It begins, as many cultivators' memories might, with the clang of metal ringing out across a training yard. Unlike the diligent practice of many a disciple, however, this particular clang is the sound of Nie Huaisang abandoning his saber straight onto the cobblestones of Qinghe's training yard, his footsteps lightly trotting away to Jin Guangyao in the near distance, waiting at the edge of the grounds.
The saber sits on the ground, unremarkable, while Huaisang fusses and fritters about near Jin Guangyao, his chattering questions boomed over by the fury of Nie Mingjue's voice, materializing before a proper view of the man himself:
"Nie Huaisang, do you want me to cleave your head with this saber?! Get the hell back here!"
Mingjue blazes onto the scene with rage in his eyes and fire in his heart, having none of it today where his little brother and his other, one-might-say-regrettably brother are concerned. Huaisang chirps back at him, unintimidated in a word, "Da-ge, it's time for a break!"
The conversation continues like this for a moment, with Huaisang insisting he doesn't need to practice because he isn't going to get it so why should he bother, until Mingjue's next outburst, one that makes Huaisang startle and shrink behind Jin Guangyao's shoulder on instinct—
"Even a pig would have already mastered it under my watch, so why are you not getting it?!" And then, somehow even louder, "Itās been a year, and you still havenāt mastered a single set of saber techniques. Complaining after spending a single incense time in the drilling groundsāIām not asking you to be outstanding, but you canāt even defend yourself! How did the Nie Clan of Qinghe produce such a good-for-nothing?! The two of you ought to be tied up and beaten every day! Fetch all those things from his room!"
The disciples he barks the order towards leave, although not after casting a few subtle and wary looks at Huaisang, who can only gape imploringly at them to not do this— to take a long time, perhaps, to get distracted with some emergency on the way to his room and not bring da-ge the things he wants, all of Huaisang's things— It's useless; sure enough they return with armfuls of gifts, art and fans and porcelain, calligraphy, even a few silks - all left in a heap at Mingjue's feet.
Several things happen then, at once: Huaisang lunges with a shout, panic in his voice, "Da-ge! You can't burn them!" Jin Guangyao cautions Mingjue to not be rash. They both remain ignored, as Mingjue swings his saber and sends the pile of fine things up in flames, a towering inferno taller than even Mingjue himself. Several of the disciples step back in fear and muted horror, while the only sound high enough to pierce the roar of the flames is Huaisang's anguished cry, as he dashes forward again into the flames, hands outstretched for his things—
"Huaisang, careful!" Jin Guangyao pulls him back, but all Huaisang can hear is the fire and all he can see is the flames, the porcelain in his hands is white and hot and shatters as he tries to cradle it away from the destruction, a chip of it nicking at his cheek, and he looks up to see the disdain in his da-ge's eyes and his outstretched hand that's shattered both pieces, Huaisang's fine things reduced to ash and smoke and still, da-ge will look at him like that, he can't even be satisfied with this much—
The fire continues to smolder and eat away at the things that are now debris, and Jin Guangyao is speaking softly to him, his hands cradling Huaisang's hands, concerned for his burns, but Huaisang can't hear him anymore; he can hardly feel Jin Guangyao's arm around his shoulder a moment later, can only see Mingjue standing there cold and proud and unrepentant. Huaisang's body spells rage in every sinew of it, the shaking of his hands and bloodshot of his eyes speaking volumes in the silence broken only by crackling flames. His things? His fucking stuff? What did his things ever do to da-ge? What right does da-ge have—
Jin Guangyao says something else Huaisang only half-hears, and the cold dismissal of Mingjue's reply— "He brings those things into the house again, and I'll burn them all too"— drags Huaisang back to reality so abruptly that for a moment he feels lightheaded. For a moment he's nearly underwater in his own fury, until he reaches down for the saber only to fling it hatefully away again, towards his brother's feet.
"Go ahead, then!!" It's not going to do him any good, Mingjue will only call him childish, but if he screams himself hoarse he might feel a fraction better, and so, "Saber, saber, saber! Who the fuck wants to practice this crap?! What if I'm happy being a good-for-nothing?! Whoever else wants to be clan leader can go right ahead! If I can't do it, I can't do it. If I don't like it, what's what it means! What's the point of forcing me?!"
He wrenches away from Jin Guangyao's calming grasp and kicks the saber; he doesn't notice the odd way its shrill scrape along the stones echoes in the back of his mind. He turns, he flees the grounds; as abruptly as it began, the scene curtains black.
In another place— no, this place, here— Huaisang blinks. He looks down at the stupid little craft in his hands, then up at Shen Yuan.
How...how many times is he going to get blindsided by these things, before the month is over...?
They'd been making fans, because Shen Yuan only had the one and its painted-on bamboo weren't appropriate to the season, Huaisang said, in tones that marked this of the utmost importance, and when Shen Yuan had just grinned and asked what he'd intended to do about it Huaisang had sniffed, his nose in the air, and said he'd just have to make Shen-ge some more, then. Somehow that had turned into this: the two of them sitting together, Huaisang chattering away while he showed Shen Yuan how to shape the little sticks of wood and assemble them into the ribbing for a new fan, and it all would have been very pleasant, a nice little interlude, if not for -- that. All those things he was just forced to see, and now Shen Yuan doesn't know where to look.
Huaisang looks like he's about to be sick, and if Shen Yuan is honest with himself his own face probably doesn't look much better. He coughs into his sleeve, wrestling with it for a moment before sighing and saying, "Fucking Trench, goddamn."
Well, he's not wrong. Huaisang makes a noise that's closer to a vague huff of air than a laugh, even a dry one - he's got nothing in him for proper responses after all of that. It almost feels like he's still suffering the things that happened that day; the burns on his hands, the sore throat he'd given himself from screaming— mmph. He settles for giving Shen Yuan a brief look of gratitude, if a little sunken about it. Yes, the proper time to drop an F-bomb, thanks...
He looks at the bones of the fan he'd been plucking at again and then tosses them away with a jerk, like they'll catch fire and burn him just like everything else if he holds onto them any longer. Then reflexively he reaches for his usual fan, on his hip, and then folds his hands in his lap with a noise of disgust.
Silence sits heavy for a moment, enough to hunch his shoulders forward in quiet contemplation. Is he angry? He feels angry. He feels sad, too, like a great chasm of despair has opened up in his chest and if he moves too quickly he'll topple into it.
Give him a moment.
Eventually, "Well, Shen-ge, I think I'm going to need a break."
"Of course," Shen Yuan says, standing up with something like a close cousin to relief. "Why don't we go inside? I'll make a-Sang some tea." That will give him something to do, an outlet for his nervous (read: anxious) energy and a way to maybe, hopefully help Huaisang feel better that doesn't require much eye contact. He'd be mortified, in Huaisang's place. He is mortified, on Huaisang's behalf. At least when he went on that damned vision quest with Viktor, he knew it was going to happen and had a little time to brace himself, instead of...this.
He doesn't feel any shyness about entering Jin Guangyao's kitchen and using his things; he'll leave him a note later over omni, letting him know what they used and why, and most likely Jin Guangyao will simply thank him for looking after Huaisang.
Mortified isn't the word Huaisang would choose. He murmurs a nondescript kind of affirmative, abandoning the art project to stand and follow Shen-ge into the house, where he promptly finds a spot to sit heavily and stare up at the ceiling. There's a part of him that doesn't want any fucking tea, still too possessed by the anger he'd felt in that memory, on that day, to pay attention to niceties and efforts to cheer him up, but - well.
Something something, Shen-ge is trying. Huaisang's anger is directionless and stunted, besides; he'll drink some tea, if nothing else than to put his focus on something else. His eyes hurt; he keeps forgetting to blink, he feels like. He waits for the tea.
"You don't have to pretend you didn't see anything," he says after a moment, not bothering to coat his words in fussy politeness. Who cares! Who cares. "I know how these things go, already. And it will take more than that to embarrass me, so don't worry."
Shen Yuan makes himself stop and take a deep breath before he allows himself to speak. He can feel Huaisang's tension; his own is feeding on it, and the last thing he needs is to forget himself and snap at the poor kid. Man. Kid? God, how old is Huaisang really? Because he looked so fucking young in that vision, and it's leaking into the way Shen Yuan sees him now. How recently did that happen? How fresh is this wound?
"I don't want to make things worse," he finally admits, not looking up from the kettle in its spot on the stove. "Huaisang has already had too endure so much -- too much," he amends. "But I'm not good at...this. Being comforting. I don't want to say the wrong thing and add to that burden."
Huaisang looks at the back of Shen Yuan's head for a long moment in silence, wondering: does it seem like he wants to be comforted? Genuinely, he doesn't know— he knows the behavior he adopts when he's doing it on purpose, but he's yet to fall weeping into Shen Yuan's general vicinity, so what is this? To have someone want to make him feel better, earnestly, without his having to force his way to the forefront is so...
Well, he must look miserable, he supposes. Most of the time no one is interested in what he says or thinks about anything. He doesn't know how to behave when the despair is genuine; he looks back up at the ceiling.
"Are you going to set my collections on fire?" Mild, but it's not the question so much as the implication: no, of course Shen Yuan wouldn't do that, so of course he can't make it worse. Huaisang sighs. "I don't know— I don't know, if I could tell myself the right things, Shen-ge wouldn't need to make any tea. As you've heard, I'm a good-for-nothing."
"Of course I'm not --" he starts to snap, shocked and a little offended by the suggestion, but when he turns around and sees the look on Huaisang's face he...He just can't stay mad about it anymore. If for no other reason than because he oversaw the education of teenagers for three years, and even though everyone on Qing Jing was appropriately in awe of him they were still kids, sometimes they acted out regardless. Sometimes everything feels like it's all too much, and you try to hurt the people around you just to prove that you can. That you're not completely helpless.
Who knows if that's what's actually going through Huaisang's head right now, but it's how Shen Yuan's choosing to interpret his actions.
"I won't be doing that," he says again, and then he looks Huaisang right in the eyes and adds, "And he shouldn't have done it, either."
He could go on, comment on how it never sounds like Huaisang's joking when he calls himself good for nothing, and talk about things like self-esteem and abuse and many other things beside, and if he'd gotten even a hint from Huaisang that they'd land right, he'd do it. But he hasn't. And he doesn't want to push too far, when Huaisang already looks so brittle.
Huaisang shrugs, slumping down a little further in his seat and sighing. He's tired; he's exhausted, and he has no energy left for propriety or the plucky cheer people have come to expect of him. He feels drained. He doesn't feel like explaining himself. Like, of course Shen Yuan isn't burning his things; that's a nonissue. It's fine.
He blinks up at the ceiling, when Shen Yuan speaks of Mingjue. And not even by name! Not, of course, that there could be anyone else meant by that 'he,' but still. Da-ge deserves to be dragged through the mud by name, every so often. He thinks.
"I know," he says, after a moment. "I told you back then that da-ge died from a qi deviation. I know he was... wrong, before that." It's not an excuse; there's no 'he wasn't always like this' in it, no defense, just the simple fact: something was wrong with Nie Mingjue, and for that, Huaisang does not blame himself.
He turns his head to look at Shen Yuan properly, although he's still slouched pretty ridiculously, so "properly" is a stretch. "My brother is dead, and I loved him, but I'm never going to miss his fits about fucking saber practice."
