Jin Ling’s correspondence style owes more to his jiujiu than his shushu, as does the rest of his personality. There’s no frippery or eloquent leading remarks, just the requisite opening lines to address a senior sect leader, followed by a request for confirmation of Nie Huaisang’s availability for a specific date. Nie Huaisang is free, of course he’s free; he’s been watching the steady approach of this day for months. We hope that Nie-zongzhu will be able to meet us in Yunping for the sealing ceremony, Jin Ling writes, and Nie Huaisang delicately turns the letter down on its face.

In the aftermath of Jin Guangyao’s downfall, the Lanling Jin sect was placed in the unenviable position of losing its sect leader amid public disgrace, as well as the revelation that even the sect leader before that one was a rapist whose debauchery resulted in incest and death. They were desperate to rehabilitate their reputation, and one of the strategies pursuant to this goal was to offer very large and very public reparations gifts to those sects considered to be most wronged: Laoling Qin, for example, but primarily Qinghe Nie, in recognition of Jin Guangyao’s culpability in the death of Nie Mingjue.

It was a shallow satisfaction, particularly knowing how da-ge’s death had been received by the wider cultivation world at the time. Back then, everyone paid da-ge the appropriate respects, but Nie Huaisang knows that the news was met with no little relief from some corners. Da-ge was a hero in wartime and a just man in any conflict, but he frightened people with his disdain for half-measures and empty words. Qinghe Nie had always been an outlier among the great cultivation sects for being more concerned with martial strength than the pursuit of various higher callings, but every other sect benefited from that state of affairs for as long as the Qishan Wen had held power. The Unclean Realms was the bulwark between Heavenly Nightless City and everyone else. Without that threat, what was Nie Mingjue to other cultivators but a troublesome brute more concerned with honour than compromise? He was mourned, to be sure, and his name still lives on as soldierly legend, but for the power-brokers of the world, Chifeng-zun’s ineffectual lesser brother was much more convenient.

So yes, there was something gratifying about the public acknowledgement of guilt, but Nie Huaisang hadn’t avenged his brother because he wanted money. Rather than pressing for more, Nie Huaisang had paid a visit to Jin Ling and told him what he really wanted: the title deed to the Guanyin temple in Yunping, and all of the funds and labour necessary to seal away da-ge and Meng Yao for good.

Progress has been slow; the resentful energy from the coffin is so thick that there needs to be cultivators present whenever the labourers are at work, but they’ve seen it through, and at last everything is coming to an end.

Nie Huaisang wets his brush and writes a simple reply confirming his availability before setting both letters aside, out of his range of view. While he’s at it, Nie Huaisang should probably get back to Jiang Cheng before he does something drastic and uncomfortably public. It’s a real danger, with that man.

Nie Huaisang could drag on the whole business with the tariffs for at least a year. There are sundry methods: he could misplace the papers Jiang Cheng has sent him, or they could be unfortunately damaged, and will Jiang-zongzhu please send him another copy? Just that song and dance alone could be drawn out until the summer, and then there’s the actual matters at hand; he could play dumb about the terms and require extensive inter-sect meetings to be held where both of their sect’s advisors try and explain trade contracts to him while he struggles to hold back tears of frustration, or he could send back agreements that blatantly misinterpret the original premises. At this type of thing, Nie Huaisang is a master.

Jiang Cheng is probably chewing the heads off of helpless disciples at this very moment, but as long as it gets his frustrations out, it’s for the best. By the time the next discussion conference rolls around, the only feeling Jiang Cheng will have about the whole thing is derision and relief that he got out early. Nie Huaisang isn’t so foolish to think his own charms have that much staying power.

He’s been weighing his options for so long that the ink on his brush has dried and needs to be cleaned to avoid clumping. He washes its bristles with more force than is wise, and doesn’t notice until it’s too late that he’s gotten ink splatters all over his sleeves.

Nie Huaisang sits back down and pushes away the wasted paper bearing his false starts. Jiang Wanyin can wait a little longer. If he decides to make a scene, he’ll only embarrass himself. Nie Huaisang has years of training to weather such things, and will need more than that to be swayed.

