Shatterdome? Oh yeah, no doubt about it, we’d be doing damage control for months probably. ‘We’ as in any of us personally who aren’t Father or Xue-laoshi? Harder to say.”

Jin Guangyao hums, “Mm. Tell me what Father’s involvement is specifically.”

Nie Mingjue knows that tone in his voice too well. Almost unconsciously he begins a countdown in the back of his mind, and he can’t find it in himself to be too upset to realize that Jin Guangshan’s days are very much numbered – likely not beyond double digits.

“Uhhh well…. Okay : If you’re the obscenely wealthy patron of a shatterdome with an already questionable reputation because of nepotism and historically shitty pilots and all, plus a policy of keeping a tight lid on information about your inner workings in a way that makes people a bit suspicious already, what do you do when you want to do highly unethical and dangerous experiments using Kaiju parts?”

“Outsource it,” Jin Guangyao says shortly. It’s curt enough that Nie Mingjue is sure he’s already figured out whatever it is that they’re being led toward. He gestures for Mo Xuanyu to keep talking anyway, since he’s not afraid to admit he’s not quite as quick-witted as Jin Guangyao is, nor as good at thinking along the same lines crooked men do.

“Right — you get someone else to do your dirty work. Someone whose reputation is big and bad enough that nobody messes with them anymore.”

“We already knew he was working with Wen Ruohan,” Nie Mingjue growls. “Tell me what I don’t know.”

“Wen Ruohan is only a small part of it, actually. But okay, so! If you want to run experiments on Kaijus in the tight privacy of a private lab you have a lot of logistical problems to consider – most of them can be solved by working on parts. Tiny bits of corpses. Cutting dead Kaijus up into pieces and dragging the pieces in here. Which we do! Every shatterdome in the world does that, and for the most part it’s on the up and up, we only take the bits we need to study, right? Acid sacs and eyeballs and exoskeleton chunks – and what we’re pretty sure are maybe meant to be their bones even though sometimes they’re like really weirdly squidgy-“

Nie Mingjue’s patience is not improving one bit. “Make a point, Xuanyu!”

“You start a black market! That’s the point. You play the long game and start a black market. Kaiju parts on the cheap to people who will turn around and jack the prices way up when they’re selling it to their contacts and then give you a good cut. When your buyers have driven the prices high enough, you start taking a cut of the physical spoils too – your finances stay consistent, but you siphon off which Kaiju pieces you want for your experiments while selling the rest for more money to cover the gap. You store the Kaiju parts in the warehouse where the corpses are already dismembered anyway, you have your people mark them all as ‘sold to private bidder’ just like the other black market shit that actually makes it out the door. Then you hang onto them yourself until it’s time to go pay a visit to your dear friend in Tokyo, perhaps to begin negotiating a legitimate Pilot Program deal for a totally random example, and you bring along a little gift – plus someone who has some really batshit insane ideas for what to do with them.”

“Xue Yang.”

“Exactly. So you take your Kaiju bits and your certifiably mad scientist over to Tokyo, and you let Wen Ruohan’s reputation keep away any nosy reporters wondering what the hell you’re working on in there. Then, once you’re not being watched anymore because this is all clearly legitimate, you let your mad scientist try Drifting with a Kaiju to see what happens.”

The stunned silence in the room is interrupted only by the sound of severely overworked computer fans trying to keep up with the sheer volume of programs Mo Xuanyu is running and the never-ending background noise of the rest of the ‘dome above their heads.

“All of that all these years just to ultimately have Xue Yang Drift with a Kaiju?” Jin Guangyao finally asks.

“Yep!”

“Why?” Nie Huaisang finally manages to demand – the first thing he’s managed to say during the whole explanation  – sounding as horrified as Nie Mingjue has ever heard him. “Why Drift with the Kaiju at all?! Even Wei-xiong’s notes said it probably would be useless considering they’re literally completely alien to us. How would we even understand what we’re seeing, if you can overcome physiological differences long enough for it to work in the first place? What’s the point?”

“Wars make money if you’re the one selling the dead,” Nie Mingjue grunts, disgusted and more than a little nauseous with it. “If you can find some way to tell your enemy valuable information about your defenses — like who to attack and how and where — then you’re guaranteed fresh meat delivered right to your doorstep, ready to be sold, and terrified people ready to pay you any amount of money to protect them from the monsters you called to their door. And with Xuanyu’s prediction algorithm getting better and better…”

“Always follow the money,” Wei Wuxian pipes up, the same disgust Nie Mingjue feels dripping from each word. “Men like Jin Guangshan and Wen Ruohan? It’s all about the money, and everyone at the bottom dies for it. Is any of this really a surprise in the end?”

“The lengths that they will go to to accomplish these things is somehow still unfortunately a surprise, yes,” Jin Guangyao mutters darkly at his side. Nie Mingjue wonders briefly if he should attempt to comfort him – this is his father’s doing, after all – but thinks better of it when he glances down to catch a glimpse of the look in his partner’s eyes. Hard, cold, and so familiarly deadly it puts a chill up Nie Mingjue’s spine. He doesn’t think that he and Lan Xichen will be able to distract him this time.

Nie Mingjue doesn’t want to distract him.

This is no longer a matter of personal distaste for Jin Guangshan and the way he treats everything under the ‘dome’s roof like it’s a business deal. This is no longer a matter of personal safety, or the safety of only his pilots, or of the population of the Shanghai Shatterdome, or the entire sprawling city of Shanghai itself. Jin Guangshan, in his greed for money and delusions of power, has endangered the entire human race. Of course he knows that Xue Yang is far from innocent in this and he’d love to get rid of that mongrel too, but he knows who the driving force really is behind all of this. If not Xue Yang, then Jin Guangshan would have found another tool to use to the same ends. Perhaps his tool would have even been Jin Guangyao, had Jin Guangshan played his cards right once upon a time.

Nie Mingjue glances down at Jin Guangyao beside him again to find the man already looking up at him, steel and fire in his wide, dark eyes. Between the two of them, no words are needed. He knows Jin Guangyao can read his (begrudging, but unflinching) acceptance of what needs to be done in the set of his mouth, the angle of his brows…or however the fuck it is Jin Guangyao always knows how to read him like a book. He’s never revealed his secrets when Nie Mingjue has asked.

Jin Guangyao slips his hand into Nie Mingjue’s and doesn’t break eye contact as he says, “A-Sang, we’re going out tonight. Time to see how good your informers really are.”

Nie Mingjue raises their joined hands to press a short kiss to Jin Guangyao’s knuckles before his partner withdraws and storms off at a sharp, precise clip without another word until he steps aside just inside the door to allow Lan Xichen to re-enter the lab, looking the tiniest bit flushed, like he’d jogged the whole way down from the Jaeger bays.

“What’s wrong?” Lan Xichen asks, as perceptive to everyone’s moods as ever. “A-Yao?”

“Come here, Xichen,” Nie Mingjue calls, finding himself desperately wanting the softness the man can offer him that Jin Guangyao usually can’t, even under much better circumstances. “There’s something you need to see.”

“Don’t wait up for me tonight, Huan-ge. I’ll see you both in the morning,” Jin Guangyao murmurs, and he gives Lan Xichen the same squeeze of their hands that he’d given Nie Mingjue before he sweeps away properly, footsteps echoing steadily back down the hallway — a death knell, if ever Nie Mingjue has heard one.