"Honestly? I think that's more than fair." Shen Yuan sighs and leaves the kettle alone to do his thing, coming over to sit next to Nie Huaisang. "The whole thing was just fucked up from beginning to end," he says frankly. "That's no way to each anyone anything, for starters. If I'd caught any of the elders treating a disciple like that while I was still peak lord, I'd have thrown them off the damn mountain."
Seriously! Not even the teachers at Bai Zhan were that bad at their jobs! Shen Yuan takes a moment to imagine how Liu Qingge would handle it if he discovered a Bai Zhan disciple's personal things had been destroyed as punishment and can only conclude that blood would have been shed. Not that any Bai Zhan disciple would have had such a large collection of objets d'art in the first place, but...surely even they would have agreed with Shen Qingqiu (the second one) on the principle of the thing.
"The fact that he was your brother on top of that..." Shen Yuan takes his head, lips tightly pressed together. He feels so strongly about how wrong it all was that it's a struggle to get the words out without shouting. "Family shouldn't treat each other so poorly," he finally says flatly.
Huaisang hums his assent, although he doesn't quite care about the... proper ways to teach disciples things. Frankly, he's never considered himself a disciple; he is simply the second Nie son, and everyone should have left him the fuck alone if they were going to be so disappointed in his lack of enthusiasm for killing monsters with sabers. Honestly.
But still. There's a point there, surely. Teachers shouldn't teach so poorly; brothers shouldn't call their brothers good-for-nothings. He's not denying either of those things, certainly. It feels strange, to hear Shen Yuan so soundly sum up the issue, "Family shouldn't treat each other so poorly," like it's simple, like someone who has never lived a day in their family can make that call. Objective truth and the way it chafes against all of Huaisang's insides war briefly in his chest, although he merely frowns sitting there with Shen Yuan.
He finds he isn't angry, to hear Shen Yuan criticize Mingjue's treatment of him. Perhaps he would feel differently if it were some other thing about his brother's character, or if he hadn't just had his nerves rubbed raw by the flash of memory— but even back then, Huaisang had resented da-ge's fits of "discipline."
Where does that leave him, then, he wonders. Sat here in someone else's house, wondering if he should be more upset. If it would be allowed, by the ancestors and the heavens and whoever else, if he were more upset. He doesn't know.
"I suppose," he says, eventually. "He was my only brother. He kept me alive, you know, protected me. But, ah... I don't know. He was never going to accept me the way I am."
Ah yes, his outsider status. It's certainly weighing heavily on Shen Yuan's mind, making him question whether he has a right to even comment on this kind of thing at all. But still. The idea of just leaving it there, leaving Huaisang alone to wrestle with how his own brother treated him, is much worse. Shen Yuan would rather get yelled at for overstepping than that.
So instead he says, sympathetically, "It's no bad thing that he looked after you. But...it also seems to me," he says carefully, picking over his words like trying to walk through a field of sharp stones, "That that's the bare minimum of what he was supposed to do, as an elder brother. That he would and should have done those things for anyone who happened to share a father with him. But in terms of being a good brother of Huaisang specifically..." He shakes his head. "It seems like he fell pretty far short."
He opens his mouth to respond and closes it again, at a loss. Instinctively he wants to say, Well, no one has ever been a very good brother to me specifically, but that's petulant at best, and he has no real interest in reviewing all the ways people have disappointed him over the years. Da-ge is, in fact, bad enough on his own.
So he's quiet, and a bit sulky, even physically; just kind drooping lower and lower on this sofa in his misery.
"Our father died," he says, eventually. "I don't think anyone ever taught da-ge how to handle a whole sect before that happened." And so it was only logical that he, the spoiled second son, could be comfortably set aside while Mingjue attempted to wrangle the rest of his life. But that sounds like another excuse, so, "I don't really have the energy to wonder why he was the way he was anymore, Shen-ge. I'm exhausted, I don't want to- to carry him around all the time."
"You shouldn't have to," Shen Yuan says quietly. "I'm not sure -- I don't --" He sighs in exasperation, rubbing his own face. "I don't know anything about this," he finally confesses. "If my brothers were here they'd probably tell you I've never let go of anything in my entire life." That's a self-deprecating joke; Huaisang is welcome to take part or to ignore it as he likes.
"But it seems to me that Huaisang has carried this burden long enough. If he's tired from it, he should...he should be allowed to put it down."
Nie Mingjue's funeral is not for another three days. Nie Huaisang's official ascension to sect leader, the one with all the bells and whistles and ceremony, will be the following day - much as he's essentially been forced to rise to Sect Leader Nie already, still in his mourning whites. He's been allowed a polite number of actual mourning days in the interim, of course, as the only inner sect disciple and immediate family, it's how things are done - but in Qinghe, there are plenty other things that need doing.
Nie Zonghui is a loyal Nie disciple; he's been in Mingjue's service for as long as Huaisang can remember, and now, Huaisang supposes, when Zonghui hovers at his elbow, it's in an official capacity and less of a 'please, second young master, Sect Leader is waiting' capacity. Huaisang doesn't resent him for it - none of this is Zonghui's fault - but he still sees the man pause before addressing him as Sect Leader and it twists the hooks Mingjue's passing has left in his stomach. It twists this morning, when Zonghui appears at the door to his private chambers to tell him only "It's today, s— Master," and it twists when Zonghui looks at him with raw hurt and empathy in his eyes to match Huaisang's own as they set out alone together, and it twists now, standing at the above-ground entrance to the Nie Ancestral Hall.
The area might look passingly familiar; Xinglu Ridge is rarely traveled but it's hardly abandoned, it is maintained. But one would be forgiven for wondering what Nie Huaisang is doing out here while his brother's body is still warm, alone save for a single disciple and a tightly wrapped saber clutched haphazardly against his chest. He carries it poorly, not only because Baxia is nearly taller than he is; the wrapping around the saber is secure, but Huaisang is too distracted by the sea of emotions he's drowned in for the past few days to carry it with- with nobility, or whatever he's supposed to carry his dead da-ge's cherished saber to its grave with.
Zonghui politely doesn't offer to take it for him, and Huaisang resolutely does not ask. This, at least, is a saber tradition he can't bring himself to budge on; Mingjue is his brother. This is for him to do.
They stop at the entrance; Zonghui says something and Huaisang is somewhere else, coming back to himself to say, "Hm?" and then, "Oh," and finally, "Alright— I'm ready. Open it."
The opening of the heavy stone entrance is strange, to say the least; it seems to force itself most of the way open, once Zonghui has begun to move the first stone, and the shuddering in the air is unmistakably a wave of residual resentful energy. Huaisang makes a face; Zonghui grimaces, but the two of them make their way slowly into the tomb, picking their way down the stairs in the semidark until Zonghui finds and lights a torch from the wall. It hardly helps; the torch can only illuminate a small circle around them, as if the darkness itself is pushing back against these two lively and alert souls come to wander in its midst. Huaisang tsks and hefts the wrapped Baxia with effort, then trudges deeper into the dark.
It's dark. That's most of the walk. Dark and oppressive, with something very wrong with the walls that neither Huaisang nor Zonghui seem to be acknowledging, although not for lack of notice; to acknowledge would simply complicate matters, and so it's on to the goal: a larger room, one that the torch illuminates only slightly better, filled with massive stone coffins. Huaisang stops on the threshold; Zonghui moves ahead of him only a few strides, before he stops and turns back to look.
"Sec— Mas—" he frowns, brow furrowed. Huaisang makes a dry noise that isn't a laugh and isn't a scoff, and is mostly under duress from being in this place carrying this saber for as long as he has. He's sweating, he notices a bit late, because nothing about this can be done with dignity, can it.
"Zonghui, never mind all that," he says, shaking his head. There's little of his usual flippancy in his voice now, only grim acceptance. "Just push it open, will you? You know I— I can't." Quietly, there, at the end, with a glance around at the other coffins; he wonders if the Nie ancestors can hear him even here, and if he's a good-for-nothing at the end of a line of... well, people who can carry a saber this far without sweating, he supposes. There's a distant shame in that, but only for a moment before the oppressive architecture of this place and cloying dark eke back into the forefront of his thoughts.
Zonghui nods, and goes to open a stone coffin with a few gestures of his own saber— this one is newer than the rest, much as that can be spotted in the mostly-darkness. It isn't new; a cloud of dust comes off it as the lid slides away with a sickening scrape and a dull thud onto the dirt floor. But it's newer.
Huaisang half-drags the wrapped Baxia up to the opened coffin, leaning it against the side to begin unwrapping the saber carefully. He doesn't touch it directly, lifting it like a swaddled baby in a sling to raise it over the edge and down into the empty stone coffin, pulling the fabric wrap away and tossing it to the floor afterwards.
He stands there, looking down at it, for a long moment. Zonghui tidies up the tossed fabric somewhere behind him. Huaisang stands there for too long, and without thinking extends a hand to reach down, to where da-ge is, and—
"Huaisang." Zonghui. Huaisang blinks and steps back once, twice, hurriedly a few steps more, stopping short before he backs himself into the oddly stifling wall. Zonghui says nothing more, simply heaves the coffin lid back into place, and Huaisang feels like he can breathe a little easier, then.
So it's inevitable, he'll think later, that the stony grimness he's worn for these past few days cracks and crumbles in this moment, and he throws himself onto the lid of the coffin, collapsing onto his knees against it and heaving sobs with no tears left in him to shed over the stone. Zonghui looks away, leaving Huaisang in his grief, and he has no idea how long he stays there like that, the voice of his despair strangled in his throat before he can properly cry out, clutching at the stone like a child would clutch at a beloved relative's robes.
When he rises and joins Zonghui again it's back at the entrance to the tomb, and his eyes are red-ringed and one of his braids out of place, but Zonghui still doesn't say anything. He waits for Huaisang to frown over his rubbed-raw fingertips, to tuck his hands away into his sleeves, to sigh. Huaisang looks ahead to the path. Zonghui drags the heavy stone door back into place behind them.
"I'm tired," Huaisang says, eventually. "Zonghui, don't let anyone wake me until the funeral, alright?" A murmur of assent. Huaisang sighs. "I need— I don't know. I don't know! I—"
Whatever else he says is lost in the setting sun over the ridge. Huaisang opens his eyes, and the brightness of the siheyuan courtyard nearly hurts his eyes.
"Ah— Sorry, er-ge, I was distracted! What was that?" Ahaha. Ha.
(He had followed Huaisang through the memory like a bewildered ghost until he understood just what it was he was seeing. Once, a long, long time ago, Mingjue had mentioned it and he had some idea from his brother's description of the place, but hearing about it and seeing it through Nie Huaisang's memory were two very different things.)
"Huaisang."
His voice is soft as he puts down the Winter Mourning (a candle holder made from antlers) they'd been hanging up over the door, his expression one of utter astonishment at what he just witnessed.
It is one thing to know Huaisang deeply mourned Mingjue. He had been at the funeral, after all, and had been supporting Huaisang in the days after as he rose to the position of Sect Leader. It is an entirely other matter to see the grief in its rawest state as the death of a beloved brother broke him down from the inside out.
(No wonder things happened as they did, no wonder Nie Huaisang spent ten years working for Jin Guangyao's utter destruction; Mingjue's death had devastated him.)
He places a gentle, steadying hand on Huaisang's shoulder.
"Let us go inside and have some tea," he says. "I think we could both use a break." There is the silent offer there for Huaisang to talk about it or not; whatever he sees fit, but Xichen will not leave him alone with his grief.