He’s already got a brush in his hand, so Nie Huaisang puts it to paper and draws the familiar strokes of Er-ge.

I do miss you, you know. I do. Once, I would’ve thought you would’ve missed me too, but I got in your hair so often even back then, so maybe not.

Writing to Lan Xichen gives him the same satisfying sting as picking at a scab, and is just as difficult to stop once he’s started.

I wonder sometimes whether you would’ve gone with him to Dongying, if you’d had the opportunity. You would never have admitted that’s what you were choosing, but you could’ve made some excuse: that someone needed to ensure he wouldn’t put anyone else in danger, or something like that. I think you would have. Tell me I’m wrong.

What would you have done there with him? You would need to change your names, change your clothes—no more Gusu Lan forehead ribbon. You probably could have made a good life together. You were both clever, and you the foremost cultivator of your generation! I think you might have been happier like that than you ever could’ve been here.

I think about abandoning my sect. too. Who wouldn’t take the chance to start over? There must be some interesting landscapes to paint in Dongying. Maybe I’ll go away in your stead. I just don’t know if I could hack it. I’ve never been good at fending for myself. As you well know.

✥

In the beginning, he had only started practicing meditation again out of fear. Not of his own mortality, but of what could happen to him before he dies. Throughout his life, he’s done as little sabre cultivation as he possibly could, but you’ll forgive him for not being reassured.

A week earlier, the wizened lady who has been the sect’s head doctor since Nie Huaisang was a child had spread her palms over his shoulder-blades and frowned. “Something’s off.”

“Is it bad?”

She continued checking Nie Huaisang’s meridians, and the crease between her brows deepened. “No. Actually, your qi is moving more smoothly than usual. Have you been cultivating for once?”

“I’m not sure… maybe?”

“Better late than never, I suppose.” She glanced him over, and added, “Keep it up, but come back right away if you notice anything strange.”

He’s continued meditating, but has kept the resulting strangeness to himself.

When he’d first heard about the ways people had used similar obscure cultivation methods to change their bodies, little by little, either by accident or intention, he’d felt queasy shock followed by blistering curiosity. Upon further contemplation, it began to seem less incredible. If a powerful golden core can extend one’s youth, is it so surprising one could use it in other ways? That’s not even considering the dark things Qinghe Nie’s sabre cultivation is capable of doing to a person. In any case, he’d thought, even if he did experience side effects, it couldn’t be worse than stabbing his own leg had been. Much like that, it was a bargain he was willing to strike. An unpleasant means to a worthy end.

He wasn’t supposed to want it. Well—want is too strong a word, but he dresses each day with a breathless lurch in his stomach that he can’t convince himself is wholly dread.

Nie Huaisang should go back to regular meditation—however ineffective it’s been at saving his family in the past—or stop entirely; he’s made it to thirty-nine while neglecting his cultivation, he can do so again if he must. He will. He tells himself every morning that he will. Just not yet; just a little longer.

His morning routine remains otherwise unchanged; he tosses and turns through the early hours, gives himself the exhausted mental lecture necessary to get out of bed, meditates, eats breakfast, and then checks his mail, hoping for everything received since the previous morning to be suitably mundane for him to delegate out of his way. Today, it has been, until he reaches the bottom of the pile: at first he thinks he’s imagining it when he happens upon a paper marked with the official stamp of Gusu Lan.

Nie Huaisang pushes the rest of the papers aside. His fingers are steady when he holds it up to read, and stiller yet as he blinks in confusion before reading it again.

✥

He can’t remember speaking with Lan Wangji one-on-one since they were children. Once, the prospect would’ve frightened him, but Nie Huaisang hasn’t felt intimidated by Lan Wangji in some time; the effect wore off when Nie Huaisang ceased to care what someone like Hanguang-jun, with his sword and his sterling reputation, had to think of him.

On his way to Gusu, he’d wondered whether he was on his way to stand trial for something related to the things that had happened leading up to the evening at Guanyin Temple. The specifics didn’t really matter, Nie Huaisang’s response would be the same, but it was mildly entertaining to imagine having that conversation with Lan Wangji. “Did you have accomplices?” Yes and no, or rather, shouldn’t you know, Your Excellency? His body sleeps next to yours every night.