 -/-

 Jin Guangyao knows, logically, that of course the way that he lives is not normal. Normal people don’t spend their days holed up in a deteriorating sprawling military facility centering their life around the same twenty-or-so people on any given day and mind-bogglingly massive interdimensional murder aliens. He knows this, and he’s never once claimed to be normal, not even before his life was exactly that.

But stepping out of the gloomy austerity of the ‘dome into the dazzling nightlife of Shanghai still feels like waking out of a vaguely unsettling not-quite-nightmare only to be doused immediately in sticky sweet, neon-colored alcohol and way too much cologne.

“Ooo Yao-ge, this way!” Nie Huaisang shouts excitedly, tugging on his arm. His face is splashed with so many colors off the signs around them it’s difficult to settle on one, but his teeth flash red in the glare of the closest bar’s advertisement, something bold and oversized that he doesn’t bother to read. Jin Guangyao lets himself be towed around, for once, and simply does his best to avoid bumping into the people crowded into the street with them — there’s far more bare skin and cleavage and cocktail-redolent laughter than he would like, and he thinks longingly of his partners probably getting settled in for the evening right this very minute in their quarters without him.

Nie Huaisang tugs him to the left at some signal Jin Guangyao doesn’t bother attempting to identify and he follows. Nie Huaisang pulls him down a short alleyway out into the next block of neon highrises. Here in the heart of the city they tower over everything, level after level after level of pleasure and fun advertised in every shade of neon imaginable, each shade somehow searingly bright enough to make his teeth hurt. Down here, in the pulsing, growling belly of it all, Jin Guangyao feels himself drowning, getting lost in the throngs and looking up into the night sky so far away it’s nearly impossible to see. Criss-crossing wires and sky bridges and the forced perspective of visual noise gradually fading up up up into the blackness of space leave him dizzy with vertigo if he looks for more than a moment.

Jin Guangyao drops his eyes back down to Nie Huaisang’s back just ahead of him in the crush and reminds himself of their agreed-upon task for the evening as a distraction.

“Ahh here we are!” Nie Huaisang finally cries, releasing Jin Guangyao’s wrist for the first time since they left the ‘dome in favor of throwing his arms wide as if to hug the building they’ve stopped in front of. As far as their surroundings go, this place sticks out like a sore thumb. Not a hint of neon on the place, not even a backlit sign board. Instead, a flickering spotlight — dim and yellow, the cheapest bulb money can buy — offers up a dingy epithet with no other context. White background, big black vinyl letters: The Cockpit.

“A-Sang,” Jin Guangyao interrupts, smile fixed where it should be with cutting precision. “I am not here to prevent your being stabbed for the sake of a subpar back alley blowjob -“

“That was one time, Yao-ge, and they only nicked me a little! I’m telling you, if he’s in Shanghai, which we have every reason to believe he is, then he’s here. I’m sure of it.”

Jin Guangyao eyes the bar again, just as dubiously as the first time. The place is a black hole amongst all the glittering allure of the nightlife around it, a shabby brick-and-mortar nothing little hole in the wall. Unfortunately, this all tracks far too well for Jin Guangyao to doubt his friend.

He heaves a world weary sigh, dodges a drunken lurch with an accompanying grope from someone passing behind them, and waves Nie Huaisang forward with an imperious gesture. “Let’s go.” He sighs again; the ‘let’s just get this over with’ is perfectly implicit.

The interior of the club is, somehow, even darker than the outside. Or it at least feels that way, the ceiling low enough that Jin Guangyao has to fight the urge to duck despite the ceiling being nowhere near his head. Much like the exterior, everything inside, even the floor, is painted a deep black that absorbs the low light thrown off by a collection of dark-shaded lamps he can count on both hands for the entire club.

It’s loud enough the moment they step into the space that Jin Guangyao has to watch Nie Huaisang’s gesturing hands to figure out where to go, and he follows the wordless instruction to go find them a table while Nie Huaisang buys them a round of drinks. Even if he could speak and be heard he knows his protests would fall on conveniently deaf ears so he just does as instructed, picking his way slowly through shadows and tables and the blurring outlines of the club’s patrons until he finds an empty table near the back. The music is slightly less deafening with a couple of half-walls in the middle of the space to block it, though of course the pounding bass is inescapable. It reverberates through the thick soles of Jin Guangyao’s standard issue boots and around all the hollow spaces in his chest until he feels less like a man and more like a drum for some unseen fists to pound on.

Nie Huaisang finds him surprisingly quickly under the circumstances, and when he slides into his seat with an overdramatic flounce Jin Guangyao ushers the drinks he’d deposited closer to the center of the table to avoid any of them sloshing free of their glasses.

“He’s here,” Nie Huaisang leans in to shout in his ear. “Just have a drink and wait.”

Jin Guangyao nods to show he’s heard and reaches for the less offensive-looking option of the drinks Nie Huaisang has brought. Almost all of them are some shade of sickly sweet artificiality and he suspects the presence of far too much flavored vodka in them, but there’s a dark purple something glittering in the dim lighting that seems safe enough so he takes it, sipping at it carefully in tiny little mouthfuls until he’s sure it won’t make his teeth feel like they’re going to vibrate out of his skull.

He’s made it most of the way through the purple thing – enough of it swirling through his head that he thinks it’s actually pretty good now – and grown numb to the thundering music when a dark shadow seems to oooooze its way out of the press of too many bodies in the cramped spaces between tables to slip into the only unoccupied seat at their table on Nie Huaisang’s other side.

“Hey babes,” Xue Yang greets, too quietly to be heard over the din, but Jin Guangyao can manage to read his lips. The predatory grin stretching across his manically expressive face needs no interpretation to know he’s up to no good, but Jin Guangyao just sips at his drink and watches Nie Huaisang tip his neck enough to let Xue Yang lean in and nibble at him in greeting. (There is a Reason, capital R, that Nie Huaisang comes out to places like this, and once upon a time Xue Yang had been one of his regular hookups until they’d gotten bored of each other’s neuroses and settled into a weirdly combative and flirtatious truce. Jin Guangyao doesn’t like being reminded of that period of their lives too often, since they’d both been completely insufferable throughout it.)

Nie Huaisang allows the necking for roughly half a minute before he catches Jin Guangyao’s raised eyebrow and swats Xue Yang away with his closed fan, eyes a little unfocused from the trio of cocktails he’s already downed with impressive disregard for how they must taste.

“You’ve really done it this time, Xue-xiong,” Nie Huaisang pouts, somehow loud enough that Jin Guangyao can just hear him over the music. “Messing around with Kaiju brains? Naughty naughty.”

Xue Yang throws his head back to cackle, his long, sharp canines teeth glinting strangely in the lamplight. “Finally figured it out?! Took you long enough, I heard you got hold of my notes weeks ago! ~Someone’s out of practice~!” Jin Guangyao grinds his teeth around the urge to smile at Xue Yang’s sing-songy needling, his ability to pick up on and prod at sore spots as unerring as ever. Right on cue, Nie Huaisang pouts and hits him with the fan again, hard enough this time that Jin Guangyao knows it must’ve actually stung at least a little (though naturally pain is not exactly a deterrent for Xue Yang).

“I have better things to do than read through all your batshit ramblings, Xue-xiong! A-Yu is doing it, I’m still mad at you for destroying all my trackers.”

“Shoulda hid one in my ass if you wanted me to keep any of them,” Xue Yang snorts and makes a grab for the last drink on the table, something blood-red and glittering like Jin Guangyao’s had been. “At least then I could’ve had some fun with it before I took it out back and shot it.”

