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Chapter Text

Left behind in the indoctrination camp when all the other sect heirs escaped, Nie Huaisang found himself in Wen Chao’s clutches, left to his amusement – and his amusement was to force Nie Huaisang to serve at his entertainment.

Are you telling me you’re a clown?!

“Rude, da-ge,” Nie Huaisang huffed, rolling his eyes at his brother’s note. “Very rude. I’m an entertainer.”

Although a rather large portion of his brand new entertain-the-troops routine was being laughed at, yes…

Damnit, da-ge! Leave a man some self-respect!

Sadly, there wasn’t enough space for him to get that sentence in along with the rest of the information he was sending back home, battle plans and supply lines and the rest. Just enough for a single additional sentence –

Sometimes the most dangerous place is the safest.

A little later, he got his brother’s response: Stop making sense. I hate it when you do that.

Nie Huaisang smiled.

-

“Can you stop shoving me around?” Nie Huaisang complained to Wen Chao after the first day of being the Wen sect’s punching bag. “You want me to entertain people, I can be entertaining! In ways other than slapstick!”

“Oh yeah?” Wen Chao sneered. “Like what?”

“I can tell stories,” Nie Huaisang said promptly. “I can paint. I compose poetry on the spot, including lewd poetry. I can do astronomy readings and calculate fortunes. I can juggle my saber. I can –”

“You can not.”

“Which one?”

“Juggle a saber!”

Nie Huaisang crossed his arms. “I can too! Or, well, da-ge always says that’s what I’m doing when I’m trying to train…”

Wen Chao sniggered. “Oh, this I’ve got to see. Someone get him a sword!”

“I can’t use a sword!” Nie Huaisang exclaimed. “Saber, saber! One side sharp only! If I tried it with a two-sided blade, I’d cut my arm off and then where would you be, huh? Without any entertainment, and no hostage, either!”

Wen Chao rolled his eyes. “Saber, then.”

Everyone looked at each other uncertainly – the saber wasn’t a common weapon for Qishan Wen.

“Just get me mine,” Nie Huaisang suggested. “What, are you all afraid I’ll fight my way out if I have my own spiritual weapon with me? Me?”

They were not afraid of him.

Nie Huaisang gripped his proper Nie saber that was warm under his fingers, with the clean blade that (currently) showed no sign of words, and smiled.

-

The Jiang sect won’t listen to my warnings.

Nie Huaisang gritted his teeth and stared at his saber. You’re joking, he wrote on the blade with his finger and a bit of qi. I warned you a whole week ago. We’re attacking tomorrow! With overwhelming forces!

I’m trying my best! I can only smuggle so many cultivators nearby without permission. What am I supposed to do, write off the whole place as a loss and just kidnap all their disciples to keep them from getting murdered?

Why not? If that’s all you can do, at least it’s something.

-

“The wine that’s going to the main table is on the bottom left,” Nie Huaisang said when he found Wen Ning standing there.

Wen Ning jumped. “Oh! Nie-gongzi…”

“You’re here to rescue Jiang Cheng, right? And you’re going to drug the wine? Bottom left.”

“…thanks.” Wen Ning hesitated. “Do you need a rescue, too?”

“Oh, no, I’m good. Tell Jiang Cheng that I’m sorry I couldn’t help more, and next time he should listen when my brother says to run away. He doesn’t say it often, so when he does, he means it.”

Wen Ning hesitated still.

“What?”

“Did you really break Wen Zhuliu’s hand before he could melt Jiang Cheng’s core?”

“It was,” Nie Huaisang said with great dignity, “an accident.”

-

“Listen, I get you,” Nie Huaisang said to a confused-looking Wei Wuxian. “Revenge is nice, rescue is sweet. But I need you to let Wen Chao get close enough to the Nightless City that me making my way there as the terrified last surviving witness is at least plausible, or we lose our best in to get info from the Wen sect. So just, you know, wait a bit longer, okay?”