(Because he knows what that is like; to watch your world crumble and mourn it completely and utterly alone. He watched it happen for his brother, and it happened for him as well. He won't let that be the case for Huaisang.)
There are things Huaisang has put away, for his own sake; things to be packed neatly into the back of his mind and papered over with something else, ignored, left to rot there for all he cares, lest he revisit them and have to do something about them. The truth about Mingjue is one such thing, buried so deeply these days that Huaisang has yet to realize how lucky he is that the city has not seen fit to expose the depths of his knowledge to anyone who might have, say, opinions and reactions to that kind of thing. It's back there somewhere; when it pokes out of the cracks and his temper flares he pushes it back, and he's gotten quite good at it.
There are things he's put away, for everyone's benefit. The things the city is showing to everyone - his grief, his most personal moments of upset and loss and failure - are not among them; so what, ultimately, if someone witnesses the way he'd wept over a tomb that didn't even contain Mingjue's body? So what if someone bears witness to the things Mingjue destroyed, to the raw and untamed grief that has wracked at Huaisang's whole being for this long? It will take more than that to put any black spot of shame on his heart— he has no idea where it would fit, besides; in the corner, with his rage, or in the great cavern, with his grief?
It doesn't matter. He sits here now and feels nothing at all that someone has seen him like that, in the tomb, until Xichen's voice cuts through to the bone, his hand on Huaisang's shoulder a coffin lid in and of itself.
Huaisang puts a lot of things away. One thing is this: Lan Xichen did nothing, and in so doing, stood back and frowned prettily while the events that led to Huaisang's afternoon in the tomb played out. Lan Xichen has already left him alone with his grief plenty of times.
It's not fair of him, he knows, but it's not fair of anyone else to take his brother from him, and he can think of nothing he wants less than to be treated softly and served tea, right this second.
But. Fine.
"I'm not thirsty," he says, because he is not, but, "I'll sit with er-ge while er-ge has tea, though."
Most days in Qinghe are quiet, lately. After Sunshot, the Nie disciples are given over to a peaceful life of training and, today, playing host to a martial arts drill. Disciples from various sects in their different-colored robes mill about the place, the sounds of sword practice and friendly competition carrying on the breeze from assorted corners of the Nie Sect's grounds, the smells of tonight's feast being prepared, and Nie Huaisang is doing nothing at all. He's having a lovely time of it, all things considered; there's nothing he enjoys more about being a cultivator (technicality) than hosting an event, and he's reached his favorite part of the day: relaxing in the fruits of his labor. The invited sects are all accounted for; the itinerary is perfect; even the weather seems to be smiling on Huaisang's efforts, crisp air and sunshine and a breeze that is refreshing in exactly the right amount.
Huaisang is lounging in just inside the main sect building, dressed to the nines in his hosting robes, still subtle and subdued in the preferred Nie style (lest Mingjue degrade his own brother as a peacock in front of other people, which he'd like to skip today) but of finer silks, with more intricate embroidery that runs luxuriously from the high collar at his throat all the way to the floor. Nothing says casual wealth and good taste like an outer robe that practically shimmers with all the embroidery run rampant over it, in the dignified style that Huaisang claims makes him look powerful and not, ahem, "like an especially clueless concubine." He likes this outfit; he likes to lounge in it in this chamber, all the doors thrown open to let in the air and the light and the sights of the disciples as they pass by on their way to this and that training exercise.
It's a good day. It's scenic. It's idyllic, as martial arts drills go, and Huaisang is content to sit back and be admired for once, for his job well done putting it together—
—And then someone is screaming, and then more people are screaming, and Huaisang can tell the difference between a scream of fear and one of rage at a distance, and it only concerns him around these cultivating maniacs that he hears both. He's on his feet hurriedly, looking around, but none of the assembled guests or disciples seem to know what's going on either. Something turns over in his heart when he hears another raging scream, and he asks no one at all,
"Is that da-ge?"
His body moves without his input, mind racing; something is wrong with da-ge, something terrible, he can feel it— it's been months that da-ge has been strange and off and now, now, now? What now?
He reaches the first body long before the square, just lying there fallen in the hallway, and he stops short, hands flying up to clasp over his mouth in sick, greasy horror. His fine clothes suddenly feel too tight, too hot, too itchy; the weather is too warm and the sun is too bright; the guests and disciples now running this way and that in unknown panic are unwelcome here, they shouldn't be here—
Especially this one. A Nie disciple, dead on the floor? What now what now what now—
Huaisang stops seeing the bodies in his haste to move, to get out to the square before something else happens, what now, and the scene before him makes no sense to him when first he sets his sights upon it. There's da-ge, in the square, saber in hand and splattered with blood. Mingjue hacks at everyone who dares to approach and even some who don't, and whatever words he thinks he's saying are a guttural scream of some ancient rage, some thing inside Mingjue that grips Huaisang's heart and squeezes.
He only hesitates a moment; some disciple shouts for him and tries to catch his sleeve but he darts away from their hand and runs as hard as he can towards Mingjue, who looks towards the sound of voices with unseeing, bloodshot eyes in a sallow, sunken face. Mingjue roars incoherently again and strikes out with his boot, catching Huaisang in the leg and sending him to the ground with a yelp; fortunate, perhaps, as that means the swing of Mingjue's saber misses where Huaisang's chest and neck had just been a fraction of a second ago. He hits the ground with both knees hard, pain singing through his leg, and still he tries to reach for Mingjue through the haze of pain— but Mingjue is gone already, turned to storm to the other end of the square, while Huaisang boggles suddenly at the shock of red seeping into his finely embroidered silks.
That's strange, he thinks. This robe is brand new, worn for the first time today, and so how could it already be torn down the length of his upper arm quite like this? How can it be so stained, so soon? He was only taking tea a few minutes ago, after all...
He blacks out for a moment, when the pain hits. When he comes to a disciple is holding him just barely on his feet, his arm and leg burning with the weight of Mingjue's fury. It's all Huaisang can do to limp forward a few dragging steps, arm limp and useless at his side before he clutches at the wound with his other hand, heedless of the slick and slippery mess his special outfit has become. Da-ge, da-ge, what now—
He summons the rest of the strength within him and shouts, "Da-ge!! Da-ge, it's me! Put down your saber!" His voice cracks— "It's me!"
Mingjue stills; the first miracle. When he turns, hair matted with blood and sweat and sticking to his sunken, sick face, bloodstained just like his eyes, Huaisang can see recognition there. He can see it, he knows he can see it, da-ge knows him if no one else, he knows Mingjue is still in there. Huaisang takes another halting, dragging step.
The sun shines brighter again, the breeze rustling the hem of his robes, and Huaisang thinks, It's over, all will be well now, and Nie Mingjue collapses a heartbeat later, dead before his body hits the ground.
The world tilts, not metaphorically at all, the world leans on an axis and Huaisang realizes a second too late that he's about to hit ground again himself, reaching blindly with bloody hand to grasp the closest person to him and stay on his feet. If he looks away from da-ge then da-ge is really dead, if he takes his eyes away for one second then this reality is all he has, if he looks a little longer then da-ge will get up, now, now now now...
The scenery seems to swim again and he knows it's too late, and with effort he looks up at the person he's claimed as ballast. Ah—
"You?" Fitz? Fitz, here, in Qinghe? That isn't right at all. "How did you...?" It doesn't matter, and he clings tighter to Fitz and shakes him with all the energy he has left, which is admittedly very little. It's an attempt. "You have to help da-ge! He's still alive! He needs someone to pick him up!"
He does not, objectively. But if approached, who can say? Huaisang certainly believes it to be true.
This is not the first time that Fitz has walked the halls of someone else's memories, but it is the first time that he has done so without the aid of the Skill. He hadn't thought such an experience was possible without the use of that ancient magic, or the presence of Skill pillars, but if the Skill had been at work here he would have known it. Like a drunk ten years sober, a Skill user will always recognize and yearn for the touch of that magic on their mind. There is no sensation in the world that can compare.
So. All that is to say that the magic at work here is not one that Fitz recognizes. But more than that, as he finds himself striding with mounting dread along the indistinct edges of this memory, anxiously weaving his way through a crowd of people who don't seem to notice his presence at all, he cannot feel Nighteyes anywhere in his mind. The place where his Wit-bond partner is, was, and will always be, is simply a raw and yawning gash in his heart, somehow this feels worse than when the wolf had died the first time, because at least then Black Rolf had been proven correct, for there had been a piece of Nighteyes left behind. Now there is nothing at all but his absence, the pain of it, there is no answering touch to his mind no matter how desperately far he flings his questing Wit sense, and even that act feels like plunging his hands into a vat of molasses. Everything about this is wrong, and that is before he hears the screams, the howls of rage. This--this is--
(This is a temporary parting, though he doesn't realize it yet. Nighteyes was not brought into Huaisang's memory--Fitz was.)
--this is a blood bath.
He comes upon the scene suddenly, abruptly, stepping out of one strange pavilion corridor directly onto a square on a brisk, beautiful sunny day, and can't take his eyes away from the bloody warrior at the centre of the carnage, the warrior who has just kicked his brother to the ground and come within a hair's breadth of killing him with a blade big enough to cleave a horse's head from its shoulders.
"Huaisang!" Fitz only realizes he's just shouted his friend's name, a desperate sound of fear, because his throat feels raw as sandpaper and no one even turns to look at him. But the scent of blood... Nighteyes might not be with him anymore, but their years together have given Fitz a keener nose than he would like, and he can smell the blood on Nie Mingjue--no, it is more than that, as though something in the blood itself is feeding and being fed by this man's fury, and it won't be sated until... what, exactly?
Until Mingjue collapses under the weight of his own body, and something in this place gives Fitz permission to move his legs again. He bolts across the square towards Huaisang, heedless of the faceless people he pushes out of his way to get to his side before he can collapse from his injuries, from the anguish and grief that he wears like a second skin on his face. He reaches his side in time to find himself grasped at by those bloody, trembling hands; there is too much silk and blood in the way to get a look at the wound, to see how bad it is, and at this angle it's hard to tell whether his leg is broken or--
"You?" Huaisang is staring up at him now, speaking to him, "How did you...?" And then he is no longer only staring and speaking, but clutching at Fitz like he is his lifeline, shaking him in his anguish and begging, "You have to help da-ge! He's still alive! He needs someone to pick him up!"
"Huaisang, you're bleeding! Your leg..!" Still, Fitz can't stop himself from looking with transparent despair towards where Mingjue's bloodied body lies in the middle of the square. He does not look alive, he looks beyond even death, whatever that means, but whatever protest he is forming dies in his throat when he looks to Huaisang again and reads the anguish in his eyes.
Another errand for another fool? He can imagine his friend's gentle eyes, how he would say words which to any other ears would make a light of what he knows he's about to do now. Fitz grimaces, then nods. "Lean against the wall," he tells Huaisang, tone unintentionally gruff, then takes his hand and places it against the gash in his arm, hastily murmuring, "I'm sorry, I know it hurts, but keep pressure on it. Keep pressure on it until we can staunch the bleeding properly." Then, meeting his eyes, he places a hand on his shoulder instead. "I'll see to your brother."
Then he turns and, after steeling his nerves, makes his way cautiously towards Mingjue's body.
Fitz is here, and Huaisang wants only for his brother to live. Fitz maneuvers him to the wall and he sinks against it to the ground, looking around mutely for Nighteyes, brow furrowed when he doesn't see the wolf coming around the corner to join them. Then Fitz presses Huaisang's own hand against the gash in his arm and he makes a strangled noise of pain, as if he's just realized it's still cut and he's still bleeding. He knows the scar that will stretch across his skin in due time, and so it doesn't make sense to have it bleeding now.