Instead, upon Nie Huaisang’s arrival, he is taken to task on something less severe but somehow more frustrating.

“I used to rely on er-ge for so much. Now I can’t even write to him?”

“You may write to me, or my uncle, if there is something urgent.”

He’d expected Wei Wuxian to be present as well, so two of them could play Nie Huaisang off against each other, like they had when they interrogated him about the sabre tombs. Nie Huaisang wishes that were the case; on his own, Lan Wangji is hard to outlast, even for someone as patient as himself.

Nie Huaisang sighs. “I don’t want to talk to him about sect business.”

“What do you have to say to him?”

He flutters his fan a little faster. “I’m sorry, Your Excellency, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s hard to think on the spot. There’s too many things!”

Lan Wangji’s expression says, I’ll wait.

Wei Wuxian seemed to think there was a chance that Nie Huaisang was going to pose a threat to Lan Wangji, for some reason—if Wei Wuxian thinks Nie Huaisang’s goal has been to free up the position of Chief Cultivator for himself, then Nie Huaisang questions whether Wei Wuxian ever really knew him at all. This open mistrust from Lan Wangji, on the other hand; at least Nie Huaisang can understand it. If Nie Huaisang were a better person, maybe he would take this devotion to an elder brother as common ground, but he is what he is, and what he feels is a deepening of scorn.

Xichen-ge always shared Lan Wangji’s eloquence and poise, but had the warmth and humour his brother lacks. When Nie Huaisang thinks of er-ge in the Hanshi, he imagines him skin-and-bone, wasting away in the dark. What a luxury it must be to take yourself into solitude with your grief, knowing you have an uncle and a brother to do what you cannot.

After all, that must be the reason Lan Wangji took this post, which he neither suits nor enjoys. It’s clear that he’d rather be off wandering the countryside with Wei Wuxian. Jin Rulan is still hardly more than a child, so there are limited options left in terms of directions the balance of power may tip, and Lan Wangji has sacrificed his own freedom to keep any more authority out of the hands of Nie Huaisang or Jiang Wanyin. Maybe Lan Wangji tells himself that it won’t be for long, that a few years of secluded meditation will suffice, and then Lan Xichen will, like Lan Wangji once did, emerge to live a life again, and on that day Lan Wangji will pass off the mantle he’s been keeping warm. Surely, Lan Wangji has to believe that. Even at the end, Nie Huaisang had looked at da-ge and thought, it’s getting bad, but he’ll hang on for a few more years. Just a few more years. He’d figured, in the vague way that people figure things they don’t really want to think about, that someday Nie Huaisang would wake up capable of gravity and responsibility, and then the thought of what was to come when da-ge left him behind would stop being so impossible to confront.

“He comforted me after da-ge died. Don’t I owe him the same?”

“When he leaves seclusion, he may choose to contact you.”

“How long will that be?” After a long silence, Nie Huaisang huffs and adds, “How is he?”

Lan Wangji looks at him with open contempt written across his icy, beautiful face. “He is in mourning.”

Even a face as beautiful as Lan Wangji’s can’t make up for the boring and exhausting ordeal that is being given a scolding, as if Nie Huaisang is a student again, and Lan Wangji has taken Lan Qiren’s place. He imagines telling Lan-er-gongzi the truth: the letters mean nothing. None of them. The words are just a pretext for what he really wants, which is to ensure that Lan Xichen remembers how this happened. Why this happened. That there was a man Lan Xichen swore himself to, who thought Lan Xichen was as close to perfect as a person could get, and was wronged beyond imagination.

At the temple, Xichen-ge had hardly even brought da-ge up. He was too stunned by his own pain, too aghast at the revelations of all of san-ge’s many crimes, but wasn't he da-ge’s dearest friend, and shouldn’t da-ge have mattered the most that night, when he was laid out in a coffin, pale and cold and failed by everyone? Nie Huaisang will never forgive Lan Xichen for giving da-ge reason to believe he was anything less than beloved, and he wants to know that Lan Xichen has thought of a single other name in seclusion but Jin Guangyao’s.

