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It had always been something of a behind-closed-doors debate – a chicken-and-the-egg problem, what came first, what was the cause and what was the symptom.
Was the Nie sect’s atypical cultivation method the reason behind the notorious Nie temper? Or were they born with the temper, and the cultivation method merely built upon that? Which one was the reason for their clan’s tendency towards early qi deviations?
Nie Huaisang usually threw his money on the “blame the cultivation style”, almost entirely for the sake of pissing off his brother.
He was starting to think, though, that he’d been wrong.
Aituan wasn’t even anywhere nearby, after all, when he started bleeding out of his qiqiao, his qi disordered and violently raging inside of him and still somehow, somehow not enough to assuage the rage in his heart, in his head –
“Nie-xiong! Nie-xiong! Nie Huaisang!”
Nie Huaisang turned with a snarl, but Wei Wuxian was already holding up his hands in surrender, Jiang Cheng quickly following suit a second later, and in the end he wasn’t really angry at them.
“I’m pretty sure you’re done,” Jiang Cheng said cautiously. “You’re – you are done, right?”
“I dunno,” Wei Wuxian muttered. “I don’t think Wen Zhuliu is entirely paste yet – there’s still a few bones Nie-xiong hasn’t crushed down into dust…”
“Shut up.”
“I will not.”
The familiar bickering was soothing, like slipping into a hot bath at the end of a tough day – like arguing with his brother about silly things, scoring a clever point and getting one of his brother’s rare smiles. Nie Huaisang felt his shoulders relax a little, and he lowered the stick –
“Why am I holding a stick?” he asked blankly, looking down at it. He didn’t remember picking it up at any point. “And why is it…uh…”
“Covered in the blood and guts and possibly brain matter of your enemy?”
Nie Huaisang swayed, suddenly light-headed. “…that,” he agreed, voice weak.
He slowly became aware that there was something squishy and wet under his feet, soaking into his shoes, and he very carefully did not look down.
“What happened?” he asked faintly. “What did I – actually, on second thought, don’t tell me.”
Jiang Cheng’s expression was a strange mix of being impressed with him and pitying him, and honestly Nie Huaisang preferred the pity. No one was impressed with him, not ever, and in retrospect he rather liked it that way, if the alternative was…
“You defeated the Core-Melting Hand in one-on-one combat,” Wei Wuxian said. “Congratulations.”
Nie Huaisang gaped at him.
“Don’t you remember?” Jiang Cheng said, blinking at him. “He said something about your brother, and you suddenly lost it –”
Nie Huaisang remembered, suddenly, and he felt a sickening lurch in his stomach as his vision flickered red around the edges again, and he imagined he could hear Aituan shouting his name from thousands of li away. How dare that man, that stone-face bastard who looked so long-suffering and yet underneath it all was so cruel and unfeeling – how dare he say such a thing about his da-ge –
Nie Huaisang had been angry the entire time he’d been here at the indoctrination camp.
Really angry, not the silly little temper tantrums he usually threw back at home or the occasional shouting matches he had with his brother to vent steam. He hated it here. He hated the fact that he was here in the Nightless City, the one place his brother had always refused to bring him no matter how embarrassingly impolitic it was, the place Sect Leader Wen had murdered his father over a stupid dinner table conversation. He hated the fact that his brother had tried to protect him, and failed only because he’d gotten distracted by Meng Yao of all people.
(He hated the fact that he’d had to learn that fact from one of his retainers, weeks too late and him already gone to the Nightless City, too late to apologize or make it up; hated the fact that the last words he’d said to his da-ge on the subject were cruel ones, blaming him for sending away his friend, when in fact his friend had torn off his face to reveal something dark beneath. He hated that his brother had just taken those cruel words from him, suffered under his accusations, without defending himself from them, because he blamed himself for – for what? For being just, the way he was supposed to be? For protecting him?)
He hated the Yin metal, the vile corruption he could feel for all that they were in a different part of the palace. He hated Wen Chao making them memorize and recite, which he was terrible at, and he hated him for making them do it outside in the hot sun and the hot earth until he fainted from heatstroke, his weak golden core insufficient to protect him the way the others did them.
He hated Wen Ruohan, he hated Wen Chao, and he hated, hated, hated Wen Zhuliu.