Now is too vague, he thinks suddenly; now is here with Mingjue and now is far away from him entirely, in the place where Fitz should be, not right here. Huaisang's mind is pain-addled and muddled by too many emotions, but the one most overpowering as he looks up at Fitz turning to go is still— he wants his brother to live.
Later he will realize his error, his fault in this moment. Later he will realize that when he thinks too hard and too desperately about da-ge getting up off the ground, the latent power in his blood takes him far too literally, and it's his own hastily drawn-on power that makes the body of Nie Mingjue twitch and jerk and climb back to its feet, leaning on the hilt of its sword.
(Huaisang feels tears on his cheeks, overjoyed and horrified at once to see Mingjue up and moving again, and he doesn't know, he doesn't know—)
The memory cannot bring Mingjue back to life because Huaisang knows he is dead; this, perhaps, is the logic in it, in how Huaisang's paleblood can puppet him back onto his feet but cannot put the soul back into the bloodied body. Mingjue's corpse hefts the massive sword again with a fresh cry, a raw and guttural sound from beyond, and its first lunge for Fitz nearly overbalances, landing on one knee with an uncomfortable crunch.
The corpse staggers back upright, though sagging to one side now, and lifts the sword again for a second approach. Slower, and dragging its busted leg, and seeing nothing but the figure of Fitz standing between it and Huaisang back there, on the ground.
It's been--how long has it been?--since Fitz last raised either an axe or a sword against another man, but the muscle memory of it comes back to him faster than his own awareness of the danger. At the last moment he flings up his axe--something else he hadn't realized he'd been holding, until suddenly, he is--to deflect that first wild, reckless swing from Mingjue's sabre, and the harsh metallic clang of steel on steel is still ringing in his ears as he goes to his knees under the force of that blow. Winded, he stares at the man whose body he is supposed to be picking up from where it had collapsed under its own dead weight mere seconds ago, watching with mounting horror as Mingjue hauls himself and that blade upright again.
Another fool's errand, indeed--what an understatement. He'll be fortunate if is a fight to the death--
--which only heightens the spike of dread that jolts through him like a lightning strike, because he can't tell, suddenly, whether Mingjue views Fitz as his target, or Huaisang. Whatever bond the brothers had once shared hadn't been enough to protect Huaisang from harm; Fitz won't risk the fatal consequences of trusting in it now. "Hey!" He barks the challenge at Mingjue and Skills the demand towards his mind, towards any lingering scrap of awareness that might remain in his mind. "Don't look at him, look at me!" He lifts the axe, not to strike at Huaisang's brother, but to hold his attention with the sharp glint of steel, his eyes hard and fixed on Mingjue's, a transparent challenge from one predator to another, as he sidesteps carefully around the edge of the square.
"Huaisang," lower, steadier, "I'll try to hold his attention, can you--can you stand, can you get someone to take you to safety?"
This is less than ideal. Huaisang feels foolish to even think something so profoundly obvious, of course it's less than ideal that Mingjue has stood up only to continue his violence, and now Fitz has involved himself for Huaisang's sake— But of course Mingjue is dead, and Huaisang has sent Fitz into the range of his fury out of pure selfishness, and if any of this is real, what happens if a man falls to a dead man's saber in the midst of it?
He doesn't know; he can only cower behind Fitz against the wall, watching with grim horror as his brother's body drags itself around in such an unnatural way. This isn't— He shouldn't—
(Mingjue's corpse hardly understands language anymore, fiction of a memory that it is, but it can feel the force of Fitz's Skill command and swivels its focus from one man to the other, interest in Huaisang seemingly pulled away for the moment.)
Huaisang finds himself already shakily on his feet, uninjured shoulder pressed to the wall for support. He can't just leave, can he? This isn't what he wanted.
"St-- Stop," he manages, raising his voice over the continued guttural growl of Mingjue's corpse to continue, "Da-ge!! Da-ge, don't hurt him! Stop this!"
It's no use, for the corpse hears nothing but Huaisang's distress and lunges for Fitz again, less competently on its bad knee, but the saber swings heavily towards him all the same. Huaisang shouts something again - for Mingjue to stop, for Fitz to run, both - lost in the moment. This isn't what he wanted—
Even for a corpse, Mingjue is a formidable warrior - but if one in every three of his swings goes wide, well, that's just a mystery.
At least the state of Mingjue's knee means that he has one clear 'tell,' which means when he lunges forward with that sabre again, Fitz is able to dodge to the side safely out of range--
--or rather, he would be out of range, if the reach of that sabre was not so wide, and if Mingjue's corpse was not quite so impossibly strong as to wield such a massive weapon like a child's toy. Fitz's sideways lunge gets him well out of range of anything that could kill or seriously injure him, but the sharp tip of the blade nevertheless cuts cleanly through the flesh of his left bicep. A splash of vile-looking green blood arcs away from the site of the wound to spatter across the wall; Fitz doesn't cry out, but seems to bodily shake himself, just once, as if to push his awareness of the pain to the back of his mind to be managed later.
Later, once he has found a way to subdue Huaisang's brother, to subdue him without--without--
The Skill. It had done... something, before. If Fitz can burn that command into what remains of Nie Mingjue's mind, perhaps that could be enough to end this before more blood is spilt, before Huaisang has to watch him die again--or, even worse, be cut down by his blade. He gathers his reserves and focuses his Skill awareness at Mingjue's mind like a javelin, and: "Stop. Stop fighting me." He points towards Huiasang with the hand not wielding his ax, now slick with green blood. "Listen to your brother. Obey him."
Once, he'd poured every ounce of power he possessed into a single Skill command, and he had burned it like a brand into Regal the Pretender's mind: to protect and serve Verity's Queen, Kettricken, and their son, Dutiful, until the day he met his death. Fitz isn't certain he possesses the reserves to deliver such a command to anyone anymore, and he has no way of knowing whether Mingjue, his body as devoid of the spark of life as the Forged Ones had been, could withstand it without shattering. And so he strives desperately for a murky middle ground, but still keeps his ax at the ready, prepared to throw himself between Mingjue and Huaisang again if he has no choice.
The splatter of Fitz's blood on the ground sends a jolt of horror through Huaisang, still half-collapsed against the wall in the back. He didn't want any of this, it is the thought that clouds all other attempts to think, to do something besides cower in the background again while Mingjue loses his mind. He watches his brother's corpse take another swing and miss, blade hitting the ground hard enough to splinter the stone, and then Fitz— does... something—? Something Huaisang can't quite put his finger on, like his words have tangible weight when he speaks to Mingjue; a heft to them, with a power behind it.
The corpse stops its advance, bloodied eyes dragging between Fitz and Huaisang with some muted imitation of expectation, and Huaisang's heart breaks anew to see the wreckage made of his only brother. To see the corpse stood still and waiting like this is worse somehow than to watch its broken leg drag along the cobblestones, through the splash of Fitz's green blood (side note: ask him why it's green).
Huaisang pushes himself off the wall and finds his mouth too dry to speak. He swallows and takes a step forward, and he swears he can see a faint glimmer of hope in Mingjue's dead eyes that snuffs out immediately when Huaisang chooses instead to shuffle closer to Fitz. It will haunt him for the rest of his life, he thinks, the question of whether or not he imagined that this memory of his dead brother wanted him at his side, for once.
"Stop, da-ge," he says at last. The corpse stares through him, still waiting. "You need to stop now."
For a moment nothing happens; the very air of the courtyard seems to hold its breath. Then, without any fuss, Nie Mingjue's corpse crumples back onto the ground, an unmoving dead thing once more. Huaisang makes a noise somewhere between a retch and a sob and reaches for Fitz, for some unbloodied space to hold onto.
He's had enough, and where the other memories he's entered and left have come and go gently, like waking up, this one ends like the slamming of a door: all at once they're back in the clearing behind Fitz's cottage. With today's survival lesson put involuntarily on hold, one can only assume, Huaisang puts a hand up to his own arm as if expecting to find it still bleeding. It isn't, of course it isn't, but when he looks up at Fitz expecting the same, he can nearly taste blood in the air.
What does one say in this situation except, "Thank you."
Huaisang reaches for him, and what else could Fitz possibly do but be there to catch him?
So that is what he does as Mingjue's body crumples to the ground under its own dead weight, and he does not let go even when the unforgiving bite of a winter gale buffets into him from behind, the force of it ripping the memory's remnants away like a bit of loose tarp left to flutter desperately in the midst of a winter storm. But there is no storm, and just as swiftly as that frigid wind arrives to strip away the illusion of Qinghe around them, so too does it peter out into a weak breeze whispering through the dense evergreen canopy overhead. It's only when he feels the bite of his own tears freezing on his wind-burnt cheeks that he realizes he's begun to cry.
When had that started? When had this raw, aching wound at witnessing Huaisang's grief become too much for his heart to carry? The immensity of it brims over like an overfull wine chalice, and the pain has nowhere else to go except out.
Tears have their uses, anyway. They say more than any clumsy words Fitz might attempt to string together, of that much he is certain. Oh, he can pen a screed of introspective memoirs and fill a library to bursting with scrolls of unpublished Six Duchies histories, but a silver tongue had always been the Fool's gift, not his. He looks back at Huaisang in wordless reply, dark eyes blinking away wetness that even now the cold is threatening to turn to frost on his lashes, and can only shake his head once, twice, at the words of thanks. Why, why is Huaisang thanking him?
"Huaisang," he begins, his jaw working, before he abandons whatever it was he'd been intending to say and simply opts to pull Huaisang into a firm hug. A protective arm about his shoulders can't undo the damage of reliving that memory, he knows that. But the air is very cold, and Fitz is warm. He can offer that much, at least.
On the periphery of their senses, Nighteyes flows back into their awareness like a ghost, trekking back towards the cottage through the Trenchwood. He doesn't interrupt.
Fitz is warm, and Nighteyes is near, and Huaisang will never see his brother again. That is a thing he's worn around his neck for what feels like a lifetime now, the yoke of misery of never seeing Mingjue again, no matter how high his temper is flaring or his other moods causing— problems. Nie Mingjue is dead, and Huaisang will never see him again, and as he sinks into the warmth of Fitz's chest he can only wonder, is it awful of him to think of that right now with relief?
(It must be, for in the absence of a father to feel any filial piety for Huaisang's loyalties should default to his brother, and he will miss him like a chasm in his chest for all time, but he does not want to see him again, after that. Not right now.)
Huaisang takes a shuddering breath and puts thoughts of Mingjue away, the way he usually does, where he needn't look directly at them lest this sort of thing start to happen again. He focuses instead on the real, in front of him: the firmness of Fitz's hold on him, the just-a-little-rough texture of Fitz's coat against his cheek, the winter breeze tugging at his hair. It wasn't cold in Qinghe then; the shock of winter freeze after that balmy Qinghe day is its own relief, in turn.
He shifts to look up at Fitz, quite nearly about to thank him again - for saving him like that, for risking his life for him, for taking on Mingjue - but he sees instead the trail of tears down Fitz's cheeks and blinks, brow furrowed. Just like the first time Fitz had sort of encountered Mingjue's ghost, Huaisang thinks, and then without thinking lifts his hands to cup Fitz's face and brush fresh tears away with his thumbs. His hands are absolutely too cold to be doing this, it cannot be comfortable, but it's an immediate impulse he doesn't even try to rein in.