The movement of his fan has slowed, and his eyes wander; Nie Huaisang gazes, unfocused, at the curl of smoke rising from the incense burner on the table between them. “I miss him.” It’s even true. He wishes it wasn’t true.

Enough. He blinks, and meets Lan Wangji’s intractable gaze. “Say, if that’s all—is Wei-xiong around? I’d like to catch up.”

At last, that produces a reaction, though a small one by anyone else’s standards: the way Lan Wangji holds his eyes shifts. “Wei Ying is not here.”

“Oh. That’s too bad. I was really looking forward to seeing him. Will he be back later?”

Lan Wangji looks at Nie Huaisang like he can’t think of anything he’d rather do less than answer his question, but he begrudgingly replies, “He may return tonight.”

“Ah, thank you—and thank you, Your Excellency, for helping me understand. So much has changed, it’s hard to know how to act anymore.”

✥

They put him up in the usual quarters for important guests, which are conveniently distant from the Hanshi, but the Gusu Lan would never be so gauche as to put him under guard, so after the lights go out, Nie Huaisang goes walking. He’s not going anywhere in particular; it’s just too early for him to sleep, and he wants to move. The stones on the orderly paths glow white in the moonlight, so he’s content to let them show him the way.

He thinks he’s seeing things when he makes out the dark outline of a figure a few paces ahead of him. It’s moving with an odd gait that he recognizes, after a moment, as the walk of someone who is trying not to make noise but doing a poor job of it.

Nie Huaisang stage-whispers, “Wei-xiong!”

Wei Wuxian freezes like a schoolboy caught out in mischief before his frame goes fluid and he turns around. There’s an open bottle of liquor in Wei Wuxian’s hand, and Nie Huaisang’s eyes are adjusted well enough to the dark to see an odd look pass over Wei Wuxian’s face. “Nie-zongzhu, is that you?”

He doesn’t sound surprised to see Nie Huaisang. That’s to be expected; he didn’t think Lan Wangji would hide something like his summons from Wei Wuxian. He wonders just how much Lan Wangji told him. Probably everything.

Nie Huaisang steps closer, so he can whisper in earnest. “I’m glad I’m not the only one up past curfew. I just can’t sleep so early!”

They end up on the roof of a small building on the outskirts of the Cloud Recesses, which is as elegant in design as everything else around them but is probably just a storage shed of some kind. After a castigatory sigh, Wei Wuxian reluctantly helps Nie Huaisang climb up. Wei Wuxian seemed very confident while leading them to this secluded spot; alcohol is forbidden in the Cloud Recesses, as is roaming around after hours, so Nie Huaisang imagines that Wei Wuxian spends most of his time up here alone.

“I’m surprised they let you in so late.”

Wei Wuxian laughs. “Lan Zhan gave me the entry pass. I can come and go.”

They don’t have any cups, so they pass the bottle back and forth between them, like Nie Huaisang had with Jiang Cheng the last time he was in the Cloud Recesses. “I guess you really do live here now. That’s so strange. Who would’ve thought, ah?”

Wei Wuxian isn’t usually around for conferences; at the last one, he was away, apparently helping investigate some mysterious animal deaths in a small town near Gusu. It’s not too surprising; Wei Wuxian never liked banquets, or conferences, or anything where he has to sit still in one place and stay quiet while other people talk. Lan Wangji never liked banquets or conferences either, but he does his duty, and he at least is good at sitting still in one place and staying quiet. It’s his foremost skill, besides the qin, the sword, and formidable glaring.

Wei Wuxian foregoes answering Nie Huaisang entirely, and breezily remarks, “I hope Lan Zhan wasn’t too hard on you.”

Nie Huaisang twirls the bottle around by the neck. “Oh, you know, he’s always so intense. I never know what to say to him.” In response, Wei Wuxian gives him one of his easy smiles, but Nie Huaisang isn’t completely convinced by its sincerity.