“Perhaps this is a conversation we could continue somewhere that won’t permanently destroy our hearing,” Jin Guangyao offers, grimacing at the sight of Xue Yang licking his cocktail-red lips with an overly theatrical eyebrow waggle, the glass already drained in three massive gulps.

“Sure, Yao-ge, whatever you say! Let me show you to my ~office~.”

Said ‘office’ is a room (to be very very loose with the word) made out of moldering crates in the suspiciously damp back alley behind the bar. Jin Guangyao doesn’t bother resisting the urge to rub at his temples as the fire door swings shut behind them with a loud clang that reverberates off the brick walls tight around them.

“Your existence both terrifies and disgusts me.”

“Aww, I missed you too, Yao-ge.”

Jin Guangyao sighs and crosses his arms over his chest, leveling an unimpressed Look at Xue Yang sprawling out over the staggered stack of the crates like they’re the most comfortable throne in the world. It’s just as dim back here as it had been inside, perhaps moreso, but at least the music is now nothing more than a thumping he can feel only in the soles of his boots, so it’s…debatably an upgrade.

“So – you finally came to find me. Took you long enough! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“You know you’re supposed to come back to the ‘dome if you’re in Shanghai,” Nie Huaisang pouts as he sits down on Xue Yang’s shins hard enough to make the crates creak ominously and Xue Yang winces around the lollipop stick between his teeth, though whether that’s from the damage to his shins or from the thought of coming back to the shatterdome is unclear.

“No can do, Sangsang. Got too many projects out here, you know how it is.”

“Projects like trying to figure out how to get the Kaijus to work for the worst men imaginable?”

Xue Yang’s creeping grin grows so wide Jin Guangyao personally believes it shouldn’t be allowed to exist on a human face, predatory and sharp at the edges, his lollipop stick trapped in the gap between his abnormally sharp canine and its counterpoint in his lower jaw.

“How’s Daddy Mustache liking that one?” Xue Yang asks him, not even bothering to pretend to deny it. “He figured it out? Pissed? Gonna come after me lecturing me about righteousness and seducing me with threats to chop my head off just like old times?”

“Mingjue has more on his mind than the actions of one unhinged man,” Jin Guangyao says smoothly despite the fact that everyone present knows precisely what he really means. It’s hard to just turn off a lifetime of self-preserving lies, even now, even with the two men – besides his partners – who know him more thoroughly than anyone else.

“So you haven’t told him the full extent yet because it will ruin so many of your elaborate schemes if you tattle on little old me and get me tied up nice and tight again so I can’t work my magic,” Xue Yang translates in that obnoxious way he has of yes, getting to the point, but doing it in such a way that’s so irritating Jin Guangyao’s first instinct is still to double down on his lies. But Nie Huaisang’s gaze is just as sharp on him over the edge of his fan, a silent warning away from old habits that got him in hot water before, so he takes a deep breath and sweetens his smile, unnervingly saccharine and perfect. A counterpoint to Xue Yang’s feral grin.

“Yes. I have a vested interest in making sure you continue to walk free for a little longer, dangerous as that might be for the general populace and every piece of candy within a ten mile radius.”

Xue Yang throws his head back to cackle again and when he sits forward again he slings his arms around Nie Huaisang’s waist to tug him up onto his knees instead of his shins, resting his head on his shoulder to pout up at Jin Guangyao through his eyelashes.

“You got me candy, Yao-gege? Just for me?”

Jin Guangyao raises his eyebrows at the man as Nie Huaisang wards him off with a few more good whacks from his fan, though he still doesn’t stand up from his perch on Xue Yang’s lap. Jin Guangyao already knows better than to so much as think about Nie Huaisang acting like this with Xue Yang while around Jiang Wanyin, who’s apparently taken it upon himself to bully Nie Huaisang into actually taking care of himself and becoming a slightly more functional human being in a slightly aggressive courting ritual that makes sense only to him (and, he supposes, Nie Huaisang). Xue Yang is still – probably more than ever – very much a massive flight risk at every moment, and sitting on him (i.e. giving him the sort of semi-violent affection he sorely needs but can only barely tolerate at the best of times) is pretty much the only surefire way to keep him around long enough to actually talk to him.

“I might have,” Jin Guangyao shrugs. “It’s difficult for me to remember when I’m so busy attempting to clean up one of your extremely dangerous messes. Again.”

Xue Yang huffs at that and slumps back, pouting and crunching on his lollipop a few times loudly before he spits out the bare paper stick and holds his hand out imperiously.

“You’re no fun anymore, Yao-gege, what happened to you?” he asks, his jutting lower lip and upturned brows quickly morphing into another manic grin when Jin Guangyao sighs as if put upon and slaps a fresh lollipop into his waiting palm. The plastic wrapper crinkles too loudly as he rips it off with his teeth and pops the sucker between his lips so fast Jin Guangyao hears the candy clack sharply against his front teeth. “Okay fine, you can spend another day off the list of people I’m gonna kill. But seriously, where’s your edge these days?! I found a way to talk to the giant aliens attacking all the stupid little humans!! No one else is doing that, not even Wei Wuxian! Call me a good boy at least, Yao-gege!”

“It is a lot like the kinds of things you and A-Yu used to get up to before Da-ge caught on and shut it down,” Nie Huaisang says with a shrewd little glint in his eye that Jin Guangyao doesn’t want to admit gets his hackles up, spine tingling with the need to defend himself and his past desperate measures. “Looking to start up the demon squad again, Yaoyao?”

Jin Guangyao pinches at the bridge of his nose again as he begs the unforgiving cosmos for some sort of extra ration of patience. “There was never such a thing as a ‘demon squad’, and if I were to ever start a group dedicated to ethically reprehensible, underground, black market research I would not allow my angsty teenage brother to give it a name at all, but especially not the ‘demon squad’!”

“Don’t even give him credit, Sangsang, I got it all from Wei Wuxian’s notes anyway, not his,” Xue Yang sighs, breezy and carefree. “And don’t help him avoid my question, either! What the fuck’s happening under Daddy Warbucks and the stupid Mustache these days, hm? They beating you up in there? Tying you down? Kink should loosen you up, Yao-gege, not wind you tighter. What are you riding my dick for all the sudden?”

“A-Sang,” Jin Guangyao says pleasantly, refusing to rise to Xue Yang’s clumsy baiting. He’s getting rusty, and Jin Guangyao has at least one solid theory as to why, though he’s not going to debase himself enough to ask. He doesn’t have to. “I’d like to talk to Xue-xiong alone for a moment if you don’t mind.”

“Aiyah,” Nie Huaisang pouts up at him from his perch. “I go to all this work to track him down and bring you out here to see him just like you asked, and now you’re brushing me off?? Rude, Yao-ge!”

Jin Guangyao sighs and withdraws his rarely-used cell phone from his pocket, clicking through a few screens quickly as Xue Yang crunches on his sucker and eyes Nie Huaisang’s exposed jugular like he’d very much like to chew through that instead.

“I just sent you money for drinks, go get whatever ridiculous concoctions you want and I promise I’ll drink one if you wait for me inside.”

“A man who knows the way to my heart! Thanks Yao-ge!!”

“Hey — nothing with tequila!” Jin Guangyao calls after his friend’s rapidly-retreating back, but considering all he gets in return is a maniacal cackle he’s pretty sure he’s in for a bitch of a hangover tomorrow either way, tequila or not. He looks down at Xue Yang again where he’s still lounging as the door slams shut behind Nie Huaisang again. Xue Yang — always better than anyone at scenting blood in the water — immediately grins his wickedly wide smile, all sharpened canines and eyes glittering with the sort of mischief that leads to world-shattering catastrophes…like Kaiju suddenly targeting specific Pilots with personally tailored attacks, because Xue Yang told them to.