-

“Meng Yao!” Nie Huaisang hollered, throwing himself into Meng Yao’s arms. “Oh, it’s so good to see you again!”

“Uh,” Meng Yao said.

Wen Ruohan laughed.

Nie Huaisang burst into tears and buried his face into Meng Yao’s neck.

Wen Ruohan laughed harder.

Meng Yao smiled awkwardly, but that was probably the fact that Nie Huaisang had already sealed his spiritual energy and had a knife to his belly.

“You’d better be here as a spy,” Nie Huaisang whispered in his ear as the Wen sect ignored them.

“Definitely,” Meng Yao murmured back, though his tone wasn’t as definitive as Nie Huaisang would prefer. “I need Wen Ruohan’s head to get my father’s approval.”

“Does my brother know?”

“…no.”

“Who does?”

“Huaisang –”

“I have my own ways of passing information. Well?”

“…Sect Leader Lan.”

“I look forward to finding out if he confirms it,” Nie Huaisang said, patting Meng Yao on the cheek, and then blubberingly begs his way into sharing a room with the man. He’s gotten pretty good at getting Wen Ruohan to agree to these sorts of silly requests – the man had just the same awful sense of humor as his son.

-

“I can’t believe you survived this long as the Nie sect’s spy,” Meng Yao marveled when it was all done.

Nie Huaisang shrugged. “I’ll give you lessons,” he offered with a grin. “If you like. It’s my one skill, apparently!”

“The war is over,” Meng Yao pointed out in return, shaking his head and smiling. “My father has accepted me back into the Jin sect and given me a new name. What use do I have for the skills of spy?”

“Of being a Nie sect spy,” Nie Huaisang corrected, and put his hand on Meng Yao’s shoulder. “If things don’t go well for you in the Jin sect…Think about it, will you? If da-ge won’t accept you, then I will.”

Chapter Text

This is what I wanted, Meng Yao reminded himself at the ceremony where his father gave him a new name and he found out it was an insult.

This is what I wanted, he thought as he watched his father’s men slaughter innocents, acting on his order and at his command.

This is what I wanted, he thought as he was used as a pimp and procurer, as a punching bag for his new ‘mother’, as a convenient scapegoat – as even his proposed marriage was mocked and unreasonably delayed – as he was denied basic privileges and treated as little better than a servant.

Worse, in some cases.

This is what I –

“San-ge!” Nie Huaisang called out, waving frantically, and behind him Nie Mingjue looked default-face neutral but actually, if you knew him well enough, extraordinarily long-suffering. “San-ge! I want to talk to you! About important things!”

If you knew Nie Huaisang, you knew that important things, to Nie Huaisang, included pretty clothing, pretty accessories, pretty birds, pretty people, and spying.

Jin Guangyao put a smile on his face, and for the first time in weeks, actually meant it.

“Any time, Huaisang,” he said. “Why don’t you come inside?”

-

“I hate it,” he told Nie Huaisang, who was trying to look understanding but actually mostly looked smug. “I figure I have two options on what to do about that. Learn to accept my lot in life –”

“Or kill them all and take over?”

“…three options. I was going to say that I was thinking of accepting your earlier offer, but if you really prefer, that second option seems perfectly plausible –”

“No, no, it’s a terrible option,” Nie Huaisang said, waving his hands. “I mean, you’d have to keep it hidden that you did it, you’d spend all your life worrying about someone finding out about it, and anyway, Lan Xichen would be so disappointed in you. How could you live with yourself?”

Quite well as long as he never found out, Jin Guangyao thought, but he acknowledged that all those points were correct. Especially the one about not wanting to live in utter paranoia for the rest of his life.

“What’s your plan?” he asked instead.

Nie Huaisang smiled.

-

“I can’t believe you,” Nie Mingjue said when Jin Guangyao first arrived in the Unclean Realm for a visit to his sworn brother, mulling over his father’s order to find out anything useful he could about Nie Mingjue’s intentions, and the critiquing tone made Jin Guangyao’s back go straight with fear that he would find here only the same disdain as he found in Lanling City. “Why do you listen to Huaisang and not to me? It’s simply unfair.”

