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i.
These are the facts: Nie Huaisang may be a studio arts major, but he’s an actor before everything, prone to dramatics. No matter how large, how intimate, how important his audience, he has always been perfectly in his element pushing the acceptable, throwing himself a little bit on the line to get anyone to do exactly as he wants.
But his performance has always required just that — an audience. So when he sits up with a gasp, legs tangled in mostly kicked-off sheets, sweat leaving a cold trail down the back of his sleep shirt —
shrieking as his knee lands on something warm and very, very alive —
spending a frenzied next few minutes apologizing frantically as he gathers his birds back into their cage for the third time this week, wrestling a sentient stack of paper and brush pens into his fashionably deteriorating bag, believing that if he just hops enough in them his pants will put themselves on —
falling to his knees on the empty sidewalk, wringing his lanyard in both fists, bus pass nowhere to be seen, as the coppery smell of engine and exhaust fades mercilessly down the street —
running without a single higher thought through the honking of traffic and up stairs, and stairs, and stairs, and —
— even he will acknowledge that maybe things with him are currently Not Right. By the time he’s collapsed in his chair at the studio, thunking his head repeatedly against his workless workspace, he’s already forgotten about the dream.
Precisely twelve minutes later, the studio door opens with a telltale crash and a rousing chorus of grumbles from his classmates, and Wei Wuxian saunters in like an omen. God does Nie Huaisang love him.
“Wei-xiong!” Nie Huaisang cries happily, and the next moments are a flurry of movement, overcomplicated high fiving, paper swept off his desk like a first snow, never mind the fact that they saw each other yesterday.
“Nie-xiong,” Wei Wuxian says, magnetic, like he’s about to reveal a secret of the universe. He grabs both of Nie Huaisang’s hands in his own and holds them in his lap. They crunch against an exorbitant amount of loose metal shards in his apron pocket. “You look like shit.”
“I could’ve told myself that,” Nie Huaisang says, but his heart isn’t in the whine. He makes a face and looks away, then starts rearranging the table to show what he’s got, which is to say, nothing. “Our final assignment is heirlooms,” he says, and Wei Wuxian winces sympathetically, lets him change the subject. “I don’t know – I wasn’t worried when it got assigned, because I could always just make something up —”
“You are the best at that,” Wei Wuxian says.
“Thank you,” Nie Huaisang says, heartfelt, and then they nudge warmly and with increasing force at each other until Wei Wuxian remembers they were talking about something important.
“I couldn’t make something up,” Nie Huaisang sighs. “It had to be this once. Everything I try turns out too impersonal. Which, okay, is what I always do, but I don’t know what’s holding me back this time.”
“Personal, huh,” Wei Wuxian says. “You’re asking me?”
Might as well, Nie Huaisang shrugs.
“I’ve never really looked into myself for my stuff, not that I know of,” Wei Wuxian says. “But it’s enough for me to know that someone will say something about it that counts, and we’ll talk. Then I’ll have made it for something.“ He takes some pliers and a complicated series of web-thin chains and rings out of his apron, and Nie Huaisang settles his head into the crook of his elbow to watch him work. A silly grin dawns across Wei Wuxian’s face. “That, and to know it’ll look good on Lan Zhan.”
“But it came from somewhere,” Nie Huaisang says, not sure where he’s going with this, but going nonetheless.
An earth-shaking bellow of Wei Wuxian’s name resonates from down the hall. A few students duck and cover, and Nie Huaisang’s table lamp rattles from the force.
“Ah, that’s my cue,” Wei Wuxian says with a resigned smile. “Keep your head up, Nie-xiong! You’ve got,“ he squints at the calendar, marked and circled beyond recognition at the far end of the room, “six more days to work this out. And you’ve got all of us! Let’s go supply hunting after humanities, maybe something’ll speak to you!”
“But I didn’t bring my dumpster clothes,” Nie Huaisang calls weakly to his friend’s retreating back as Wei Wuxian books it out the door.
ii.
The earth is off balance. There is the roaring and crashing, the bright, jagged bursts of light, the sickening crunch of what might be standards, what might be guards, what’s probably both. Nie Huaisang’s vision flashes with black and red ripples and he can’t see clearly enough, can’t run, and everything is happening so much, all at once, it doesn’t even occur to him how strange it is that he isn’t trying to get far away, but closer, to where the energy is most dense. That he doesn’t feel afraid at all, but something hotter and darker and crushing. That his heart is crumbling in his chest.