“I don’t work for free,” Xue Yang says. “You know how steep my real prices are for the good shit.”

“I know. I’m offering you protection.”

“Mm you’re already doing that for me, gege, don’t try to play coy. You’ve got to up the ante now.”

“Not for you; for your family.”

The grin flickers off Xue Yang’s face quick as a burnt light fizzling out, expression as cold and furious as Jin Guangyao had expected.

“I don’t have a family.”

“Alright.” Jin Guangyao shrugs. “But that’s my offer. Anything you need to keep them safe you’ll have — money, papers, medical care, a house somewhere the Kaiju will never reach. Whatever it takes.”

In the blink of an eye, Xue Yang is no longer lounging on his stack of musty crates, but is instead snarling right in Jin Guangyao’s face, the cold bite of a knife at his throat as his back collides with the slimy bricks on the opposite side of the alley.

“Shut up!! I don’t have a family!” Xue Yang bites out, his breath redolent with sugar; underneath it, the thick tang of blood. Jin Guangyao quietly flicks his own knife out of his sleeve, though he doesn’t threaten Xue Yang with it just yet.

“Fine, so they’re not your family. Sugar daddies, then, though from what I understand they donate as much of their royalties and pensions as they can to orphanages and relief shelters, so I’m not sure if they can really qualify as anything other than your ‘handlers’ at best.”

Xue Yang withdraws as suddenly as he’d pounced, affecting an utterly flawless (and therefore obviously fabricated) aura of cold indifference. “I’m not doing anyone favors, Yao-gege. I don’t work for free, I told you, and I don’t need your fucking protection so just leave me alone.”

“You don’t need it – or they don’t, because they’ve already got such a good guard dog?”

“You have no goddamn idea what you’re talking about!” Xue Yang’s hackles are up again, knife flashing anxiously between his fingers as he spins it too fast to be seen clearly in the dim alley light. “What do they even have to do with anything?! You think you have a right to meddle in their lives just because they decided to walk back into your stupid Shatterdome for a day? They’re my toys to play with, not yours!”

“Mature, xiao-Yang,” Jin Guangyao drawls. “If you’d rather torture them than help them, that’s your business. I don’t want to force you to help me, but I will if I must. This is your mess, and you will help me clean it up, and you underestimate the lengths I’m willing to go to to ensure you get it done. You’re alive because I won’t allow you to die, and you’ll do as I say until I decide you’re no longer useful.”

“Hey!!” Jin Guangyao doesn’t take his eyes off Xue Yang as a young, high voice suddenly shouts above them, punctuated with the clang of something knocking hard against a metal grate. “Get your ass back in here, Yang-ge, the daozhangs are back! Stop playing tough and come eat dinner!!”

“Get back inside the house before I chop your stupid head off!!” Xue Yang shouts up at whoever it is, an ugly snarl on his face that Jin Guangyao can only assume is masking embarrassment more than genuine anger. His knife is still flickering between his fingers, after all, and if he were truly angry it would likely be sailing through the air to lodge itself somewhere in this person’s face by now.

“My offer stands,” Jin Guangyao says in the ringing silence of the window slamming shut again. “You can say you don’t want it, but you can’t hide from me forever, A-Yang. The Immortals aren’t fit to return to active duty, and you’ve doomed yourself to an early grave with your little Drift experiment – if the Kaijus don’t kill us all first, your nerve damage will come for you almost as quick without proper care. Do this last task for me, and I’ll send you so far away everything you’ve seen and done here will be nothing but a fever dream. You’ll never want for anything again, and neither will they.”

Xue Yang is glaring at him again and breathing hard like he’d just run a mile, his teeth bared, hands clenched white-knuckled at his sides. He takes a deep breath in and visibly centers himself before he closes his eyes and forces his grimacing lips into his signature grin.

“Anything to get you to leave me the fuck alone again,” he chirps. “What’s the goal? I’m assuming I can have as much fun with him as I want?”

It’s Jin Guangyao’s turn to take a deep breath in. He’s been wanting this for so long – thinking of it in abstract even when it still made him sick with guilt. Daydreaming of it when it was no longer an ‘if’ but a ‘when’. Making quiet, hidden moves to line things up just right in recent months, just in case.

Just in case.

“Make it hurt,” he tells Xue Yang, even though he knows that’s a given, “and before it’s over, make sure he has no doubts as to who is standing behind you telling you to pull the trigger.”

Xue Yang nods and turns to go without another word, knife still flashing and spinning rapidly between his clever fingers. Jin Guangyao allows himself five deep breaths before he returns to the noisy, black interior of the bar, and when he finds Nie Huaisang back at their table he downs three shots of something in quick succession without so much as a grimace. Nie Huaisang just hands him a pint glass of water before he lines up the next shot with silent, grave understanding.

[incorrect-web-novels]

In any AU, Xue Yang has to be a stranger to Lan Xichen, or they would fuck nasty. There's no in-between.

[red-garden]

When will we, as a society, understand that Jin Guangyao’s story is about survival and the things he had to do to make it, rather than one super evil guy just trying to be awful and kill people? We can look past Wei Wuxian torturing and killing nameless Wen soldiers because we’re not attached to them and they’re Wens. That gets to be justified because it’s the bloody revenge of the protagonist on henchman #362. We can look past his desecration of the dead, his raising of fallen soldiers to tear apart their brothers in arms, because they’re the baddies. We look past him deserting Jiang Cheng after his return because he had people to protect and Jiang Cheng is an asshole (affectionate). Don’t misconstrue me- I love Wei Wuxian, and I think that he is a basically good person that was pushed past his breaking point and did some truly awful things as a result. He’s not a bad person. But he’s not better than Meng Yao.

Walk with me, Jin Guangyao antis. Let’s recount every bad thing Jin Guangyao has ever done in chronological order.

1) killed Nie Mingjue’s general

2) got Su She to cast the 100 holes curse on Jin Zixun (possibly to frame Wei Wuxian)

3) advocated for and later worked with Xue Yang

4) killed Nie Mingjue

5) banged his sister before he knew they were siblings, later married her after knowing

6) everything about Jin Guangshan’s death

7) allegedly killed his own son

8) chopping nie Mingjue up into little pieces and keeping his head in a cupboard

9) putting all the juniors in The Zombie Cave to get everyone on Wei Wuxian’s ass and kill a lot of people

10) almost killing Jin Ling

Numero uno first ever Bad Meng Yao Deed was killing Nie Mingjue’s general. You know, the general that constantly belittled him and repeatedly insulted his mom. Not only is this one totally understandable, it was also filial.

Next the 100 holes curse. There’s not solid proof that he wanted to frame WWX for this, it’s more likely this was just a better hidden filial killing in the name of his mother’s honor that ended up negatively impacting WWX.

Xue Yang is a little freak, but he’s a powerful, smart little freak. He was to protect Xue Yang in the interest of his father, although he does keep working with him after JGS’s death. This one was a power grab, trying to have extra pieces on the board to ensure his position among the Jin.

Nie Mingjue was another filial killing. If there’s one thing Meng Yao is gonna do is always be filial to his mom. Additionally, Nie Mingjue was not a perfect innocent angel either, he supported killing the Wen remnants. This wasn’t Meng Yao killing the last unicorn y’all. AND AND ALSO ALSO Jin Guangshan ordered this!!!!!!!!!! He was obeying his father to maintain his social position!!!!!!! What’s not clicking?