Right, Jin Guangyao thought, his shoulders loosening. Right. It’s different here.

“We speak the same language,” he said.

“What language is that?” Nie Mingjue grumbled. “Fan semaphore? Anyway, stop dawdling by the door and get in here already. I told the kitchen to make your favorites since I know you and he will be spending half the day drinking tea and plotting mischief.”

Jin Guangyao nodded, and in a moment of recklessness added, “Would you tell me what your plans are for the position of Chief Cultivator?”

“It should be abolished,” Nie Mingjue said at once. “Why do we need someone to boss us all around?”

A standard Nie Mingjue answer, Jin Guangyao supposed.

“And your next moves to accomplish that?”

Nie Mingjue blinked owlishly at him. “I’m busy rebuilding my sect,” he said. “I can worry about politics later, can’t I?”

Jin Guangyao sighed and went to talk to Nie Huaisang instead.

-

“The wonderful thing about da-ge is that he means well,” Nie Huaisang said. “The terrible thing about da-ge…”

“Is that he means well,” Jin Guangyao agreed.

-

“We could use demonic cultivation as a lever, no one likes that,” Jin Guangyao suggested, but Nie Huaisang shook his head.

“I’m planning on rehabilitating Wei-xiong,” he said. “And the Wen boy, Wen Ning – he was nice.”

“That seems unnecessarily difficult.”

“Just you wait.”

-

“Wait. We’re framing my father?”

“Don’t think of it as framing, san-ge! Think of it as allowing him the rope he can use to hang himself.”

“…has anyone ever told you that you’re ruthless, Huaisang?”

“Hmm. Da-ge, when fighting me for the last sweet. Does that count?”

“No.”

-

“…I take it back,” Jin Guangyao said, watching Nie Mingjue nurse his wounded hand and even more wounded pride after an abject loss at the dining room table. “Huaisang, you can have the last sweet, and also the title of ‘most ruthless’.”

“I told you!”

-

“Does that mean you’ll agree to my plan, then?”

“Don’t make me regret this.”

-

“I’m willing to play along with your stupid plan,” Nie Mingjue said, which came as a surprise to both Jin Guangyao and Nie Huaisang – not least of which because as far as Jin Guangyao knew, they hadn’t actually told Nie Mingjue what they were planning. “But I have some conditions.”

Jin Guangyao turned to look at Nie Huaisang, who looked as surprised as he was, and then turned to stare at Nie Mingjue’s retreating back: he’d only briefly put his head in to check on them in between other tasks, and as Jin Guangyao well knew, his schedule was packed – it was no surprise he didn’t stay.

“Does he know what the plan is?” he asked Nie Huaisang. “Or was he just guessing that he’d have a role to play?”

“I have no idea,” Nie Huaisang said. “Sometimes he surprises me.”

Jin Guangyao nodded thoughtfully. “We should go figure out his conditions,” he said, and Nie Huaisang nodded. “And also how he managed to learn about the plan, assuming he did.”

“What else could you be planning?” Nie Mingjue asked irritably when they finally managed to corner him. “I know what both of you are like, I know what your goals are; the rest of it all falls out quite naturally from that. Have you figure out yet how you’re planning on fixing the Wei Wuxian problem?”

“Setting up an opportunity for rampant heroics. He won’t be able to resist.”

Nie Mingjue nodded.

“What are your conditions, da-ge?” Jin Guangyao asked.

“Jin Zixuan doesn’t die if you can help it, and Jiang Cheng becomes Chief Cultivator if someone has to have the job,” Nie Mingjue said. “I do not want to get stuck with it, and anyway we’re getting him his head disciple back; he can deal.”

Those conditions seemed reasonable, although the Jin Zixuan bit might be a little annoying.

“And in exchange for that, you’ll play along?”