When they were kids, Wei Wuxian had an unusually high alcohol tolerance. The first time the three of them drank together, neither Nie Huaisang nor Jiang Cheng could walk in a straight line, but Wei Wuxian looked like he was ready to take to the archery range. Maybe he was just a good actor, but Nie Huaisang watches the way he drinks now, in a new body, and it strikes him as unlikely that alcohol tolerance is part of the soul that the sacrifice ritual brings back. If he had to guess, Nie Huaisang would assume it’s a skill that must be earned through practice.

For his own part, Nie Huaisang passes the bottle back, and tries to tally how much he’s had so far. He hasn’t been paying attention. He never used to do this kind of thing—getting too drunk in public—when da-ge was alive, but it was easier to be around san-ge while intoxicated, even if Nie Huaisang did usually play it up. It made any flashes of anger easier to explain away. He doesn’t need to put so much work into playing the fool anymore, but what else is he going to do? He’d rather be home than spending the night in Gusu, but he can’t leave this late in the evening, so he might as well be a little less here.

“Say, Wei-xiong. What do you do these days?”

Wei Wuxian shrugs in a smooth, nonchalant full-body ripple, but Nie Huaisang knows it’s a practiced motion. They were like this with one another back then, both delighting in having someone to play off of. They spurred each other on to be more expansive, more theatrical, more in love with being young. “Ah, being a married man is busy work.”

“It must be!” He keeps his tone slightly flirtatious, just a little teasing. It’s easy. They used to be like that, too, though it never meant anything. Even back then, Nie Huaisang had enough sense not to believe he could compete with Lan Wangji for Wei Wuxian’s attention, but daydreaming was free, and he clung to the knowledge that he and Wei-xiong had once made use of the time Jiang-xiong spent practising the sword to practice kissing. It didn’t really matter that it was only a few hours after Wei-xiong was rebuffed by Lan Wangji, and that he had turned to Nie Huaisang with a desperation that had little to do with him. No, back then Nie Huaisang already knew better than to attribute Wei Wuxian’s winking, smiling manner with any more meaning than that, but he occupied his time stuck at home during the war daydreaming about what it would be like to be whisked off his feet by such a hero.

He shouldn’t have invested all that time in pining over Wei Wuxian; if Nie Huaisang had to moon over someone during the lectures, he might as well have saved himself the heartbreak and chosen Jiang Cheng—though, on second thought, that would have made the current situation even more of a mess.

“Lan Zhan is very good to me,” Wei Wuxian adds, and his voice is quiet. Anything said while drinking on a rooftop at night will come out sounding melancholy, but everything about this encounter feels almost comically maudlin. It reminds Nie Huaisang of how Wei Wuxian was at banquets during the Sunshot Campaign; those are memories which produce no nostalgia at all.

He wonders what Wei Wuxian would say if Nie Huaisang let slip what he’s been getting up to with his erstwhile shidi. Would Wei Wuxian believe him, if Nie Huaisang told him that Jiang Cheng is more fun to drink with? It’s even true; Jiang Cheng’s tolerance has never been high, and his cheeks get all flushed.

“But doesn’t it get boring here? I mean, Lan-er-gongzi has his duties, right?”

“That’s what the outside is for,” Wei Wuxian replies, before offering him the bottle one last time. Nie Huaisang declines, and the corner of Wei Wuxian’s mouth twists in an expression that Nie Huaisang can’t place. He reaches out and plucks Nie Huaisang’s closed fan from where Nie Huaisang had held it loosely in his hand.

“What about you, then?”

“Hm?”

Wei Wuxian spins Nie Huaisang’s fan between his fingers and watches him with intent, any visible drunkenness completely suppressed. “What do you do these days, Nie-zongzhu?”

Nie Huaisang’s fingers fall to the slanted tile below them and curl until he can feel his fingernails scrape. “Oh, you know. This and that. The same as ever.”

Wei Wuxian laughs, tilting his long neck back a little, and Nie Huaisang laughs with him. It goes on a little too long, and when it ends, Wei Wuxian reaches out to tuck Nie Huaisang’s fan back into his belt.