Most of the boys at the indoctrination camp had gotten the idea that he wasn’t that bad, for all that he was terrifying, because he always looked so bored about everything, like he was having to fulfil all of this as a torturous duty instead of a pleasure, but he’d been the one to carry Nie Huaisang back inside after he’d fainted and he’d said some things about his brother then, when Nie Huaisang was too weak to do anything, and today he’d come by, watching Nie Huaisang struggle to set up the small tent he’d been given for their travels, and he’d said them again…
“He wanted to steal my brother’s cultivation,” Nie Huaisang said through numb lips. His hands were clenched, quivering with rage that was impossible to bury down in his heart – was this how his brother felt all the time? No wonder he was so straightforward about most things; forget scheming, it was amazing he could even think. “He wanted – he didn’t even think of him as a person. Just dirt beneath his feet, fruit ripe for the plucking, some animal he could slaughter as a prize to give to his wretched master –”
He’d even said, today, that they could use what was left over as a corpse puppet, and chuckled when he thought of what the great Chifeng-zun would have thought of that.
Nie Huaisang had been angry ever since they’d arrived, full of bile and choler and rage.
His family never did handle their rage well.
“You had a minor qi deviation,” Wei Wuxian said solemnly, looking at him. “You’re still bleeding – your eyes, your nose, your ears…We need to get you to a doctor.”
“We need to hide the body before anyone finds it, that’s what we need to do,” Jiang Cheng said.
“We can do both! Multitasking!”
He was very lucky to have such good friends, Nie Huaisang thought to himself, and toppled over.
He woke up back in the sorry excuse for a camp, with Wen Qing acting as his doctor and Wen Ning as her assistant, taking care of him (it had taken an embarrassingly long while before Nie Huaisang remembered their names, for all that they’d come to lessons at the Cloud Recesses, too, both of them, and even though they’d all gone on a whole mission to the village with the goddess statute together afterwards, but in his defense he was really bad at memorizing - anything), and while Wen Qing kept herself nice and professional, Wen Ning kept shooting him extremely impressed looks that Nie Huaisang didn’t think he deserved.
He hadn’t actually defeated the Core-Melting Hand in one-on-one combat, no matter what Wei Wuxian said. He’d launched a surprise attack at the back of a man who wasn’t expecting it, because no one ever expected anything from Nie Huaisang.
“You have remarkable arm strength,” Wen Qing said (she had looked amused when he asked about her name, blushing with shame), sounding casual but clearly fishing a little. “It’s hidden by your thin frame, and even further minimized by your choice in clothing, but actually you have significant muscle there.”
“Saber practice,” Nie Huaisang explained. “Sabers are heavier than swords, and rely more on brute force. At home, you train a lot with heavy things even before you get your own saber, just to make sure you can wield it properly – you have to have a good arm.”
He’d been barely mediocre by his sect’s standards, and even that level he’d only achieved through years of nagging, threatening, and occasional bribery on his older brother’s part. He shouldn’t have been able to win, but Wen Zhuliu hadn’t even been looking at Nie Huaisang when he’d said what he said, hadn’t seen the moment he’d snapped and attacked, his disordered qi giving him extraordinary strength even as it turned against him to destroy him internally, and if there was one thing that saber style taught you it was not to let someone who’d fallen to your blade get up again.
(Had his brother brought out Baxia against Meng Yao, before deciding to let him go? He couldn’t help but wonder – it was bad luck if he had, a severing of the relationship in an unfixable way, but he wasn’t sure his brother would be strong enough to resist trying to repair it if Meng Yao ever came back. Where was Meng Yao, anyway?)
Attacking a man from behind wasn’t really honorable, he thought glumly, and he thought he understood for the first time why his brother was so strict about such things: it didn’t feel good to have done it this way. It felt like cheating, made every approving gaze feel like a lie, like something he didn’t deserve.
“So what happens now?” he asked, and Wen Qing shrugged a little helplessly. “Does, uh…”
“Wei-gongzi and Jiang-gongzi are hiding the remains,” Wen Ning volunteered. He looked way too cheerfully when he said ‘remains’. Possible budding mass-murderer? Or maybe he’d just been a doctor’s assistant for too long. “Wen-er-gongzi hasn’t noticed yet – he’s still with Wang Lingjiao.”
“But he will notice,” Nie Huaisang said.
“As long as he doesn’t blame any of you, does it matter?” Wen Qing said.
“…if you have an example of Wen Zhuliu’s handwriting, I can probably forge it to look like a note saying he was summoned back by Sect Leader Wen.”
Wen Qing and Wen Ning exchanged looks he didn’t quite understand, but they brought him what he needed, and by the time they got trapped in a horrible underground cave with a gigantic man-eating Xuanwu the next day, Wen Chao still hadn’t figured it out, though he’d been in an awful mood the entire time.
“Why are you sitting down?” Jiang Cheng scolded him even as he dashed around fighting Wen sect soldiers, and see, this was why Nie Huaisang didn’t ever fight. It only made people expect him to do it more – Jiang Cheng hadn’t scolded him at all for hiding behind things before…
Before.
“Leave him alone,” Jin Zixuan said. He hadn’t been there, so he still looked disdainful and dismissive; it was amazing how much of a relief that was. “He can’t help anyway.”
