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“You never answered my question,” Lan Xichen murmurs to his brother’s brother, over a game of weiqi, as the two of them kneel opposite each other in the Hanshi. He raises his head to look at Nie Huaisang, but a-Sang does not meet his eyes. “Despite the many times I have asked - you hold your tongue.”
The Nie Huaisang who Lan Xichen protected for more than a decade would fumble here, and make some sort of flustered comment. Likely he would shake his hands. The Nie Huaisang sitting across from him clears his throat, positions a stone on the board between them - it’s a good move, Lan Xichen registers faintly, removing two liberties with one efficient placement - and says, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“It’s your turn, er-ge.”
“Don’t ask?”
“You know what I meant,” a-Sang says quietly, eyes darting towards Lan Xichen’s before flickering away again. “We’re having a nice day, er-ge. You know where this path leads.”
Lan Xichen takes a stone blindly from his own pile, disregarding strategy as he chooses a space on the board. He notices, distantly, the way his hands shake as he places it against the wood with a dull click. A-Sang clucks his tongue and removes a stone of his own from the board. “You have always been good at this, er-ge,” he praises, making his own move without hesitation, and Lan Xichen understands: it’s an out.
He doesn’t take it. “Did a-Yao really move?”
Nie Huaisang stills.
“Answer me, a-Sang,” Lan Xichen says hoarsely. He knows the answer, by now - of course he does. It has been several years since a-Yao’s … since the events at Guanyin Temple, and he still hears the echo of a-Sang’s shout, of a-Yao’s guttural hiss; still wrought in his sense-memory is the effortless way Shuoyue pierced cloth and flesh, singing in his grasp at the blood of his brother. He remembers the pallor of a-Sang’s cheeks and the widening of his eyes. Wangji (doubtless quoting his husband) says that they should leave Nie Huaisang to his own domain in Qinghe, let him drape the Unclean Realm in paintings and tapestry and soften its sharp edges with time; let the past draw into itself, and learn to forget. But Lan Xichen, it seems, cannot stop prodding at old wounds.
He knows the answer, by now. He just needs to make himself believe it.
Lan Xichen presses his fingers against his eyelids for a long moment, feels the strain in his brow. “You killed my brother.”
Nie Huaisang swallows with an audible click. There are none of the excessive, stammering denials Lan Xichen is used to hearing fall from his lips. There is no contradiction or qualification. Instead, Nie Huaisang murmurs, hushed but clear, “He killed mine.”
Lan Xichen takes a trembling breath and grasps at his pile of stones, searching for something to twist in his hands. (Usually he would be carrying Shuoyue, would trace his fingertips over the embellishment on its hilt - but Shuoyue rests unused across the room, forsaken in Lan Xichen’s cowardice.) There is an undercurrent of certainty, of unambiguity, in a-Sang’s words. He hears them echo, in the way he hears a-Yao’s but did I act? in every moment he lets his thoughts drift from his tangible tasks; he hears, and hears, and has not yet been able to stop hearing the driving fierceness in the quiet of a-Sang’s tone.
It unsettles him - a-Sang’s composure. Lan Xichen has wondered, countless times, how Nie Huaisang and Nie Mingjue were of the same blood. But he sees their da-ge now, in a-Sang’s harshness. Though a-Sang’s anger is and has always been well-concealed, held within his chest, it is undeniably the same fury.
“You are angry,” Lan Xichen says, quietly, stupidly. It’s only pointing out the obvious.
Nie Huaisang raises his eyes, here - pauses in his flickering gaze to meet Lan Xichen unflinchingly. “Even now,” he agrees. “Of course.”
Lan Xichen says, as if he has not secluded himself in the Hanshi ever since he first returned to the Cloud Recesses, “It’s been years.”
“It has.” Nie Huaisang makes a-Yao’s smile again; Lan Xichen muses, despairingly, that he does not bother to hide it here. He does not think a-Sang has brought a fan to visit Lan Xichen since he first entered seclusion. “It’s still your turn, you know, er-ge.”
“You were lying to us,” Lan Xichen says, finding his voice hoarse and raspy, “for all those years.”
Nie Huaisang raises a brow, and Lan Xichen’s gut twists to see the echo of a-Yao in the curve of his thin smile. “I did only what I had to do, er-ge.”
“You did not have to -”
“Really?”
“A-Sang -”
“Tell me da-ge wouldn’t want Jin Guangyao dead,” Nie Huaisang hisses, suddenly drawn into an anger Lan Xichen has never seen him twisted in before. It’s as ugly on his face as it was on a-Yao’s. “No, I have an even better one, er-ge - tell me the wrathful, brutal Nie Mingjue would not want his own death avenged.”
Lan Xichen flinches.
“That’s what I thought.” Nie Huaisang draws back from the table, standing. Stillness plummets across his expression, like liquid jade poured over flesh. “I get the impression you don’t care much for our game, er-ge? So you won’t mind if I end it early?”
Lan Xichen scrambles for words. “No, I - you shouldn’t -”
“I have no regrets,” Nie Huaisang says clearly, enunciating his words as though Lan Xichen is a child. “If you cared for da-ge, you would have done the same. And I was not the one who drove the sword through Jin Guangyao’s chest.”
There’s a cruel echo to Nie Huaisang’s voice; Lan Xichen sees, for a moment, the bloodied sneer a-Yao had worn as he stepped closer to Lan Xichen, drove himself further onto Shuoyue’s blade. “You watched him,” Lan Xichen whispers around the lump in his throat. “Learned from him. And then you -”
“Ironic, isn’t it,” Nie Huaisang says coldly, and steps out of the Hanshi. Lan Xichen stares as his brother’s brother paces down the too-neat path, turns a corner, and disappears from sight.