I get really mad over the Qin Su stuff, because marrying her after she was already pregnant was the kindest thing he could do for her. Should he have told her they were siblings and let her make her own choice? Absolutely. But he was trying protect her, and I can’t fault him for that. (Call back the nonconsensual golden core transfer)

The only thing I won’t defend is how he killed JGS. JGS was world’s worst guy, but no one deserves to be raped under any conditions. The sex workers he hired didn’t deserve to die, they didn’t deserve any of that. One thing I will say is that he didn’t plan for Sisi to be there. She had been transferred, he didn’t expect her, and after the fact he fed and clothed and kept her comfortable for the rest of her life. Keeping her under house arrest was how he protected his social position. Psychologically speaking I understand why he killed JGS like this however. While jiggy loved his mom, it’s clear he didn’t love sex workers more broadly, and saw his mom as an exception among them. He didn’t see the sex workers he killed as people, only saving Sisi because she was another supposed exception. For JGS, this was a taste of his own medicine type beat. JGS is a rapist, who raped Qin Su’s mom and jiggy’s mom when she was 15. I completely understand why he chose to kill JGS this way, but that doesn’t make it okay.

Jin Rusong’s death is completely alleged. While it ended up being politically advantageous to jiggy to squash the smaller sects that plotted against him, we have no idea if he killed his son. While he does say he does, he also says he killed Qin Su, who killed herself. While he may feel responsible for both their deaths, that doesn’t mean he killed them. I should point out the one claiming he killed his son was Sect Leader Yao, you know, the mob mentality character.

Chopping Nie Mingjue up is just common sense. Harder for a fierce corpse to kill you if it’s just a head. Harder to identify a body if it’s just a leg. “This is desecrating the dead” AND WHAT WAS WEI WUXIAN DOING, RIDDLE ME THAT BATMAN

For the juniors, this one was just poorly thought out tbh. He needed the Jianghu to get WWX’s ass because he was going to uproot him from his comfortable life. So he harmlessly leaves all the kids in a cave, gets everyone out there, gets their energy sealed, and lets people point fingers at WWX when the zombies start coming. He knows this likely would result in the deaths of many cultivators- many cultivators who need I remind you, make up the bourgeois, talk nasty about his mom, and who supported killing the Wen Remnants. This was like the ocean gate of wuxia, but y’all aren’t ready for that. He was protecting the life he worked so hard for, plain and simple 

Okay there are two things I won’t defend. While I don’t think he would’ve taking JL’s life, I can’t imagine how traumatic that was for Jin Ling. BUT AGAIN, I understand why he did it. He was grasping at straws, clinging to anything he thought might keep him alive, and he did a desperate, shitty thing. If you want to believe he never loved Jin Ling because of this moment, be my guest, but if there’s one thing jiggy can do is love.

All in all, he did a lot of desperate, shitty things to claw his way to a better life, and a lot of desperate shitty things to keep it. If you think he shouldn’t have cared so much about being part of the Jianghu, CONGRATULATIONS, YOU MISSED THE POINT !!🎉🎊 Poverty is violence, and he grew up in it. It was his mother’s wish, what she broke herself doing, to give him a better life. He was a good son, not going to squander what his mother gave him, trying to protect his very precarious position in a society that hated him for the fact of being born wrong. He’s not a moral paragon, but no one in mdzs is. They’re all people that react in deeply human ways to deeply unfair situations. They lash out, commit violence, do things they regret. Jiggy did a lot of terrible things, but the point is that he shouldn’t have had to.

[wifiwuxians]

Oo it's over I'm already working out the details with my bestie

need to figure something out for mo xuanyu because i have vague fic ideas but nothing concrete and i can't just give him another Xun. i don't know if i even want there to be any shipping but everyone is such a bad option. guy needs to crack the world in half but i don't wanna write another like villain dynamic.... like he'd be the one scaring the other party and not the other way around, and mxy is sadly so like at the very bottom of the social ladder that it's hard to find any character he could have any power over

[lansplaining]

redeemability of MDZS characters

WEI WUXIAN: ca-CHING. i had a friend who redeemed wei wuxian for a whole walkman. i’m serious. 

LAN WANGJI: varies a LOT so you really want to check in advance. some places are like there is nothing to redeem here and sometimes it’s like oh hell yes cash that boy in. another thing to be aware of though is that most places that give you big value for LWJ redemption are gonna really beat the hell out of him in the process, which i know bothers some people. my view is like lol i got my prize why do i care, but it is a thing for some people 

LAN XICHEN: really tough one. everywhere will give you a different reason (he doesn’t need it, he doesn’t deserve it, etc) but the upshot is almost nowhere sees any redemption value. you can sometimes find really niche places but idk if it’s worth the effort in the end

JIANG CHENG: another one that’s probably just not worth your time. a ton of places say they really want to redeem jiang cheng and that it really needs to happen but then you try and figure out the process for doing that and it basically just doesn’t exist, there’s literally no way to meet their standards for even the crappiest keychain or glowstick prize 

XUE YANG: such low-hanging fruit. almost as easy as wei wuxian, people are gagging for it. you can honestly skip a lot of the steps people say you need to take, nobody really cares

JIN GUANGYAO: lots of places are just not interested at all, but you can get some pretty good value from other places-- but like with LWJ, you gotta be okay knowing you’re giving him up to basically be destroyed. i heard of someone who got a dartboard though, so 

[yunmeng-jiang]

ok it's time for my Official Jiang Cheng Ship Opinions Post. buckle in this is gonna take a bit

Xicheng: I like it in 1 extremely specific circumstance (bonding over very similar experiences post-canon) but I've only seen that done well like. twice. NEEDS to have good characterization (also rare unfortunately) and take into account what they can and can't do as their own sect leaders with regards to courtship/marriage.

Chengqing: perfect in every way. that's it that's all I need to say.

Sangcheng: ehhhhh? Cute in Cloud Recesses summer camp era, not feasible post-canon due to irreconcilable differences in worldview and how much danger it's acceptable to put Jin Ling in.

Zhancheng: honestly I prefer this to be platonic. Hatefucking is not my jam and LWJ is Wei-Ying-sexual in canon anyway. Give Jiang Cheng a friend who is as weirdly obsessed with Wei Wuxian as he is but in a slightly different way. I want to see them coming to terms with that.

Ningcheng: again, someone just as weirdly obsessed with Wei Wuxian, but a little to the left. I don't think either one of them is ever going to look at the other and not see "the guy WWX likes better than me." Maybe someday they'll form a relationship that isn't based entirely around Wei Wuxian, but it seems kind of unlikely.

Chengyao: I'm actually coming around to this a bit recently? Again, it really needs to keep good characterization at the forefront and consider their positions as individual sect leaders, and remember that their "divorced couple energy" is part of the Guanyin Temple shitshow and not the way they would usually behave, especially for Jin Ling's sake. I want to see more fics where Meng Yao grows up with the Jiang sect so that Jiang Cheng is attached to him from the very beginning.

Mingcheng: meh. I don't really think about this ship that much because it honestly doesn't compel me at all. sorry to the mingcheng enjoyers it there I simply do not get it

Chengxuan: same as above, I don't really get this one. Their dynamic is just not that interesting to me.

Chengyi: that is a child. hard no on this one.

Miancheng: kinda cute? I like it when Jiang Cheng recruits her into the Jiang after she gives up on the Jin, it's a fun idea, but I think I like them better as friends.