"You'll make me cry, too," he says, near a whisper in the winter quiet. He's teetering on the edge as is after that memory, half surprised he didn't carry his tears back out of there too, but ah: tears or no, it's good to look into eyes full of clarity, and not of blood.
"I'm sorry." It's an automatic, reflexive apology, low and rough in his throat from the strength of emotions that have caught him off-guard, but even to his ears in this moment it seems a silly thing for him to say. He makes a sound that might be a weak excuse for a laugh, under other circumstances. "I didn't mean to."
His tears still sting his eyes, but Huaisang's fingers on his face are so soft, so gentle--how did this man manage to remain so full of gentleness when surrounded by so much rage and violence? And then he registers just how cold those hands are, and guaranteed to get even colder the longer they stand together out here in the isolated quiet of the woods. Fitz brings up his hands to cover Huaisang's against his cheeks; his callused hands are poor shelter for an artist's fingers from the elements, but he offers what he has, even if it isn't much.
Oh, little brother. Nighteyes' thoughts are softer than lambswool, warm and sad. Fitz allows them to rest in his mind and shelves his private confusion over the wolf's tone for later contemplation. Later, when Huaisang doesn't feel fragile as spun glass in his hands.
He draws in a shuddering breath and unthinkingly smooths down a few loose tendrils of Huaisang's windswept black hair. "Come inside," he offers with a nod to the warm yellow light emanating from the cottage window.
Oh, and that's all it takes to bring Huaisang's tears back, it seems - the gentle apology and the sound that isn't a laugh, and then Huaisang can't see Fitz clearly for a moment through the sudden wellspring of tears. He blinks them away hastily, shaking his head for reasons twofold: Fitz needn't apologize for anything, first of all, and these tears are something unlike how he'd wept in that memory. There's no hot coil of dread and greasy nausea in him now, only the catharsis of a dam broken as the tears run freely down his face.
So that's something. He tries to convey this in a hasty headshake and a murmur of 'No, it's fine, I don't know,' looking down as Fitz smooths his hair. Ah, and part of him is loath to leave this spot, to break the spell of whatever all this is and have to put his thoughts in order, to remember to do things like not let himself freeze and so on. But it is very cold, and the glow of Fitz's cottage is inviting, and he wants very much to put a solid wall between the winter mourning and the pair of them, so - alright. He nods.
Quietly, with a beat of humor that takes considerable effort to dredge up, he asks, "Are you going to make me drink milk tea?"
Jokes. He's feeling more chipped porcelain than spun glass, so one step at a time. When he drops his hands from Fitz's face he shifts to grasp his sleeve and then simply loop his arms around Fitz's upper arm in a loose embrace. He lets out a short sigh, determined like marching away from the antler on the ground is much more of an ordeal than it needs to be, and he nods again. Time to go.
Even if he's had to dredge the last remnants of his good humour up from the bottom of his heart to muster it, it's an immense relief for Fitz to hear Huaisang try to tease him. Even if he still has tears shining in his eyes, even if he moves carefully, tenderly, as if to walk too fast or too quickly might shatter the parts of him that are still broken, at least he is walking. At least when faced with the choice between sinking down into his grief, to grow cold and atrophied with the familiarity of it, or leaving it behind, he chose the latter. It's a harder choice to make than many realize, until they're faced with it themselves.
"You're welcome to tea," he admits with a rueful little smile, "but I thought you might prefer something stronger."
The inside of the cottage is warm and tidy, if still a bit spare with its furnishings, but Fitz has been diligent about pending the gaps in the walls to keep out the draft, and there's really nothing that compares to the comfort offered by a lit hearth on a frigid winter night. Once they're both inside, Fitz fetches the bottle of brandy down from its coveted place above his stove, along with two glasses. He unstoppers the bottle, pours a liberal amount of the brown liquor into one glass, then glances at Huaisang in silent question. "Brandy?" A pause, before he chuckles once, "unless you'd prefer the tea."
Huaisang welcomes the warmth of the cottage and the opportunity to simply... sit. To merely sit and exist in Fitz's home, without the ceaseless pressure of all of the things in the past that loom over his head, that sit uneasy in his heart. Here in this little cottage, he can merely be, and it is a reprieve he hasn't noticed wanting until he has it now. It's easy to refuse to take stock of what he wants and needs when he has an act to put on; it's harder by contrast to act when circumstances finally, finally do not demand it of him.
He would even drink the stupid milk tea if Fitz insisted, but oh, they're going to drink drink. Alright. He watches Fitz move around the cottage, taken by the simple act of setting down glasses and pouring a drink. Uncomplicated, freely offered. He might very well learn he hates brandy in the next few moments, but with marginally less effort than out in the cold, he manages a smile.
"I'm never going to prefer that tea," he says, eyebrows raised. He takes a moment to collect himself, to pat at his hair, to tug his sleeves straight; a moment to put himself back together, so he needn't fall apart here at the slightest provocation. With a nod he holds his hand out for a glass, and, "Let's have something stronger."
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deercountry2022-11-23 11:23 am
memshares
for shen yuan: the art burning
The saber sits on the ground, unremarkable, while Huaisang fusses and fritters about near Jin Guangyao, his chattering questions boomed over by the fury of Nie Mingjue's voice, materializing before a proper view of the man himself:
"Nie Huaisang, do you want me to cleave your head with this saber?! Get the hell back here!"
Mingjue blazes onto the scene with rage in his eyes and fire in his heart, having none of it today where his little brother and his other, one-might-say-regrettably brother are concerned. Huaisang chirps back at him, unintimidated in a word, "Da-ge, it's time for a break!"
The conversation continues like this for a moment, with Huaisang insisting he doesn't need to practice because he isn't going to get it so why should he bother, until Mingjue's next outburst, one that makes Huaisang startle and shrink behind Jin Guangyao's shoulder on instinct—
"Even a pig would have already mastered it under my watch, so why are you not getting it?!" And then, somehow even louder, "Itās been a year, and you still havenāt mastered a single set of saber techniques. Complaining after spending a single incense time in the drilling groundsāIām not asking you to be outstanding, but you canāt even defend yourself! How did the Nie Clan of Qinghe produce such a good-for-nothing?! The two of you ought to be tied up and beaten every day! Fetch all those things from his room!"
The disciples he barks the order towards leave, although not after casting a few subtle and wary looks at Huaisang, who can only gape imploringly at them to not do this— to take a long time, perhaps, to get distracted with some emergency on the way to his room and not bring da-ge the things he wants, all of Huaisang's things— It's useless; sure enough they return with armfuls of gifts, art and fans and porcelain, calligraphy, even a few silks - all left in a heap at Mingjue's feet.
Several things happen then, at once: Huaisang lunges with a shout, panic in his voice, "Da-ge! You can't burn them!" Jin Guangyao cautions Mingjue to not be rash. They both remain ignored, as Mingjue swings his saber and sends the pile of fine things up in flames, a towering inferno taller than even Mingjue himself. Several of the disciples step back in fear and muted horror, while the only sound high enough to pierce the roar of the flames is Huaisang's anguished cry, as he dashes forward again into the flames, hands outstretched for his things—
"Huaisang, careful!" Jin Guangyao pulls him back, but all Huaisang can hear is the fire and all he can see is the flames, the porcelain in his hands is white and hot and shatters as he tries to cradle it away from the destruction, a chip of it nicking at his cheek, and he looks up to see the disdain in his da-ge's eyes and his outstretched hand that's shattered both pieces, Huaisang's fine things reduced to ash and smoke and still, da-ge will look at him like that, he can't even be satisfied with this much—
The fire continues to smolder and eat away at the things that are now debris, and Jin Guangyao is speaking softly to him, his hands cradling Huaisang's hands, concerned for his burns, but Huaisang can't hear him anymore; he can hardly feel Jin Guangyao's arm around his shoulder a moment later, can only see Mingjue standing there cold and proud and unrepentant. Huaisang's body spells rage in every sinew of it, the shaking of his hands and bloodshot of his eyes speaking volumes in the silence broken only by crackling flames. His things? His fucking stuff? What did his things ever do to da-ge? What right does da-ge have—
Jin Guangyao says something else Huaisang only half-hears, and the cold dismissal of Mingjue's reply— "He brings those things into the house again, and I'll burn them all too"— drags Huaisang back to reality so abruptly that for a moment he feels lightheaded. For a moment he's nearly underwater in his own fury, until he reaches down for the saber only to fling it hatefully away again, towards his brother's feet.
"Go ahead, then!!" It's not going to do him any good, Mingjue will only call him childish, but if he screams himself hoarse he might feel a fraction better, and so, "Saber, saber, saber! Who the fuck wants to practice this crap?! What if I'm happy being a good-for-nothing?! Whoever else wants to be clan leader can go right ahead! If I can't do it, I can't do it. If I don't like it, what's what it means! What's the point of forcing me?!"
He wrenches away from Jin Guangyao's calming grasp and kicks the saber; he doesn't notice the odd way its shrill scrape along the stones echoes in the back of his mind. He turns, he flees the grounds; as abruptly as it began, the scene curtains black.
In another place— no, this place, here— Huaisang blinks. He looks down at the stupid little craft in his hands, then up at Shen Yuan.
"Oh," he says. He can't think of anything else.
no subject
They'd been making fans, because Shen Yuan only had the one and its painted-on bamboo weren't appropriate to the season, Huaisang said, in tones that marked this of the utmost importance, and when Shen Yuan had just grinned and asked what he'd intended to do about it Huaisang had sniffed, his nose in the air, and said he'd just have to make Shen-ge some more, then. Somehow that had turned into this: the two of them sitting together, Huaisang chattering away while he showed Shen Yuan how to shape the little sticks of wood and assemble them into the ribbing for a new fan, and it all would have been very pleasant, a nice little interlude, if not for -- that. All those things he was just forced to see, and now Shen Yuan doesn't know where to look.
Huaisang looks like he's about to be sick, and if Shen Yuan is honest with himself his own face probably doesn't look much better. He coughs into his sleeve, wrestling with it for a moment before sighing and saying, "Fucking Trench, goddamn."
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He looks at the bones of the fan he'd been plucking at again and then tosses them away with a jerk, like they'll catch fire and burn him just like everything else if he holds onto them any longer. Then reflexively he reaches for his usual fan, on his hip, and then folds his hands in his lap with a noise of disgust.
Silence sits heavy for a moment, enough to hunch his shoulders forward in quiet contemplation. Is he angry? He feels angry. He feels sad, too, like a great chasm of despair has opened up in his chest and if he moves too quickly he'll topple into it.
Give him a moment.
Eventually, "Well, Shen-ge, I think I'm going to need a break."
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He doesn't feel any shyness about entering Jin Guangyao's kitchen and using his things; he'll leave him a note later over omni, letting him know what they used and why, and most likely Jin Guangyao will simply thank him for looking after Huaisang.
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Something something, Shen-ge is trying. Huaisang's anger is directionless and stunted, besides; he'll drink some tea, if nothing else than to put his focus on something else. His eyes hurt; he keeps forgetting to blink, he feels like. He waits for the tea.
"You don't have to pretend you didn't see anything," he says after a moment, not bothering to coat his words in fussy politeness. Who cares! Who cares. "I know how these things go, already. And it will take more than that to embarrass me, so don't worry."
