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When he returns from the secluded pavilion on the outskirts of Lanling, Nie Mingjue looks fairly a mess, even aside from the black lines scrawled up his face. His hairpiece is askew, with the coiffed crown of braids it frames half-torn out; bloodstains streak all down his shimmering grey robes to an extent almost surprising for all that blood having been sliced out of just one man.
This late at night, aside from the kitchens, Koi Tower is quiet, and the Fragrant Palace is dark. Nie Mingjue is one shadow meeting another, a silently fleeting join of hands, before he is led back inside.
Once they are alone in the Jin’s treasure room (his treasure room, now), Jin Guangyao draws the ruined robes down from Mingjue’s shoulders. They’ve only grown more tattered, more bloody, since the day his rage consumed him. More fit for a terrifying ghost.
Left in just the pale grey of his underrobe - a new one; the original was beyond saving - Jin Guangyao has him sit, and busies his fingers running through the thick, inky strands of his hair. He pulls the hairpiece out and sets it aside; he combs the braids free and then lets the work of twisting them back together quiet his mind, pull him back down from the feverish spiral of earlier that evening, into the low, ever-present, at least tolerable simmer of his emotions.
Nie Mingjue is perfectly, enviably still, as Jin Guangyao shapes back into place the elaborate, almost familiar arrangement that the years haven’t yet dulled from his mind.
When he’s finished, he retrieves a fresh, clean robe from the neatly folded pile on one of the back shelves - none of them Nie Mingjue’s favourites, the ones Huaisang had sobbed over going through his brother’s effects in the Unclean Realm - but a few Jin Guangyao had remembered him wearing years before, when he could be convinced to a couple hours for himself, not simply seeing to his disciples’ training, his soldiers’ patrols and their findings, his realm’s resources and defenses. He drapes it around Mingjue’s shoulders now, gold-flecked cloth patterned like the rough texture of the rocks of Qinghe; slides the sleeves up his arms, tugs the crossed panels into position just so, closes the ties to hold it all in place. Mingjue’s response to his intentions is almost seamless, now.
But his expression is still perfectly blank, when Jin Guangyao’s gaze slips up to his face, like a nervous tic. In the sinking black of Nie Mingjue’s eyes, he catches a glimpse of his own frame, too-frail looking in the layers of his Jin robes as if he were about to start shivering again. A small knot threatens to grow in his stomach; he imagines that same implacable void of ink reflecting another body, another face, not so frail, with not so many layers, but stinking with fear-sweat just the same as death closes in.
Perhaps, he thinks, he will have to find a way to get that blood out of the tattered robe, or else discard it entirely.
It is a problem for later.
With his eyes fluttering closed, he reaches into the thread of spiritual energy connecting the two of them and issues a wordless command, wanting to shove away the chill on his skin and the emptiness lurking in the pit of his stomach. A moment later, a strong, cold arm circles around Jin Guangyao and pulls him in close; Jin Guangyao forces himself to drop the tension out of his shoulders, leaning into the space between Mingjue’s chin and his chest.
He can hear his own single heartbeat thudding inside him; he can smell the faint lingering of agarwood incense he’d burned recently to infuse the cloth, over the nearly wiped-clean hints of ash-and-petrichor resentment. The fabric is fine and almost soft against his cheek.
Jin Guangyao closes his eyes again fully, and whispers, “Da-ge.”