Ruocheng: no. just no.

Zhucheng (chengliu? Wen Zhuliu and JC): also no.

Chengsu: I could get behind the idea of JGY desperately contacting Jiang Cheng and being like "help I just found out my fiancee is my sister can you please pretend you've been in love with her all this time and get married to her instead??? I'll negotiate to get you more Jin Ling rights if you do." she fits JC's list of desirable qualities in a wife. unfortunately she gets like 6 seconds of screen time and then dies so we really don't know very much about her, which makes it a bit hard to form a strong opinion on the ship

Other Chengsu? Sucheng/Mincheng/Chengshan/whatever this is: I actually think it's interesting that Su She and Jiang Cheng share the trait of "treat them nicely within this narrow window of time in their life in order to get them to become loyal to you forever, otherwise fuck you." It's possible that if Su She had grown up with the Jiang the two of them would have found some common ground and maybe become friends. I'm more interested in non-romantic interactions here

Cheng...yang? what do you call the Xue Yang/Jiang Cheng ship? Xuecheng? idk. again, not really my jam.

Chengjiao. Lingcheng? Jiang Cheng/Wang Lingjiao. Do people even ship this? I could see it as character development for her I guess. At this point I'm just fishing for possible pairings.

and finally, saved for last...

Xiancheng: this isn't romantic or sexual or platonic, it's all three and also a secret fourth thing that's more intense than all of them put together. As a ship, I don't prefer it, because it's too easy to flatten it out into either a boring cutesy fluffy cliche or a boring jealous/possessive boyfriend type thing. I need to see them being weird about each other in a way that no one can possibly identify, especially themselves. They'll die for each other. They'll live for each other. They'll destroy themselves and be happy about it as long as they believe that the other is going to be okay. You really can't make it as simple as "yeah these two want to fuck."

[canary3d-obsessed]

Restless Rewatch: The Untamed, Episode 38 part two

(Masterpost) (Pinboard)  (whole thing on AO3)    

Warning! Spoilers for All 50 Episodes!  

Shopping and Night Hunting

Xue Yang convinces Xiao Xingchen to take him along as his night hunting assistant, and the Empathy session jumps forward. The next thing we see is a whole street full of dead people with Xiao Xingchen standing over them with his sword, while Xue Yang looks on approvingly.  

Xiao Xingchen explains that the whole village was Puppets, with no living people. Dude. DUDE. Even by the standards of a world that contains Jiang Cheng and Lan Xichen, you are way too trusting of shit that people tell you.  

A-Qing checks the corpses and they have white eyes, which makes her think they might really be puppets. Xue Yang makes some insane faces just so we know he's not actually turned over a new leaf.

Next we see Xiao Xingchen trying to buy potatoes (this is fantasy China, not pre-Qing historical China; they can have all the potatoes they want) and a vendor telling him to scram. Is Xiao Xingchen just asking for free potatoes? Is this the first time he’s realized that doesn’t generally work?. Xue Yang menaces the vendor by loudly stabbing a potato, and then calls Xiao Xingchen back over. 

The vendor gasps and fills up their basket with food, and Xiao Xingchen smiles because he thinks that his buddy silently convinced the guy to give them food by...being nice? Unclear.

I Ain’t Gonna Play Yi City

Next we see ultrahot Song Lan arriving at the gate of Yi City, where A-Qing is happily picking up a money purse. ...whose? Do enough living people come through here that they just casually drop money on the ground? Song Lan twigs to her not being blind pretty quickly, although for politeness sake he lets her continue to pretend.

Song Lan asks if she's seen a white-clad sword-bearing daoist priest, and she quizzes him to make sure he's a good guy before helping him. Her entire set of security questions:

1. are you friends? 2. How tall is he?  3. is he hot? 4. What does his sword look like?

If this is not a mistranslation, these are not very good questions to ask if you want someone to believe you’re blind, incidentally.

Song Lan's answers:

1. ............... .... ...yes 2. me and him match like a set of salt and pepper shakers 3. like, SO hot 4. It’s named Shuanghua (”splendid frost,” per Viki), as all True Sword Fans know

(more after the cut!)

These answers are correct, pretty much, so he passes the security check and she leads him into the city. He comes carrying his sword Fuxue (”blowing away snow,” roughly), his horsetail flail, and his messy, messy feelings, which are going to be his undoing.

They walk through the super-abandoned town, which has paper decorations hanging up. These paper decorations are really well made, considering that they are still there when WangXian roll up several years later.

Song Lan has a little crisis trying to psych himself up to see Xiao Xingchen. Bro, you have been walking around looking for him for literally YEARS, and you haven't figured out what to say yet? Contrast with Lan Wangji, who went for the wrist-grab mere moments after discovering that Wei Wuxian was back, and followed it up by carrying him off to his bed. 

Enemy Mine

While he's dithering, Xue Yang comes back, and A-Qing hides while Song Lan stands there being shocked. 

We're treated to the Xue Yang version of sweet banter, where he tricks Xiao Xingchen into picking a short straw for chores, and then tells him he was tricking him because he was blind. 

They have a laugh together and Xue Yang is handsy with XXC, causing Song Lan to clench his fist so strongly that we can hear his knuckles cracking. 

You knew your ex was going to be at the party; if you can’t handle seeing him with a new guy you shouldn’t have come.

Then he sees Xue Yang go out to get groceries, and he grips his flail so hard that his palm starts bleeding. That sentence is about a weapon, not about his dick, incidentally.

More Empathy

But then empathy skips ahead, showing Xiao Xingchen stabbing Song Lan, while Wei Wuxian's hands shake and he says "Song Lan, don't!" like he’s in the audience of a horror movie. A-Qing, in the present, drools up some blood, which is pretty normal for her, TBH. 

The Lan kids are alarmed and want to wake them up, but Jin Ling says to hang in there for a bit more. For a kid, Jin Ling isn’t bad at wielding authority. 

A distraught Jingyi insists, however, so Jin Ling starts ringing the bell, and Wei Wuxian opens his eyes but doesn't come out of Empathy. He does stop skipping ahead, though, so we go back to Song Lan & Xue Yang's confrontation, which is possibly the best fight in the whole dang show.

We’re Gonna Get It On ‘Cause We Don’t Get Along

Xue Yang comes back from the grocery store to find Song Lan perched on his roof like a sexy vengeful raven. Xue Yang greets him sexily politely and with no anxiety at all, and Song Lan attacks.

Song Lan has had literally years to settle his mind and get his emotions under control and...he has not done that. Like, at all.

He could have cleared this whole situation up with about four words to Xiao Xingchen, and they could have fought Xue Yang together. But he was so unready to hug it out with his ex that he opted to face Xue Yang all on his own. Dumb. Ass. 

Contrast this with Lan Wangji, who always talked to Wei Wuxian, no matter how estranged they had become. Trying to stab him counts as talking. And also contrast this with Jiang Cheng, who hashed everything out with Wei Wuxian in an excruciating public confrontation, after which they teamed up to save their nephew.  Neither of those guys let their ooky feelings stand in the way of a reconnection, and their outcomes were way, way, way better than Song Lan’s. 

Xue Yang and Song Lan get busy fighting, and Song Lan starts asking what the fuck Xue Yang is playing at, how long has he been deceiving Xiao Xingchen, etc.   