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"I don't want to make things worse," he finally admits, not looking up from the kettle in its spot on the stove. "Huaisang has already had too endure so much -- too much," he amends. "But I'm not good at...this. Being comforting. I don't want to say the wrong thing and add to that burden."
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Well, he must look miserable, he supposes. Most of the time no one is interested in what he says or thinks about anything. He doesn't know how to behave when the despair is genuine; he looks back up at the ceiling.
"Are you going to set my collections on fire?" Mild, but it's not the question so much as the implication: no, of course Shen Yuan wouldn't do that, so of course he can't make it worse. Huaisang sighs. "I don't know— I don't know, if I could tell myself the right things, Shen-ge wouldn't need to make any tea. As you've heard, I'm a good-for-nothing."
A beat. "I'm kidding, of course."
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Who knows if that's what's actually going through Huaisang's head right now, but it's how Shen Yuan's choosing to interpret his actions.
"I won't be doing that," he says again, and then he looks Huaisang right in the eyes and adds, "And he shouldn't have done it, either."
He could go on, comment on how it never sounds like Huaisang's joking when he calls himself good for nothing, and talk about things like self-esteem and abuse and many other things beside, and if he'd gotten even a hint from Huaisang that they'd land right, he'd do it. But he hasn't. And he doesn't want to push too far, when Huaisang already looks so brittle.
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He blinks up at the ceiling, when Shen Yuan speaks of Mingjue. And not even by name! Not, of course, that there could be anyone else meant by that 'he,' but still. Da-ge deserves to be dragged through the mud by name, every so often. He thinks.
"I know," he says, after a moment. "I told you back then that da-ge died from a qi deviation. I know he was... wrong, before that." It's not an excuse; there's no 'he wasn't always like this' in it, no defense, just the simple fact: something was wrong with Nie Mingjue, and for that, Huaisang does not blame himself.
He turns his head to look at Shen Yuan properly, although he's still slouched pretty ridiculously, so "properly" is a stretch. "My brother is dead, and I loved him, but I'm never going to miss his fits about fucking saber practice."
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Seriously! Not even the teachers at Bai Zhan were that bad at their jobs! Shen Yuan takes a moment to imagine how Liu Qingge would handle it if he discovered a Bai Zhan disciple's personal things had been destroyed as punishment and can only conclude that blood would have been shed. Not that any Bai Zhan disciple would have had such a large collection of objets d'art in the first place, but...surely even they would have agreed with Shen Qingqiu (the second one) on the principle of the thing.
"The fact that he was your brother on top of that..." Shen Yuan takes his head, lips tightly pressed together. He feels so strongly about how wrong it all was that it's a struggle to get the words out without shouting. "Family shouldn't treat each other so poorly," he finally says flatly.
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But still. There's a point there, surely. Teachers shouldn't teach so poorly; brothers shouldn't call their brothers good-for-nothings. He's not denying either of those things, certainly. It feels strange, to hear Shen Yuan so soundly sum up the issue, "Family shouldn't treat each other so poorly," like it's simple, like someone who has never lived a day in their family can make that call. Objective truth and the way it chafes against all of Huaisang's insides war briefly in his chest, although he merely frowns sitting there with Shen Yuan.
He finds he isn't angry, to hear Shen Yuan criticize Mingjue's treatment of him. Perhaps he would feel differently if it were some other thing about his brother's character, or if he hadn't just had his nerves rubbed raw by the flash of memory— but even back then, Huaisang had resented da-ge's fits of "discipline."
Where does that leave him, then, he wonders. Sat here in someone else's house, wondering if he should be more upset. If it would be allowed, by the ancestors and the heavens and whoever else, if he were more upset. He doesn't know.
"I suppose," he says, eventually. "He was my only brother. He kept me alive, you know, protected me. But, ah... I don't know. He was never going to accept me the way I am."
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So instead he says, sympathetically, "It's no bad thing that he looked after you. But...it also seems to me," he says carefully, picking over his words like trying to walk through a field of sharp stones, "That that's the bare minimum of what he was supposed to do, as an elder brother. That he would and should have done those things for anyone who happened to share a father with him. But in terms of being a good brother of Huaisang specifically..." He shakes his head. "It seems like he fell pretty far short."
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He opens his mouth to respond and closes it again, at a loss. Instinctively he wants to say, Well, no one has ever been a very good brother to me specifically, but that's petulant at best, and he has no real interest in reviewing all the ways people have disappointed him over the years. Da-ge is, in fact, bad enough on his own.
So he's quiet, and a bit sulky, even physically; just kind drooping lower and lower on this sofa in his misery.
"Our father died," he says, eventually. "I don't think anyone ever taught da-ge how to handle a whole sect before that happened." And so it was only logical that he, the spoiled second son, could be comfortably set aside while Mingjue attempted to wrangle the rest of his life. But that sounds like another excuse, so, "I don't really have the energy to wonder why he was the way he was anymore, Shen-ge. I'm exhausted, I don't want to- to carry him around all the time."
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"But it seems to me that Huaisang has carried this burden long enough. If he's tired from it, he should...he should be allowed to put it down."
for xichen: baxia burial day
Nie Zonghui is a loyal Nie disciple; he's been in Mingjue's service for as long as Huaisang can remember, and now, Huaisang supposes, when Zonghui hovers at his elbow, it's in an official capacity and less of a 'please, second young master, Sect Leader is waiting' capacity. Huaisang doesn't resent him for it - none of this is Zonghui's fault - but he still sees the man pause before addressing him as Sect Leader and it twists the hooks Mingjue's passing has left in his stomach. It twists this morning, when Zonghui appears at the door to his private chambers to tell him only "It's today, s— Master," and it twists when Zonghui looks at him with raw hurt and empathy in his eyes to match Huaisang's own as they set out alone together, and it twists now, standing at the above-ground entrance to the Nie Ancestral Hall.
The area might look passingly familiar; Xinglu Ridge is rarely traveled but it's hardly abandoned, it is maintained. But one would be forgiven for wondering what Nie Huaisang is doing out here while his brother's body is still warm, alone save for a single disciple and a tightly wrapped saber clutched haphazardly against his chest. He carries it poorly, not only because Baxia is nearly taller than he is; the wrapping around the saber is secure, but Huaisang is too distracted by the sea of emotions he's drowned in for the past few days to carry it with- with nobility, or whatever he's supposed to carry his dead da-ge's cherished saber to its grave with.
Zonghui politely doesn't offer to take it for him, and Huaisang resolutely does not ask. This, at least, is a saber tradition he can't bring himself to budge on; Mingjue is his brother. This is for him to do.
They stop at the entrance; Zonghui says something and Huaisang is somewhere else, coming back to himself to say, "Hm?" and then, "Oh," and finally, "Alright— I'm ready. Open it."
The opening of the heavy stone entrance is strange, to say the least; it seems to force itself most of the way open, once Zonghui has begun to move the first stone, and the shuddering in the air is unmistakably a wave of residual resentful energy. Huaisang makes a face; Zonghui grimaces, but the two of them make their way slowly into the tomb, picking their way down the stairs in the semidark until Zonghui finds and lights a torch from the wall. It hardly helps; the torch can only illuminate a small circle around them, as if the darkness itself is pushing back against these two lively and alert souls come to wander in its midst. Huaisang tsks and hefts the wrapped Baxia with effort, then trudges deeper into the dark.
It's dark. That's most of the walk. Dark and oppressive, with something very wrong with the walls that neither Huaisang nor Zonghui seem to be acknowledging, although not for lack of notice; to acknowledge would simply complicate matters, and so it's on to the goal: a larger room, one that the torch illuminates only slightly better, filled with massive stone coffins. Huaisang stops on the threshold; Zonghui moves ahead of him only a few strides, before he stops and turns back to look.
"Sec— Mas—" he frowns, brow furrowed. Huaisang makes a dry noise that isn't a laugh and isn't a scoff, and is mostly under duress from being in this place carrying this saber for as long as he has. He's sweating, he notices a bit late, because nothing about this can be done with dignity, can it.
"Zonghui, never mind all that," he says, shaking his head. There's little of his usual flippancy in his voice now, only grim acceptance. "Just push it open, will you? You know I— I can't." Quietly, there, at the end, with a glance around at the other coffins; he wonders if the Nie ancestors can hear him even here, and if he's a good-for-nothing at the end of a line of... well, people who can carry a saber this far without sweating, he supposes. There's a distant shame in that, but only for a moment before the oppressive architecture of this place and cloying dark eke back into the forefront of his thoughts.
Zonghui nods, and goes to open a stone coffin with a few gestures of his own saber— this one is newer than the rest, much as that can be spotted in the mostly-darkness. It isn't new; a cloud of dust comes off it as the lid slides away with a sickening scrape and a dull thud onto the dirt floor. But it's newer.
Huaisang half-drags the wrapped Baxia up to the opened coffin, leaning it against the side to begin unwrapping the saber carefully. He doesn't touch it directly, lifting it like a swaddled baby in a sling to raise it over the edge and down into the empty stone coffin, pulling the fabric wrap away and tossing it to the floor afterwards.
He stands there, looking down at it, for a long moment. Zonghui tidies up the tossed fabric somewhere behind him. Huaisang stands there for too long, and without thinking extends a hand to reach down, to where da-ge is, and—
"Huaisang." Zonghui. Huaisang blinks and steps back once, twice, hurriedly a few steps more, stopping short before he backs himself into the oddly stifling wall. Zonghui says nothing more, simply heaves the coffin lid back into place, and Huaisang feels like he can breathe a little easier, then.
So it's inevitable, he'll think later, that the stony grimness he's worn for these past few days cracks and crumbles in this moment, and he throws himself onto the lid of the coffin, collapsing onto his knees against it and heaving sobs with no tears left in him to shed over the stone. Zonghui looks away, leaving Huaisang in his grief, and he has no idea how long he stays there like that, the voice of his despair strangled in his throat before he can properly cry out, clutching at the stone like a child would clutch at a beloved relative's robes.
When he rises and joins Zonghui again it's back at the entrance to the tomb, and his eyes are red-ringed and one of his braids out of place, but Zonghui still doesn't say anything. He waits for Huaisang to frown over his rubbed-raw fingertips, to tuck his hands away into his sleeves, to sigh. Huaisang looks ahead to the path. Zonghui drags the heavy stone door back into place behind them.
"I'm tired," Huaisang says, eventually. "Zonghui, don't let anyone wake me until the funeral, alright?" A murmur of assent. Huaisang sighs. "I need— I don't know. I don't know! I—"
Whatever else he says is lost in the setting sun over the ridge. Huaisang opens his eyes, and the brightness of the siheyuan courtyard nearly hurts his eyes.
"Ah— Sorry, er-ge, I was distracted! What was that?" Ahaha. Ha.
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(He had followed Huaisang through the memory like a bewildered ghost until he understood just what it was he was seeing. Once, a long, long time ago, Mingjue had mentioned it and he had some idea from his brother's description of the place, but hearing about it and seeing it through Nie Huaisang's memory were two very different things.)
"Huaisang."
His voice is soft as he puts down the Winter Mourning (a candle holder made from antlers) they'd been hanging up over the door, his expression one of utter astonishment at what he just witnessed.
It is one thing to know Huaisang deeply mourned Mingjue. He had been at the funeral, after all, and had been supporting Huaisang in the days after as he rose to the position of Sect Leader. It is an entirely other matter to see the grief in its rawest state as the death of a beloved brother broke him down from the inside out.