“But –”
“My head hurts,” Nie Huaisang said plaintively, and it had the benefit of being both true and working very effectively to get Jiang Cheng to head as far away from him as possible in a sudden rush. After a while, he got up and picked up one of the swords some unfortunate Wen sect retainer had dropped.
“I have no idea what I’m doing with this,” he said, very seriously, to yet another unfortunate Wen sect retainer, before lifting it and bringing it down, saber-style, the way his brother had all but beaten into his head.
That one didn’t seemed like he was expecting it, either, even though Nie Huaisang was right in front of his face and everything.
It felt a bit better, though – Aituan didn’t like the Wen sect one bit, he thought a little muzzily, and wondered why he’d thought that, since after all Aituan was all the way back at home – and he was a little less ashamed to stand with the rest of them as they tried to figure out a way out of the cave.
“You probably shouldn’t do that,” he said to the Lan disciple who picked up a bow and was trying to aim it at the Xuanwu. “You’ll miss.”
The Lan disciple glared at him.
“Not as bad as I would, mind you,” Nie Huaisang said, looking at it. He felt as though he was standing behind a pane of glass and nothing could touch him - not pain or fear or anything, anything but rage. “I’d probably miss the turtle entirely. I’m just saying that it’s angry now, so the shot’s a lot harder to make; maybe five people could make that shot.”
“Lan-er-gongzi could make it.”
“Yes, well, Lan-er-gongzi isn’t human,” Nie Huaisang said, quite seriously, and the Lan disciple’s lips twitched. “Seriously, don’t waste your time – or your arrows. If you’re anywhere good enough at archery to even think that you could make that shot, you need to keep them to protect me.”
“Are you in need of protection?”
“Oh, always,” Nie Huaisang said blithely, the way he always did, then paused and grimaced. “Most of the time, anyway. I got sick, earlier.”
He was pretty sure the Lan disciple didn’t understand what he meant by sick.
“You don’t really want me to protect you,” the disciple said, frowning. “Do you?”
Nie Huaisang wanted everyone to protect him. He never wanted to fight again in his life.
But the Lan disciple looked like he was a little pleased to have been asked, like no one had ever asked him before, and Nie Huaisang suddenly felt a sudden stab of empathy hitting him straight in the heart.
“I do. I’m pretty sure all the other Nie disciples here are short-range fighters –” His brother had sent as few of them as he could manage, and only sent any at all because he wanted someone there to keep an eye on Nie Huaisang. To protect him. “– and they’re mostly hotheaded idiots –” That was definitely true. “– and I really, really don’t want to end up in another situation where I get sick again, because my brother will never forgive me. So I could use an archer.”
“…okay,” the Lan disciple said. “I’m Su She.”
Nie Huaisang nodded. “I promise to apologize to your sect later on for taking up your time.”
He managed not to be sick the entire journey home.
Maybe it was an aberration, he thought, maybe –
When he got home, his brother was holding Aituan in his hand instead of Baxia – she was in her sheath on his back – and he rushed over to him at once, presenting the saber to him before he did anything else; confused, Nie Huaisang accepted his saber, wondering if he was going to need to go practice or something, and the second his hand wrapped around the hilt –
Oh.
Oh.
His head abruptly cleared, the fog he hadn’t even realized was there finally lifting, the rage draining out of him and back into Aituan – not an especially angry saber, as they went, but still a Nie saber with all that entailed. His qi finally, finally straightened out, stabilized, and he felt like he could breathe again, his mind free and clear now that he had a saber in his hand.
Like all the other Nies before him.
Doomed.
And then he was in his brother’s arms, being held tight.
“Oh, Huaisang,” his brother said, and his voice sounded raw and broken, almost as if he’d been weeping. “I never wanted this for you.”
Nie Huaisang hugged him back.
“It’s okay,” he said, and the buzzing in the back of his head that was Aituan agreed with him. He’d been there the whole time, ever since the first incident; it didn’t matter how far away from each other they were. “It was a small one, it passed, it’s fine…”
It wasn’t fine, and they both knew it – Nie Huaisang might not know the details of all their clan secrets, but he knew enough to know what it was he was so carefully not knowing – but what was there to say?
It was still his family. It was still his heritage.
(He wondered what Meng Yao would say, if he knew. He wondered if he would pull his saber back the way his brother had, if Meng Yao ever betrayed him.)
“At least I can help fight now,” he said, joking, and his brother glared at him.
“Not a chance,” he said. “You’re going to go somewhere safe. You can go with –”
“Su She.”
“– with Su She back to the Cloud Recesses; it’ll be more secure there than here.”
It was about what Nie Huaisang had expected.
“Okay,” he said. “But not now.”
His brother’s eyes flickered down to his saber. His lifeline.
“No,” he said. “Not now.”