Xue Yang is a perceptive guy, and he points out that Song Lan is holding back because he wants to ask these questions. He’s absolutely right; Song Lan wants to feel indignant and righteous, partly because he knows he himself has mistreated Xiao Xingchen. He’s putting himself in the role of Xiao Xingchen’s protector, when he doesn’t actually have that relationship with him any more. 

I love this fight sequence for two reasons.  First, because it showcases the actors doing a lot of moves themselves, and they both look amazing and move beautifully. (OP has slowed most of these gifs down quite a bit to avoid giving everybody a migraine, incidentally--the camera operator was moving around as much as the actors in these shots)

Second, because a lot of story happens in this fight; the dynamic between them, as two people with a very complex mutual hatred, is played out in their moves. Song Lan's moves are all strong attacks, expressing his anger and frustration, while Xue Yang’s are mainly defensive, avoidant, and slippery, because he is more interested in hurting Song Lan with words than with his blade at this point. He knows he has an unbeatable advantage up his sleeve, so he’s not particularly worried, even when Song Lan lands a couple of hits. 

Xue Yang lays it all out for Song Lan, explaining that Xiao Xingchen, being blind, relies on his sword to point toward resentful energy. Hey, isn't that what Wei Wuxian's Compass of Evil does? So WWX only needs that thing because he can't carry a sword? That...actually makes sense. Anyway, Xue Yang figured out if he cuts people's tongues out, Shuanghua can't tell living people from monsters, which is so awesome and fun for Xue Yang.

Song Lan starts to lose his composure and calls Xue Yang a “villain,” which leads Xue Yang to mock him for his weaksauce cussing ability.

Xue Yang: You educated people have a disadvantage when cursing someone out. Song Lan: Eat a bag of dicks, fuckstick.

Then he criticizes Xue Yang for taking advantage of Xiao Xingchen's blindness. 

He gets a couple of licks in but then Xue Yang stops and points out that Xiao Xingchen is only blind because of giving his eyes to Song Lan.

This stops Song Lan in his tracks; I am not sure if he already knew that’s where his eyeballs came from, or if he thought it was a coincidence that Xiao Xingchen became blind after he, Song Lan, got new eyeballs. Then Xue Yang challenges Song Lan's standing to be fighting on Xiao Xingchen's behalf, reminding him that he's not actually Xiao Xingchen's friend. These are the same tactics that Jin Guangyao will later use on righteous, insecure Jiang Cheng. 

Back when Xue Yang killed Song Lan's sect/temple buddies, Song Lan blamed Xiao Xingchen, and Xue Yang says now that that was his plan; he killed them to turn Song Lan against Xiao Xingchen. 

It totally worked. Song Lan said that they should never see each other again, and Xiao Xingchen took it to heart and fucked off forever - after giving Song Lan his eyes. Contrast this with Wei Wuxian, who stuck by Jiang Cheng despite being blamed & choked by him after the Lotus Pier massacre.

Despite all this emotional turmoil, Song Lan is holding his own...until Xue Yang pulls out his secret weapon; half of a yin tiger seal.  

He starts hitting Song Lan with corpse poison and resentment blasts and very quickly has him on the ropes.

He finishes up by cutting his tongue out. Yikes.

At this point it’s clear that Xue Yang was never in any serious danger; this was his plan for Song Lan all along.  Song Lan goes to attack Xue Yang but now that he’s been modded, Splendid Frost thinks he’s a zombie, so Xiao Xingchen comes sailing in and stabs him. 

Song Lan tries to raise his sword to XXC's fingers so he can identify himself, but at the last moment his eyes turn solid black and he drops the sword. Does that mean Xue Yang stuck a nail in his head already? *shrug* 

Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen head back into the coffin house -- seriously, why do they live there instead of one of the many actual houses in this town? -- and leave Song Lan lying in the street, with A-Qing, who saw the whole thing, hiding behind a hay stack.

Xue Yang Must Die...eventually

After some more bell ringing, Wei Wuxian emerges from Empathy, pretty overwhelmed. 

He gets up and goes over to Xiao Xingchen's coffin and looks closely at the wound on his neck, understanding that XXC killed himself, and why.

His face, in this moment. Suicide isn’t something he expected to have in common with his uncle. 

He tells the kids and A-Qing to stay in the coffin house; he won't explain what he saw, except to say that Xue Yang must die. Then he goes off to kill Xue Yang, by which I mean to assemble his Xue-Yang killing team, rather than try to take him mano a mano like Song Lan did.

The first order of business is to finish rebooting Song Lan, which he does by pulling the second nail out of his head like he should have done four hours ago. 

Note that Wen Ning and Song Lan were fighting for the ENTIRE time Wei Wuxian was doing Empathy. Corpses don’t get tired, I guess.

As soon as the nail comes out of his head, Song Lan quiets down, looking bereft, and crouches on the ground to try to reassemble his shattered consciousness. Unlike Wen Ning, he doesn’t have to bake in a cave for a month to achieve this. 

We get a nice shot of Wei Wuxian, Song Lan, and Wen Ning looking like the cultivation world’s handsomest goth band. 

Next, Lan Wangji cuts open Xue Yang's shirt so he can yoink his spirit-trapping bag, which he then tosses to Wei Wuxian. 

Now Xue Yang is the one who's overly emotional. 

Wei Wuxian, despite being very upset by what he saw in Empathy, is completely cool and in control of himself now, because that's just how he is in a fight. (Unless you kill his sister. That gets him very emotional, but the emotion is rage, at least initially, so it’s not a safe tactic.)

Lan Wangji gets in another poke with Bichen while Xue Yang is distracted.

Camera operator: Spare me!

Xue Yang decides to take his ball amulet and go home, disappearing into the fog while Wei Wuxian keeps talking smack at him.

Holy Abrupt Episode Ending, Batman!

[lgbtlunaverse]

One underdiscussed aspect of the bone-deep lack of mutual understanding during the nieyao stairs scene is that Nie Mingjue doesn't know - and can't know - what he's actually asking of Jin Guangyao. Not because he doesn't understand how his father treats him, or how tenuous his position is. But because he has no clue Xue Yang is a demonic cultivator.

Remember: Nie Mingjue is still alive, which means the position of chief cultivator doesn't exist yet and Jin Guangshan is facing heavy pushback for suggesting it. Most of that is coming from a fear that the Jin will try to become the next Wen. So having an outer disciple murder an entire clan and then not even punish him properly? This is a collosally bad move politically! You might as well be waving a red flag around yelling "I want to kill other sects with impunity!" There's a reason that years in the future, the moment Jin Guangyao becomes acting sect leader, he will immediately order Xue Yang's death (He doesn't actually die, either by accident or on purpose on jgy's part. But the point is that as far as the public is concerned he had Xue Yang executed.)

From Nie Mingjue's perspective, Jin Guangshan just shot himself in the foot politically for some random outer disciple. It's morally wrong, but it's also incredibly fucking stupid. In his eyes, he is asking Jin Guangyao to do the glaringly obvious right thing, even when exclusively looking at the Jins' self-interest. The thing that surely everyone else in the Jin also wants Jin Guangshan to do! Jin Guangyao can say that he has no influence on his father all he wants, but it is obvious how much work he does and so, as much as his father may not respect him, he clearly at least trusts Jin Guangyao's competence. Nie Mingjue has already tried shouting directly at Jin Guangshan during the trial and it seemed to work, but then Jin Guangshan went back on his decision like a complete idiot. So now Nie Mingjue is asking the guy who is famous for being good at rhetoric and convincing people to convince his donkey of a father to do the obviously correct thing with minimal downsides because again, to Nie Mingjue, this is all about some random outer disciple. It makes sense to ask this! It's a pretty reasonable request! Jin Guangshan can't possibly care that much.