(No wonder things happened as they did, no wonder Nie Huaisang spent ten years working for Jin Guangyao's utter destruction; Mingjue's death had devastated him.)
He places a gentle, steadying hand on Huaisang's shoulder.
"Let us go inside and have some tea," he says. "I think we could both use a break." There is the silent offer there for Huaisang to talk about it or not; whatever he sees fit, but Xichen will not leave him alone with his grief.
(Because he knows what that is like; to watch your world crumble and mourn it completely and utterly alone. He watched it happen for his brother, and it happened for him as well. He won't let that be the case for Huaisang.)
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There are things he's put away, for everyone's benefit. The things the city is showing to everyone - his grief, his most personal moments of upset and loss and failure - are not among them; so what, ultimately, if someone witnesses the way he'd wept over a tomb that didn't even contain Mingjue's body? So what if someone bears witness to the things Mingjue destroyed, to the raw and untamed grief that has wracked at Huaisang's whole being for this long? It will take more than that to put any black spot of shame on his heart— he has no idea where it would fit, besides; in the corner, with his rage, or in the great cavern, with his grief?
It doesn't matter. He sits here now and feels nothing at all that someone has seen him like that, in the tomb, until Xichen's voice cuts through to the bone, his hand on Huaisang's shoulder a coffin lid in and of itself.
Huaisang puts a lot of things away. One thing is this: Lan Xichen did nothing, and in so doing, stood back and frowned prettily while the events that led to Huaisang's afternoon in the tomb played out. Lan Xichen has already left him alone with his grief plenty of times.
It's not fair of him, he knows, but it's not fair of anyone else to take his brother from him, and he can think of nothing he wants less than to be treated softly and served tea, right this second.
But. Fine.
"I'm not thirsty," he says, because he is not, but, "I'll sit with er-ge while er-ge has tea, though."
for fitz: the styabbening
Huaisang is lounging in just inside the main sect building, dressed to the nines in his hosting robes, still subtle and subdued in the preferred Nie style (lest Mingjue degrade his own brother as a peacock in front of other people, which he'd like to skip today) but of finer silks, with more intricate embroidery that runs luxuriously from the high collar at his throat all the way to the floor. Nothing says casual wealth and good taste like an outer robe that practically shimmers with all the embroidery run rampant over it, in the dignified style that Huaisang claims makes him look powerful and not, ahem, "like an especially clueless concubine." He likes this outfit; he likes to lounge in it in this chamber, all the doors thrown open to let in the air and the light and the sights of the disciples as they pass by on their way to this and that training exercise.
It's a good day. It's scenic. It's idyllic, as martial arts drills go, and Huaisang is content to sit back and be admired for once, for his job well done putting it together—
—And then someone is screaming, and then more people are screaming, and Huaisang can tell the difference between a scream of fear and one of rage at a distance, and it only concerns him around these cultivating maniacs that he hears both. He's on his feet hurriedly, looking around, but none of the assembled guests or disciples seem to know what's going on either. Something turns over in his heart when he hears another raging scream, and he asks no one at all,
"Is that da-ge?"
His body moves without his input, mind racing; something is wrong with da-ge, something terrible, he can feel it— it's been months that da-ge has been strange and off and now, now, now? What now?
He reaches the first body long before the square, just lying there fallen in the hallway, and he stops short, hands flying up to clasp over his mouth in sick, greasy horror. His fine clothes suddenly feel too tight, too hot, too itchy; the weather is too warm and the sun is too bright; the guests and disciples now running this way and that in unknown panic are unwelcome here, they shouldn't be here—
Especially this one. A Nie disciple, dead on the floor? What now what now what now—
Huaisang stops seeing the bodies in his haste to move, to get out to the square before something else happens, what now, and the scene before him makes no sense to him when first he sets his sights upon it. There's da-ge, in the square, saber in hand and splattered with blood. Mingjue hacks at everyone who dares to approach and even some who don't, and whatever words he thinks he's saying are a guttural scream of some ancient rage, some thing inside Mingjue that grips Huaisang's heart and squeezes.
He only hesitates a moment; some disciple shouts for him and tries to catch his sleeve but he darts away from their hand and runs as hard as he can towards Mingjue, who looks towards the sound of voices with unseeing, bloodshot eyes in a sallow, sunken face. Mingjue roars incoherently again and strikes out with his boot, catching Huaisang in the leg and sending him to the ground with a yelp; fortunate, perhaps, as that means the swing of Mingjue's saber misses where Huaisang's chest and neck had just been a fraction of a second ago. He hits the ground with both knees hard, pain singing through his leg, and still he tries to reach for Mingjue through the haze of pain— but Mingjue is gone already, turned to storm to the other end of the square, while Huaisang boggles suddenly at the shock of red seeping into his finely embroidered silks.
That's strange, he thinks. This robe is brand new, worn for the first time today, and so how could it already be torn down the length of his upper arm quite like this? How can it be so stained, so soon? He was only taking tea a few minutes ago, after all...
He blacks out for a moment, when the pain hits. When he comes to a disciple is holding him just barely on his feet, his arm and leg burning with the weight of Mingjue's fury. It's all Huaisang can do to limp forward a few dragging steps, arm limp and useless at his side before he clutches at the wound with his other hand, heedless of the slick and slippery mess his special outfit has become. Da-ge, da-ge, what now—
He summons the rest of the strength within him and shouts, "Da-ge!! Da-ge, it's me! Put down your saber!" His voice cracks— "It's me!"
Mingjue stills; the first miracle. When he turns, hair matted with blood and sweat and sticking to his sunken, sick face, bloodstained just like his eyes, Huaisang can see recognition there. He can see it, he knows he can see it, da-ge knows him if no one else, he knows Mingjue is still in there. Huaisang takes another halting, dragging step.
The sun shines brighter again, the breeze rustling the hem of his robes, and Huaisang thinks, It's over, all will be well now, and Nie Mingjue collapses a heartbeat later, dead before his body hits the ground.
The world tilts, not metaphorically at all, the world leans on an axis and Huaisang realizes a second too late that he's about to hit ground again himself, reaching blindly with bloody hand to grasp the closest person to him and stay on his feet. If he looks away from da-ge then da-ge is really dead, if he takes his eyes away for one second then this reality is all he has, if he looks a little longer then da-ge will get up, now, now now now...
The scenery seems to swim again and he knows it's too late, and with effort he looks up at the person he's claimed as ballast. Ah—
"You?" Fitz? Fitz, here, in Qinghe? That isn't right at all. "How did you...?" It doesn't matter, and he clings tighter to Fitz and shakes him with all the energy he has left, which is admittedly very little. It's an attempt. "You have to help da-ge! He's still alive! He needs someone to pick him up!"
He does not, objectively. But if approached, who can say? Huaisang certainly believes it to be true.
cw for blood? discussion of nmj's bleeding eyes
So. All that is to say that the magic at work here is not one that Fitz recognizes. But more than that, as he finds himself striding with mounting dread along the indistinct edges of this memory, anxiously weaving his way through a crowd of people who don't seem to notice his presence at all, he cannot feel Nighteyes anywhere in his mind. The place where his Wit-bond partner is, was, and will always be, is simply a raw and yawning gash in his heart, somehow this feels worse than when the wolf had died the first time, because at least then Black Rolf had been proven correct, for there had been a piece of Nighteyes left behind. Now there is nothing at all but his absence, the pain of it, there is no answering touch to his mind no matter how desperately far he flings his questing Wit sense, and even that act feels like plunging his hands into a vat of molasses. Everything about this is wrong, and that is before he hears the screams, the howls of rage. This--this is--
(This is a temporary parting, though he doesn't realize it yet. Nighteyes was not brought into Huaisang's memory--Fitz was.)
--this is a blood bath.
He comes upon the scene suddenly, abruptly, stepping out of one strange pavilion corridor directly onto a square on a brisk, beautiful sunny day, and can't take his eyes away from the bloody warrior at the centre of the carnage, the warrior who has just kicked his brother to the ground and come within a hair's breadth of killing him with a blade big enough to cleave a horse's head from its shoulders.
"Huaisang!" Fitz only realizes he's just shouted his friend's name, a desperate sound of fear, because his throat feels raw as sandpaper and no one even turns to look at him. But the scent of blood... Nighteyes might not be with him anymore, but their years together have given Fitz a keener nose than he would like, and he can smell the blood on Nie Mingjue--no, it is more than that, as though something in the blood itself is feeding and being fed by this man's fury, and it won't be sated until... what, exactly?
Until Mingjue collapses under the weight of his own body, and something in this place gives Fitz permission to move his legs again. He bolts across the square towards Huaisang, heedless of the faceless people he pushes out of his way to get to his side before he can collapse from his injuries, from the anguish and grief that he wears like a second skin on his face. He reaches his side in time to find himself grasped at by those bloody, trembling hands; there is too much silk and blood in the way to get a look at the wound, to see how bad it is, and at this angle it's hard to tell whether his leg is broken or--
"You?" Huaisang is staring up at him now, speaking to him, "How did you...?" And then he is no longer only staring and speaking, but clutching at Fitz like he is his lifeline, shaking him in his anguish and begging, "You have to help da-ge! He's still alive! He needs someone to pick him up!"
"Huaisang, you're bleeding! Your leg..!" Still, Fitz can't stop himself from looking with transparent despair towards where Mingjue's bloodied body lies in the middle of the square. He does not look alive, he looks beyond even death, whatever that means, but whatever protest he is forming dies in his throat when he looks to Huaisang again and reads the anguish in his eyes.
Another errand for another fool? He can imagine his friend's gentle eyes, how he would say words which to any other ears would make a light of what he knows he's about to do now. Fitz grimaces, then nods. "Lean against the wall," he tells Huaisang, tone unintentionally gruff, then takes his hand and places it against the gash in his arm, hastily murmuring, "I'm sorry, I know it hurts, but keep pressure on it. Keep pressure on it until we can staunch the bleeding properly." Then, meeting his eyes, he places a hand on his shoulder instead. "I'll see to your brother."
Then he turns and, after steeling his nerves, makes his way cautiously towards Mingjue's body.
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Now is too vague, he thinks suddenly; now is here with Mingjue and now is far away from him entirely, in the place where Fitz should be, not right here. Huaisang's mind is pain-addled and muddled by too many emotions, but the one most overpowering as he looks up at Fitz turning to go is still— he wants his brother to live.
Later he will realize his error, his fault in this moment. Later he will realize that when he thinks too hard and too desperately about da-ge getting up off the ground, the latent power in his blood takes him far too literally, and it's his own hastily drawn-on power that makes the body of Nie Mingjue twitch and jerk and climb back to its feet, leaning on the hilt of its sword.
(Huaisang feels tears on his cheeks, overjoyed and horrified at once to see Mingjue up and moving again, and he doesn't know, he doesn't know—)
The memory cannot bring Mingjue back to life because Huaisang knows he is dead; this, perhaps, is the logic in it, in how Huaisang's paleblood can puppet him back onto his feet but cannot put the soul back into the bloodied body. Mingjue's corpse hefts the massive sword again with a fresh cry, a raw and guttural sound from beyond, and its first lunge for Fitz nearly overbalances, landing on one knee with an uncomfortable crunch.
The corpse staggers back upright, though sagging to one side now, and lifts the sword again for a second approach. Slower, and dragging its busted leg, and seeing nothing but the figure of Fitz standing between it and Huaisang back there, on the ground.