“Same as ever, ah? Good. I like to know what to expect.” Wei Wuxian stands up, and Nie Huaisang realizes that he’d forgotten just how tall he is. It’s impossible not to notice, when he’s being loomed over in the dark. “This has been fun, but I should go home. I don’t want my husband to worry.”

✥

When he returns to his guest quarters, Nie Huaisang wants to break something precious, but nothing here belongs to him. The thoughts filling his head are sluggish and petty, and he removes his clothes with a complete lack of care, letting his outer robes fall to the ground around his feet. In the cold winter air, the single layer he keeps about himself may as well be nothing, but it’s the principle of the thing, of avoiding nakedness when he already feels raw. He makes his unsteady way to the bed and crawls under the covers. He is drunker than he ought to be. He is only realizing now.

When Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian call themselves married, what does that mean? Wei Wuxian has a jade entry pass to the Cloud Recesses. Jin Guangyao had that, too. When Wei Wuxian eventually dies for the second time, will he be interred in the Lan family crypts alongside Qingheng-jun and the rest of the ancestors? How much understanding is the Gusu Lan sect willing to extend to Lan Wangji’s unconventional life? If Nie Huaisang is jealous of anything, it’s not their “marriage”, but the brazenness it takes to claim that they have one with a straight face, like just by saying it they can make it true.

Nie Huaisang doesn’t begrudge them their happiness. Really, he doesn’t! He doesn’t envy the stifling closeness that must come from sharing quarters with one’s lover while living as a perpetual barely tolerated guest. It’s only that Wei Wuxian has subjected himself to every form of disgrace, yet Hanguang-jun sleeps next to him at night and calls him husband in public. Does Wei Wuxian know how lucky he is, to have returned from death at such high cost, with a man by his side who looks at his wreck of a life and says that it’s good, that he deserves to be held?

In any case, Nie Huaisang doesn’t want to live that way. He meant what he said to Jiang Cheng. He doesn’t want there to be someone waiting up for him, frowning about the late hour and asking him where he’s been. He’s too old to start being expected to explain himself now. He’s been wrapping himself in secrets for so long that he thinks that someone trying to peel them away would reveal nothing but emptiness. The shell is all that remains.

Goosebumps are pricked all over his limbs. He curls up under the blankets with his thighs tucked up by his chest, like a baby or a sleeping animal; an uncomplicated body. It’s the alcohol that’s to blame, too, for the petulant yearning he feels for touch. Not sex, even, just to feel some warmth and weight on the other side of the bed.

If he hadn’t drawn the end out like that with Jiang Cheng, maybe they could’ve had something manageable, just an addendum to their working relationship and whatever remained of their old friendship. But he hadn’t accounted for how deliriously good it would feel to share someone else’s air, even if Nie Huaisang had been buzzing just as much from fear as pleasure. Proximity means offering yourself up for examination, in body if not soul, and if Jiang Cheng had asked him to make explanations for himself, all Nie Huaisang would be able to say is, I don’t know, I really don’t know, and mean it.

✥

The sect leader’s study at the Unclean Realms was off-limits to Nie Huaisang when it was his father’s; he only entered it when he was about to be reprimanded. Later, Nie Huaisang came in to bother da-ge or Meng Yao when he was lonely or bored. He’s avoided it ever since it became his own; it looks too much like it did when it was theirs. It even smells the same, which doesn’t seem like it should be possible, but is: dust, paper, and something masculine, like the sweat of hard work. He’s set foot inside now and again over the years when he needed to find something he couldn’t send someone to fetch, but he doesn’t linger. However, his reply to Jiang Cheng is by now very late, and Nie Huaisang doesn’t want to disclose the details of that situation to his disciples if he can avoid it—or field an impromptu visit from an impatient Jiang-zongzhu—, so the day after he returns home from the Cloud Recesses, Nie Huaisang enters that dusty room in search of the relevant contracts. Nie Huaisang should use the opportunity to go over the family records. He’s been putting it off for years, but it’s long past time that he made a list of all the potential heirs, just in case.