Except of course he does. Because Xue Yang isn't some random outer disciple. He's the only good shot Jin Guangshan has at recreating the yin tiger tally. And Jin Guangshan reaaaaaally wants the yin tiger tally. So bad that he is fully willing to tank an ungodly amount of political goodwill to get it. Jin Guangyao is fully aware that not only will Jin Guangshan never kill Xue Yang, he isn't planning on keeping him locked up either. In fact, after Nie Mingjue is dead, he'll free Xue Yang and strongarm Chang Ping into denying the guilt of his family's murderer. Jin Guangshan cares a lot about keeping Xue Yang in his employ.

And Jin Guangyao knows this. But he can't tell Nie Mingjue that! Because then he'd have to admit they've been doing demonic cultivation. That the fucking ghost geneal is in their basement. That, oopsie, they actually also killed a whole other entire clan just a while ago after framing their sect leader for an assasination attempt and then used their bodies as fodder to make more fierce corpses. You know, in case one mass murder wasn't enough!

So obviously he's not gonna say that. Which means Nie Mingjue has no idea what he's demanding from Jin Guangyao, and therefore no idea why he absolutely can't fullfill that request.

I get why it's not mentioned very often because there are a lot of other problems which are both more obvious and more fun to talk about. (Who doesn't love a little overcomplicated trolley problem?) But I think it adds just another layer to the chasm between them in this scene. They're not just disagreeing, they're having completely different conversations.

[morethanwonderful]

Out of all of Wei Wuxian's traits, one of the ones that fascinates me the most is how incredibly casual and chummy he is with corpses. All the other cultivators are a bit desensitized to the dead by nature of their profession, yes, but Wei Wuxian in particular treats the dead very much the same as he treats living people, and I think it's simultaneously one of his best and most concerning attributes.

On the good side, the way Wei Wuxian treats the dead is absolutely an extension of his overall goodness and empathy. He stands on the side of those that are looked down on, and nobody faces more discrimination that the dead. He treats the dead like people because they are people, and they deserve to have their voices heard. That's what Empathy's for, and that's why he revives Wen Ning to stand as witness to his own murder. Wen Ning is not a thing! And even when Wei Wuxian is raising armies of dead Wens to fight on his behalf, we get illustrations of him giving a helping hand to a weak old corpse that can't stand on its own.

Wei Wuxian is painted in very deliberate contrast to Xue Yang, who treats the dead as tools and deprives them of agency. His closeness with them is a symbol of his kindness.

However, beyond treating the dead decently and like people, there is a point where his chumminess with them starts to get unsettling, and that's the point where it becomes a reflection of his loneliness and trauma. In particular, I'm thinking of his cuddliness with the ghosts he uses to torture Wen Chao and the corpse girls he's hanging out with when he invites Lan Zhan to drink with him. Because treating the dead with respect is a very different thing from having a corpse lay in your lap as you stroke its hair. And fierce corpses by definition do not have personalities (with Wen Ning as the exception that proves the rule), so treating them as companions to socialize with is rather concerning behavior.

So why is he like this? Isolation and trauma!

It's easy to understate the trauma of Wei Wuxian's three months in the Burial Mound, especially given that we don't see them play out but do get details about so many other horrible moments. But those three months? They Fucked Him Up. In particular, beyond the trauma of the near death experience (or presumably many many near death experiences in a row), he spent the better part of three months without seeing a single other living human. People are not meant to do that.

So what is a person gonna do when he spends three months in Worse Solitary Confinement? And when that solitude is spent on Fierce Corpse Mountain? He's gonna get really weird about corpses. He's gonna turn into the kind of man that would let a murderous ghost he's controlling lay in his lap as he strokes her hair, because for an extended period of time, that is the closest thing to human contact he's had access to.

And later, post-sunshot-campaign, Wei Wuxian does regain access to living humans and society, but he's still incredibly isolated. Just about everyone besides his siblings and Lan Zhan hates and/or is scared of him by the time we hit the scene of him and the fierce corpse girls throwing flowers, so it's no wonder he's hanging out with dead people. He already picked up the habit of replacing company with corpses once, so of course he doesn't see anything wrong with it. Maybe they're there as bodyguards, maybe he's just extremely lonely and doesn't have any human companions to drink with him, or maybe (probably) it's a mix of both. But in any case, it's a pretty clear expression of a horrifying degree of both past and present isolation.

That's why, though he doesn't lose his respect for the dead or his desensitization to touching corpses, we never see him just Hanging Out With Mindless Ghosts in his second life. It's a substitute for real companionship, not a healthy behavior, but lack of company is no longer an issue he has after being resurrected.

He doesn't need an entourage of corpse girls, because this time, when he wants company, he's always got Lan Zhan.

[veliseraptor]

Generally I remember you for your unmatched vibes. Like, you talk about the unyielding misery of the Yi City arc, and I fully agree but god do you capture it so well while also giving me hope and tenderness and also just. Feelings? I like that there’s always nuance in your stories and complicated emotions and relationships.

Funnily enough, though, for all that your Xue Yang/Xiao Xingchen/Song Lan dynamics always immediately spring to mind for me along with your unmatched views on villains & their treatment, for some reason I always remember this incredibly specific line of the summary of one of the installments of Remember This Cold.

“Enough waiting. It’s time for a wedding.”

I guess it’s also because that line is reminiscent of the vibe I get from your works? Like most of the time there’s an oppressive feeling of misery and tragedy that pervades the narrative and you’ve made me cry a lot with your Xue Yang angst but in those fics that are fix-its, it’s like, there’s always this hope in the end, that in this unrelenting misery we have each other, that we’re gonna celebrate and cherish what we do have and not what we don’t despite all the miserable things inside and outside of us. A hope for something better than what we all got (which is why I just love all your villain takes, like yeah yeah I know the world is complicated and it’s never as simple as all that but at my heart I just want people to love and be loved and for no one to have to continuously get hurt.)

specifically for that line, I just love how it says to me, “all right, enough of all this. We’ve been through a lot and we’re going to go through a lot in the future. Let’s set it all aside to have something happy for once, and by god are we going to enjoy it and make the most of it.”

idk if I explained this well, but hopefully it made some kind of sense because I really really love your works. That line really just randomly pops into my head whenever, especially when I’m thinking of my favourite trope of characters in general finding hope and solace from themselves & their bonds with each other & generally just trying to find something better for themselves and those they love.

thank you for all of this, anon! it means a lot to me.

there was a period of time when I was younger where I wrote a lot of...really bleak fiction (both original and non) that was very much "everything is awful forever" and I feel like you can chart some of my emotional growth when that shifted toward me being a little more interested in leaving at least an open door for some kind of hope, however small and broken it might be.

not that that's a thing for everyone - the other thing is not a sign of emotional immaturity - just that for me personally I think there was something going on for me emotionally/mentally there that I had to sort through, and it was healthier for me personally once I did.

(not that I don't still love the bleak everything is awful forever sometimes, I really do.)

but yeah. it's important to me at this time and place, at least, that people who suffer don't have to suffer forever, and sometimes life is taking the bright moments and holding onto them for as long as they last.

[asukaskerian]

Im gonna be super honest i can barelly tell wwx's actor from xue yang's from context. I really hope they will have different voices and body languages when i get there because in the gifsets holy fuck. sameish cute brat face, smirky, AND hes trying to cosplay wwx ? Faceblindness party.