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Another fool's errand, indeed--what an understatement. He'll be fortunate if is a fight to the death--
--which only heightens the spike of dread that jolts through him like a lightning strike, because he can't tell, suddenly, whether Mingjue views Fitz as his target, or Huaisang. Whatever bond the brothers had once shared hadn't been enough to protect Huaisang from harm; Fitz won't risk the fatal consequences of trusting in it now. "Hey!" He barks the challenge at Mingjue and Skills the demand towards his mind, towards any lingering scrap of awareness that might remain in his mind. "Don't look at him, look at me!" He lifts the axe, not to strike at Huaisang's brother, but to hold his attention with the sharp glint of steel, his eyes hard and fixed on Mingjue's, a transparent challenge from one predator to another, as he sidesteps carefully around the edge of the square.
"Huaisang," lower, steadier, "I'll try to hold his attention, can you--can you stand, can you get someone to take you to safety?"
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He doesn't know; he can only cower behind Fitz against the wall, watching with grim horror as his brother's body drags itself around in such an unnatural way. This isn't— He shouldn't—
(Mingjue's corpse hardly understands language anymore, fiction of a memory that it is, but it can feel the force of Fitz's Skill command and swivels its focus from one man to the other, interest in Huaisang seemingly pulled away for the moment.)
Huaisang finds himself already shakily on his feet, uninjured shoulder pressed to the wall for support. He can't just leave, can he? This isn't what he wanted.
"St-- Stop," he manages, raising his voice over the continued guttural growl of Mingjue's corpse to continue, "Da-ge!! Da-ge, don't hurt him! Stop this!"
It's no use, for the corpse hears nothing but Huaisang's distress and lunges for Fitz again, less competently on its bad knee, but the saber swings heavily towards him all the same. Huaisang shouts something again - for Mingjue to stop, for Fitz to run, both - lost in the moment. This isn't what he wanted—
Even for a corpse, Mingjue is a formidable warrior - but if one in every three of his swings goes wide, well, that's just a mystery.
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--or rather, he would be out of range, if the reach of that sabre was not so wide, and if Mingjue's corpse was not quite so impossibly strong as to wield such a massive weapon like a child's toy. Fitz's sideways lunge gets him well out of range of anything that could kill or seriously injure him, but the sharp tip of the blade nevertheless cuts cleanly through the flesh of his left bicep. A splash of vile-looking green blood arcs away from the site of the wound to spatter across the wall; Fitz doesn't cry out, but seems to bodily shake himself, just once, as if to push his awareness of the pain to the back of his mind to be managed later.
Later, once he has found a way to subdue Huaisang's brother, to subdue him without--without--
The Skill. It had done... something, before. If Fitz can burn that command into what remains of Nie Mingjue's mind, perhaps that could be enough to end this before more blood is spilt, before Huaisang has to watch him die again--or, even worse, be cut down by his blade. He gathers his reserves and focuses his Skill awareness at Mingjue's mind like a javelin, and: "Stop. Stop fighting me." He points towards Huiasang with the hand not wielding his ax, now slick with green blood. "Listen to your brother. Obey him."
Once, he'd poured every ounce of power he possessed into a single Skill command, and he had burned it like a brand into Regal the Pretender's mind: to protect and serve Verity's Queen, Kettricken, and their son, Dutiful, until the day he met his death. Fitz isn't certain he possesses the reserves to deliver such a command to anyone anymore, and he has no way of knowing whether Mingjue, his body as devoid of the spark of life as the Forged Ones had been, could withstand it without shattering. And so he strives desperately for a murky middle ground, but still keeps his ax at the ready, prepared to throw himself between Mingjue and Huaisang again if he has no choice.
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The corpse stops its advance, bloodied eyes dragging between Fitz and Huaisang with some muted imitation of expectation, and Huaisang's heart breaks anew to see the wreckage made of his only brother. To see the corpse stood still and waiting like this is worse somehow than to watch its broken leg drag along the cobblestones, through the splash of Fitz's green blood (side note: ask him why it's green).
Huaisang pushes himself off the wall and finds his mouth too dry to speak. He swallows and takes a step forward, and he swears he can see a faint glimmer of hope in Mingjue's dead eyes that snuffs out immediately when Huaisang chooses instead to shuffle closer to Fitz. It will haunt him for the rest of his life, he thinks, the question of whether or not he imagined that this memory of his dead brother wanted him at his side, for once.
"Stop, da-ge," he says at last. The corpse stares through him, still waiting. "You need to stop now."
For a moment nothing happens; the very air of the courtyard seems to hold its breath. Then, without any fuss, Nie Mingjue's corpse crumples back onto the ground, an unmoving dead thing once more. Huaisang makes a noise somewhere between a retch and a sob and reaches for Fitz, for some unbloodied space to hold onto.
He's had enough, and where the other memories he's entered and left have come and go gently, like waking up, this one ends like the slamming of a door: all at once they're back in the clearing behind Fitz's cottage. With today's survival lesson put involuntarily on hold, one can only assume, Huaisang puts a hand up to his own arm as if expecting to find it still bleeding. It isn't, of course it isn't, but when he looks up at Fitz expecting the same, he can nearly taste blood in the air.
What does one say in this situation except, "Thank you."
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So that is what he does as Mingjue's body crumples to the ground under its own dead weight, and he does not let go even when the unforgiving bite of a winter gale buffets into him from behind, the force of it ripping the memory's remnants away like a bit of loose tarp left to flutter desperately in the midst of a winter storm. But there is no storm, and just as swiftly as that frigid wind arrives to strip away the illusion of Qinghe around them, so too does it peter out into a weak breeze whispering through the dense evergreen canopy overhead. It's only when he feels the bite of his own tears freezing on his wind-burnt cheeks that he realizes he's begun to cry.
When had that started? When had this raw, aching wound at witnessing Huaisang's grief become too much for his heart to carry? The immensity of it brims over like an overfull wine chalice, and the pain has nowhere else to go except out.
Tears have their uses, anyway. They say more than any clumsy words Fitz might attempt to string together, of that much he is certain. Oh, he can pen a screed of introspective memoirs and fill a library to bursting with scrolls of unpublished Six Duchies histories, but a silver tongue had always been the Fool's gift, not his. He looks back at Huaisang in wordless reply, dark eyes blinking away wetness that even now the cold is threatening to turn to frost on his lashes, and can only shake his head once, twice, at the words of thanks. Why, why is Huaisang thanking him?
"Huaisang," he begins, his jaw working, before he abandons whatever it was he'd been intending to say and simply opts to pull Huaisang into a firm hug. A protective arm about his shoulders can't undo the damage of reliving that memory, he knows that. But the air is very cold, and Fitz is warm. He can offer that much, at least.
On the periphery of their senses, Nighteyes flows back into their awareness like a ghost, trekking back towards the cottage through the Trenchwood. He doesn't interrupt.
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(It must be, for in the absence of a father to feel any filial piety for Huaisang's loyalties should default to his brother, and he will miss him like a chasm in his chest for all time, but he does not want to see him again, after that. Not right now.)
Huaisang takes a shuddering breath and puts thoughts of Mingjue away, the way he usually does, where he needn't look directly at them lest this sort of thing start to happen again. He focuses instead on the real, in front of him: the firmness of Fitz's hold on him, the just-a-little-rough texture of Fitz's coat against his cheek, the winter breeze tugging at his hair. It wasn't cold in Qinghe then; the shock of winter freeze after that balmy Qinghe day is its own relief, in turn.
He shifts to look up at Fitz, quite nearly about to thank him again - for saving him like that, for risking his life for him, for taking on Mingjue - but he sees instead the trail of tears down Fitz's cheeks and blinks, brow furrowed. Just like the first time Fitz had sort of encountered Mingjue's ghost, Huaisang thinks, and then without thinking lifts his hands to cup Fitz's face and brush fresh tears away with his thumbs. His hands are absolutely too cold to be doing this, it cannot be comfortable, but it's an immediate impulse he doesn't even try to rein in.
"You'll make me cry, too," he says, near a whisper in the winter quiet. He's teetering on the edge as is after that memory, half surprised he didn't carry his tears back out of there too, but ah: tears or no, it's good to look into eyes full of clarity, and not of blood.
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"I'm sorry." It's an automatic, reflexive apology, low and rough in his throat from the strength of emotions that have caught him off-guard, but even to his ears in this moment it seems a silly thing for him to say. He makes a sound that might be a weak excuse for a laugh, under other circumstances. "I didn't mean to."
His tears still sting his eyes, but Huaisang's fingers on his face are so soft, so gentle--how did this man manage to remain so full of gentleness when surrounded by so much rage and violence? And then he registers just how cold those hands are, and guaranteed to get even colder the longer they stand together out here in the isolated quiet of the woods. Fitz brings up his hands to cover Huaisang's against his cheeks; his callused hands are poor shelter for an artist's fingers from the elements, but he offers what he has, even if it isn't much.
Oh, little brother. Nighteyes' thoughts are softer than lambswool, warm and sad. Fitz allows them to rest in his mind and shelves his private confusion over the wolf's tone for later contemplation. Later, when Huaisang doesn't feel fragile as spun glass in his hands.
He draws in a shuddering breath and unthinkingly smooths down a few loose tendrils of Huaisang's windswept black hair. "Come inside," he offers with a nod to the warm yellow light emanating from the cottage window.
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So that's something. He tries to convey this in a hasty headshake and a murmur of 'No, it's fine, I don't know,' looking down as Fitz smooths his hair. Ah, and part of him is loath to leave this spot, to break the spell of whatever all this is and have to put his thoughts in order, to remember to do things like not let himself freeze and so on. But it is very cold, and the glow of Fitz's cottage is inviting, and he wants very much to put a solid wall between the winter mourning and the pair of them, so - alright. He nods.
Quietly, with a beat of humor that takes considerable effort to dredge up, he asks, "Are you going to make me drink milk tea?"
Jokes. He's feeling more chipped porcelain than spun glass, so one step at a time. When he drops his hands from Fitz's face he shifts to grasp his sleeve and then simply loop his arms around Fitz's upper arm in a loose embrace. He lets out a short sigh, determined like marching away from the antler on the ground is much more of an ordeal than it needs to be, and he nods again. Time to go.
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"You're welcome to tea," he admits with a rueful little smile, "but I thought you might prefer something stronger."
The inside of the cottage is warm and tidy, if still a bit spare with its furnishings, but Fitz has been diligent about pending the gaps in the walls to keep out the draft, and there's really nothing that compares to the comfort offered by a lit hearth on a frigid winter night. Once they're both inside, Fitz fetches the bottle of brandy down from its coveted place above his stove, along with two glasses. He unstoppers the bottle, pours a liberal amount of the brown liquor into one glass, then glances at Huaisang in silent question. "Brandy?" A pause, before he chuckles once, "unless you'd prefer the tea."
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He would even drink the stupid milk tea if Fitz insisted, but oh, they're going to drink drink. Alright. He watches Fitz move around the cottage, taken by the simple act of setting down glasses and pouring a drink. Uncomplicated, freely offered. He might very well learn he hates brandy in the next few moments, but with marginally less effort than out in the cold, he manages a smile.
"I'm never going to prefer that tea," he says, eyebrows raised. He takes a moment to collect himself, to pat at his hair, to tug his sleeves straight; a moment to put himself back together, so he needn't fall apart here at the slightest provocation. With a nod he holds his hand out for a glass, and, "Let's have something stronger."