Nie Mingjue nodded. He had that long-suffering look again. “Just tell me what you need me to do.”

-

“A-Yao, you’re sure you really don’t mind?” Jin Zixuan asked a third time. “I’m sure this wasn’t what you thought you’d be getting when you were accepted to Lanling Jin –”

“What part?” Jin Guangyao asked. “Our father engaging in crimes and trying to blame me for them, no one believing him and deposing him as sect leader, or the fact that you’d like me to be sect leader for a few years while you focus on raising your children?”

“…all of that, really,” Jin Zixuan said. “Mostly the last one, though.”

“I promise I don’t mind at all,” Jin Guangyao said, and smiled.

On the contrary, he thought. This is what I wanted.

Chapter Text

People never seemed to understand, and Nie Mingjue was honestly tired of trying to explain it to them.

He’d never been especially good with words, or at least he wasn’t on a personal level. He apparently had a talent for speeches, especially wartime speeches made to soldiers in order to buck up their courage and build up their morale; that was easy enough, standing up in front of them and telling them the same sorts of things he’d been telling himself for years whenever the dreary endless sludge of politics and other people’s unwillingness to move themselves even in their own best interest started getting him down. He could use his height to his advantage there, towering over people, and couple that the strength of his voice – he suspected that half the time people didn’t even really listen to him, just looked at him and made conjectures for the rest, and that was just fine by him. Whatever worked.

But when it came to explaining complicated things like his brother…

Yeah, he had nothing.

Nie Huaisang had never been good at the things the Nie sect usually prized – he was a weak cultivator and bad at fighting, and at some point Nie Mingjue had more or less entirely given up on trying to teach him the fundamentals of saber fighting in favor of teaching him a much more narrowly targeted set of skills, designed to help keep him alive in a pinch. Even with that, he’d whined and complained, dragged his feet and resisted…he didn’t even have significant scholarly talents to make up for it, not really. Nie Mingjue had no taste for art, but those who did suggested (in however polite terms they could manage) that Nie Huaisang’s poetry was wretched, his composition barely serviceable, his attempts at philosophy convoluted and contraindicated, and as for his painting skills…

Well, he could draw birds pretty well.

But he could play a mean game of weiqi, even against Nie Mingjue, and he was lively and personable - nobody ever disliked him, assuming they bothered to pay him attention at all. He liked to barter with merchants whenever he went shopping, and shopping was the one thing he really did do with a passion; he could make the most grim-faced cynic on the street break out into a smile, and collected half a dozen or more free treats every time he went to the marketplace despite them all knowing he could afford their wares if he so wished.

Nie Huaisang, in short, was good for nothing, but he was fun to be around.

He was also – and this was the part Nie Mingjue could never explain to people – one of the most persistent and vindictive sonofabitches to have ever been born.  

One would think, wrongly, that Nie Huaisang would have learned to be more forgiving on account of his personal weakness, but in fact, it just seemed to make him even more inclined to get vengeance on those who had wronged him. He bore grudges without ever feeling the weight, as immovable as the mountains – there would be times when something would blow up spectacularly in Nie Mingjue’s face and he’d turn around only to find Nie Huaisang there, smiling at him and reminding him of some grievance from years before.

And that was if he were lucky – if he were unlucky, he’d find himself in some blissful situation, given everything he’d ever wanted, and find Nie Huaisang patting himself on the back for arranging it.

When Nie Mingjue had been forced by the Wen sect’s overweening arrogance to send Nie Huaisang to them for reeducation and indoctrination, about nine-tenths of what he’d felt had been terror, thinking about all the things that the Wen sect could do to his weak little brother who had nothing but good humor to defend himself with. The last tenth, though, had been the lingering thought that he’d been unable to fully banish: I don’t think they know what they’re getting themselves into here.

Sure enough, they hadn’t.