It quickly becomes clear that a proper inventory is long overdue. The room is a graveyard of documents and old keepsakes, a surprising amount of which are personal effects rather than anything related to the sect, and da-ge’s papers are mixed in with their father’s. No doubt later users of the room were less meticulous than Meng Yao had been.

Nie Huaisang wonders whether da-ge, too, felt like a trespasser in here. It’s hard to imagine da-ge feeling inadequate for anything, but even though Nie Huaisang was young at the time, he remembers how uncharacteristically nervous da-ge was in the months after their father died. Maybe no one else would’ve noticed, but Nie Huaisang knew him best.

Sure enough, there are thick family registers and genealogies, which he scans until the names of a few noteworthy ancestors jump out; he sets those aside, and continues sorting through the untidy piles of paper he’s arranged around him on the floor. He unrolls a scroll to find an unsophisticated painting he recognizes as his own work, which he must have given to da-ge; Nie Huaisang hadn’t even been very proud of it, he’d just wanted it to have a purpose, and da-ge could hardly tell the difference between good art and the merely competent. The sight of it makes him feel winded. He rolls it back up and places it with the rest of the things that he hasn’t decided whether to keep or discard.

Nie Huaisang pauses when he uncovers a stack of letters tied together with string. He has to look twice to be sure of what he’s seeing, but the paper on top is addressed to his mother. The twine comes apart with a gentle tug, and the letter itself, once unfolded, is faded and heavily creased. He scans the page in search of a foothold in this conversation into which he’s intruded, and his eye is caught again by names, though this time they’re more familiar.

I hope Nie-zongzhu is well, and Mingjue isn’t giving you trouble. Is he still big for his age? I don’t envy you; imagine if yours turns out the same! You little scamp, I can’t believe you held out on telling me for so long. Am I not your dearest friend? But now that I know, you must tell me everything. How are you feeling? The first time is always hard, but you’ll manage. Please write if you need anything. I’m sure I can manage a visit before you’re due.

All my affection,— the letters are signed off by a name he doesn’t recognize: a woman’s name, maybe a nickname.

The old Nie-zongzhu had been morose in the years following the death of his first wife, and the hope within the sect was that his second would bring him another son, and with him renewed strength for the family bloodline. The second son came along, but the second Nie-furen wasn’t long for this world either. She suffered an accident while horseback riding. Just a miserable fluke of fate. After that, Nie Huaisang’s father treated him with a kind but distant regard. He doesn’t have anything to complain about. Da-ge was grateful enough for a sibling that Nie Huaisang never doubted he was wanted, even when he got older and began to understand that the second son his father wanted was very different from the one he got.

As for what his mother would have wanted, Nie Huaisang will never know—or so he’d thought; he flicks through the stack of letters with shaky fingers and tries to puzzle out the missing half of the conversation. He has a cute face, just like you, goes a lavish, gushing brushstroke hand. Nie Huaisang can’t remember his mother’s face, so he can’t say whether or not it’s the truth.

If things had been different, and he had been born the other way—how would that girl have grown up, with no mother, and father and da-ge already at a loss most days with what to do with Nie Huaisang as he was? He knows he was a sweet kid, because it let him get away with far too much. He was coddled by the older disciples when he was young, even if he didn’t make many friends his own age. He ran barefoot in the summer and made his own fun. But Nie Huaisang remembers those days from the inside-out; when he tries to picture that boy as he was seen by everyone around him, there’s a disconnection, as if he’s watching someone else’s child and thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to live that way, to be that simple?

Sitting on the floor surrounded by the detritus of generations past, he still feels like a child playing with grown-up things. Forget da-ge; Nie Huaisang is getting close to the age their father was when he died, and his family left him no good examples of how to get old. When Nie Huaisang was younger, when he really thought he might be the lucky one, the only Nie to live a peaceful life, he would sometimes daydream about his wedding, because he likes banquets and beautiful things, but felt only squirming discomfort about the idea of having a wife and some children and doing whatever it is second sons do when they grow up. It’s getting near to the date at which Nie Huaisang will have been sect leader for longer than da-ge ever was, and the sealing ceremony—the last of da-ge’s many burials—is closer yet, but even now, when Nie Huaisang tries to picture himself in twenty years, it’s like looking out a doorway at night.

