Work Text:
It’s been a peaceful year, more or less.
The Cloud Recesses are quieter than usual. The elders have dismissed all classes for the past two weeks so that its guest disciples may prepare for their final exams, and at any given moment, everywhere with a decently flat surface there lay a young cultivator in white robes, bent over dozens of scrolls splayed out in front of them, in utter distress.
Nie Huaisang has not been one of them. For the past week and a half, Nie Huaisang has been in your private quarters, in your lap as you sit at the edge of your bed, letting you kiss his thin lips, letting you slide your hands along his slim thighs whenever you recite ten Lan precepts in their correct order, which he checks on the scroll that hangs behind you. The Lan Sect’s exams are all dependent on rote memorization -- write down the first five hundred of the Lan Sect’s three thousand rules, create a genealogy tree of the Jin family until the sixth generation, write down the year in which the following arrays were created and by whom -- things like so.
You dislike it, and much of it you will forget almost the moment you step out of the exam room, but to achieve an unsatisfactory result it would reflect badly on your sect. And anyway you are good at studying.
Nie Huaisang is not good at studying. You’ve never seen him study, at the very least. There are optional, ungraded music lessons in the Cloud Recesses which he took as a bird takes to flight, and nearly out-paced Lan Wangji, who had been studying for all of his life, in all instruments except the guqin - yet he is near-bottom in musical cultivation. He’s gifted you beautiful paintings of the Gusu towns and of you and your siblings and of himself, and you’ve lovingly stored all of them in a chest beneath your bed, but his arrays come out weak. In the night, he’s danced for you, and you’ve seen the perfect control of his limbs and the strength of his torso as he sweeps his fan like a leaf in the wind, yet in swordsmanship he is clumsy and acts as a bumbling fool.
You used to be annoyed by it. How frivolous, you used to think, bitterly. How happy he looks. Here you are, in the shadows of an older brother who is not your older brother, held by your throat by the weight of your mother’s steely voice, of your father’s disappointed eyes, yet Nie Huaisang, pretty and light footed and weak and mediocre in all the ways that matter, is beloved by both his family and his sect. You kept thinking he does not deserve to be sect heir.
But then again, you tell yourself, neither do you.
“Wrong,” Nie Huaisang says. He keeps his fan between your lips and his. His knees are bent on either side of your thighs, his tailbone rising just above your knees. You have your arms wrapped around his waist. “The last one was supposed to be ‘Destroy the five poisons.’”
Hungry, you try to dip in for a kiss anyway.
“Nope,” he says, laughing. “Those are the rules, Jiang-xiong. Wrong answer, no kiss. Try again.”
“You’re so carefree for someone who hasn’t studied for our finals yet,” you say, frowning. You want that fan out of the way and see how swollen his lower lips are, possibly swoop in for a quick peck, but Nie Huaisang ostensibly sees through your plan and presses the fan against his face even more. “You’re the one who keeps complaining that your brother will break your legs if you fail again.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll remember everything if I hear it in your voice.”
“Will you now?’ With a quirk of your eyebrow, you pull down his hand, take a moment to admire the redness and wetness of his mouth, and devour him.
Yes, you think. Despite everything, it really has been a peaceful year.