Now, Nie Huaisang hadn’t personally delivered any of the finishing blows there, but then, he never did, preferring to use other people to do it for him - even in vengeance and spying, he was lazy as always. Wen Chao, who had mocked him, had been left to the vengeance of Wei Wuxian with his brand new demonic cultivation; it’d been an ugly sort of death. Wen Zhuliu, who’d threatened him, had ‘accidentally’ gotten his hand broken when Nie Huaisang’s saber had temporarily ‘gone out of control’ and pierced the key meridian of his wrist – those few months of forcing Nie Huaisang to take classes on medicine had clearly not gone to waste – and then been executed by Jiang Cheng with his steely-eyed hatred. Wen Ruohan, who had murdered their father and made Nie Mingjue’s life a living hell for years, had seen his sons murdered, his empire destroyed, his war lost, and in the end had been stabbed in the back by a trusted subordinate.

Throughout, no one had paid any attention to poor little Nie Huaisang, preserved only through the Wen sect's desire to humiliate the Nie sect by using him as a clown.

Even Lan Xichen, who ought to know better, had persisted in comforting Nie Mingjue throughout the war regarding Nie Huaisang’s health, as if Baxia wasn’t full up on all the complaints Nie Huaisang could possibly fit in given the size of his saber and the quantity of his qi. Meng Yao knew, Nie Mingjue supposed, but that was because he was himself another object of Nie Huaisang’s vengeance – he’d find himself with everything he’d ever wanted, the poor man, and in Nie Huaisang’s eternal debt to boot.

Poor, poor man.

It was a good thing for everyone, Nie Mingjue reflected, that he was too virtuous to sic Nie Huaisang on people.

Usually.

“You promised me that Jiang Cheng would be made Chief Cultivator instead of me,” he reminded Nie Huaisang, who sighed dramatically. “Huaisang. You promised.”

“I promised I’d try, da-ge!”

Nie Mingjue crossed his arms and glared.

“It’s a work in progress, all right? I’m going to have er-ge suggest it.”

Nie Mingjue’s eyebrows went up. “Xichen? How?”

“As a wedding present to his new in-law –”

Nie Mingjue held up a hand. “Stop right there. Who’s getting married?”

“Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji,” Nie Huaisang said obediently.

Nie Mingjue thought about their respective personalities and started to detect the start of a headache. “Which one are you punishing for some unremembered petty slight, this time?”

“Neither!”

Nie Mingjue gave him a look.

“…Wei-xiong screwed up helping me cheat on a test, and Lan Zhan bit me.”

“He bit you? How old was he, five?”

“Six! Old enough to know better!”

Nie Mingjue rolled his eyes. “And which one is going to think that they owe you their lives for arranging this?”

“Lan Zhan knows I’m working on it,” Nie Huaisang said promptly, and Nie Mingjue nodded. That made sense: Lan Wangji was honorable and dependable, and would be easy to extract things out of in the future if things went the way he wanted. “Also, Mistress Wen promised to give me anything I want if I can make Wei-xiong stop pining.”

“Mistress Wen? You mean Wen Qing?” Nie Mingjue’s eyes narrowed. “She’s a doctor, isn’t she?”

“Her brother Wen Ning helped poison a whole bunch of Wen sect soldiers one time, very impressive, you’ll like him,” Nie Huaisang said, not answering the question. “It’s the least I can do, really!”

“Huaisang…”

“Listen, if Wei-xiong and Lan Zhan are going to start their own sect up, they’re going to need some support first,” Nie Huaisang said with great dignity. “We’re not taking in the Wen sect, we’ll just be housing them for a little while, that’s all!”

“Huaisang…”

Nie Huaisang grinned at him.

Nie Mingjue threw his hands into the air. There was really no point in worrying any more about Nie Huaisang, he decided – ever since he’d found his talent for spying, and for managing other spies, Nie Huaisang had decided that he was going to rearrange the entire cultivation world to his liking in just the same way he’d rearranged the furniture in his quarters in the Unclean Realm.

No, really, there was no point in worrying for Nie Huaisang.

Now it was time to worry for everyone else.