The day is unseasonably warm, even in a dim room like this, but Nie Huaisang is shivering. He feels as he did during childhood fevers, when he thought he might shake away into nothing.

The registers are full of the ancestors who built a sect out of nothing and kept it strong against Wen encroachments for centuries, only for the family lists to peter out with the quiet indictment of Nie Huaisang’s name at the bottom of the page. Nie Huaisang got into the habit, long ago, of not leaving evidence of anything he might regret others laying eyes on. He still burns most of the letters he gets after he’s read them; though he’s no Jin Guangyao, Nie Huaisang’s memory is quite good. Maybe that’s why otherwise inexplicable anger and panic spike in his chest when he sees himself impersonally referenced by record-keepers; he can’t redact himself from forty years of documents, and even if he did, he doesn’t know what he’d write instead.

✥

Evening falls, but he’s not hungry, so Nie Huaisang lights some candles and remains in the study. It took a not insignificant amount of will to enter in the first place, and he’s still in the stage of cleaning where the room is in a worse state than it was when he started. It is, however, a chilly winter evening, and he idly wishes he had some companionship.

He was wrong, back at the Cloud Recesses. The reason he’d kept writing to Lan Xichen was because he doesn’t have anyone else. Even if Wei Wuxian decides he’d like to carry out a pantomime of friendship, he was never any good at keeping up a correspondence. No patience for it. The only person Nie Huaisang can think of who he knows for certain will reply to his letters is Jiang Cheng, and that’s only because Nie Huaisang probably owes him money.

San-ge was always available for a sympathetic ear, and even after da-ge died, there was something real in almost every morsel of Nie Huaisang’s heart which he fed Jin Guangyao to keep him sated and complacent. When he wrote to san-ge to say that he wished he had his own Meng Yao to help him, he’d meant it. Nie Huaisang wished he could afford to let anyone in that close.

He’d rather get a letter full of invectives than have Lan Xichen pretend he never knew him. He pities er-ge. He holds him in contempt. But Nie Huaisang loves him, too—he’s known Lan Xichen most of his life, and can see better than anyone how the trouble Lan Xichen got himself into is a result of the qualities Nie Huaisang always admired him for: his kindness, his modest indulgence, his insistence on giving people the benefit of the doubt. And Nie Huaisang also understands, more than Lan Wangji ever could, what it feels like when it takes Jin Guangyao’s death to realize that he was the pin holding your life together.

He’s spent so long dissimulating, but it goes back before Jin Guangyao, before da-ge died, back to when the only role Nie Huaisang had to play was that of the second young master of Qinghe Nie, and even that never came to him naturally, birthright or no. There are no rules anymore, no mission, no pressing reason to keep himself wrapped in secrets so tightly that he can’t tell if there was ever anything underneath, but what is he, without pretense?

Nie Huaisang is sober, but it seems he failed to leave the desire for touch back at the Cloud Recesses. Maybe it’s because he’s been thinking of his mother, who is usually a faded figure on the outskirts of his memory. He’s too old to be wishing he still had a mother to hold him, but he does—he wants something, at least. Perhaps just to see her face and judge whether they still look alike.

By the time the candles are stuttering, he’s organized the chaos enough to be able to pick up where he left off another time. He realizes only as he’s straightening the last of the piles that he never found anything relevant to the trouble with Jiang Cheng. Nie Huaisang huffs, and fumbles for the nearest writing set and blank paper he can find.

Jiang-zongzhu,

Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention—how embarrassing! I’ll take your word for it on the tariffs; I don’t have a head for numbers.

Once again, his brush hovers for long enough it threatens to drip ink onto the page. He lowers it with the giddy trepidation that accompanies decisions he already knows he’ll come to regret.

As your nephew may have told you, I’ll be in Yunping soon. The address where I’ll be staying is below. Feel free to drop in and discuss terms. You can come by for breakfast, if you like.