Something grips him tight around his waist, across the front of his shoulders, constricting tighter as he screams wordlessly and resists. He twists in his panic to see who’s holding him down and —
It’s Meng Yao, wearing a jaunty little hat. A cruel grin slices across his face.
What?
Hello?? What?!?
Nie Huaisang wakes on the familiar, safe concrete of the media arts rooftop. He takes a deep, rattling breath. His entire body is baking in the sun save for his face, and he turns and sees it’s because he’s lying in Jiang Cheng’s shadow.
“Jiang-xiong,” he rasps. “What are you doing here?”
Jiang Cheng slips a little finger-sized skateboard into his Business Suit sleeve, obviously not expecting him to have woken up so fast. “Jiejie wanted to visit you know, so. I drove her over.”
“Okay, but why are you here?” Nie Huaisang reiterates, sitting up with a slight groan. The Jiangs’ part of campus is nearly on the other side of town.
He pats down his bag to uncover about a third of a bottle of barley tea, which he sniffs with a frown and offers to Jiang Cheng. Jiang Cheng slaps it out of his hand and digs a slightly crushed rice roll out of his leather messenger bag, splits it carefully down the middle, which only crushes it more, and gives Nie Huaisang the less misshapen half.
“You don’t have to tell me exactly why,” Nie Huaisang says through an inadvisably large mouthful of rice, backtracking when the quiet draws on. “Just —”
“It’s fine,” Jiang Cheng says, zoning back in. “Things got tense again at home and I’m trying to stay away from Mother for now. When she’s mad the whole department can feel it.”
“My roof is always open to you,” Nie Huaisang says magnanimously. He catches a piece of pickled cabbage on his knee before it can hit the ground. “Did you stop and see Wei-xiong first?”
“Not right now,” Jiang Cheng says. “He doesn’t have to know, the self-blaming idiot.”
They resettle into a better silence. Nie Huaisang loves to fill the empty air with every little thing he thinks of, but when it’s only him and Jiang Cheng something’s just different.
“Your turn to tell me,” Jiang Cheng says when he’s finished and crumpled the plastic wrap into a tiny ball. “Why were you sleeping like that? Don’t you have, like, skincare or whatever?”
“Everybody has a vitamin D deficiency these days,” Nie Huaisang begins. Jiang Cheng levels him with a look, but Nie Huaisang can contend with the best of them. A business major is nothing. “Fine, okay, maybe my bus pass is gone.”
“So you walk to school one time, and you — actually, never mind,” Jiang Cheng says. “I have. A car. I could just drive you home?”
“No, don’t worry about it,” Nie Huaisang says on instinct, like he does whenever the favor he needs isn’t something of zero actual consequence. He could say yes. There’s no real reason for him to turn Jiang Cheng down — it’s not much of a burden, it’s what a friend would do. “I’ll be fine,” he reiterates.
iii.
So when Nie Huaisang isn’t spinning some new truth out of straw, he’s layering something onto it thick, delicate piping and all. At this point, it’s just a part of who he is. There’s no one he does this for, though, as much as his mom. When he found out his first year how much she was quietly shelling out each month to help pay for his dorm, he’d dropped everything to find an apartment that would take that burden from her, not that he can ever tell her why.
All this to say that during Nie Huaisang’s long calls home, he embellishes just about everything about his place — the square footage, the privacy, the central heating, the water pressure, the water itself — but not once had he needed to say anything but the truth about two things: the rent, and how easy it is to reach campus.
Not that that counts for much, now that he can’t take the bus anymore.
Maybe in another life, another body, Nie Huaisang thinks, he could enjoy walking alone at night. The city changes, then, the lights and warm pockets of homes, newly rendered in neon and gold puddles. It’s quiet somehow, pensive despite the chatter, the electric shop chimes, the humming of cars and scooters.
Or he supposes that’s what it would be like, if not for the sound of laughing men that’s been trailing after him for the past few blocks.
His fingers are stiff from curling so tightly around the keys in his pocket. He considers the strength in his bones if he throws a punch, the too-soft soles of his boots, which bag pocket he threw his exacto knife into when he packed up. When he finally has no choice but to turn off the main streets, he holds his breath and counts the moments of silence.
The deep voices start up again about something, glass and crinkled plastic clinking noisily. Nie Huaisang’s heart sinks.
Just before the next intersection, he ducks into a corner store and slowly makes his way down the magazine aisle like he’s there with a purpose. He peers over the rack for the group to pass, until the kid at the counter gives him a weird look and he has to keep browsing, which is to say, he goes to stare into the day-old oden pot until he feels like his brain is seeping out his head.
Ultimately, a truly violent waver on his feet drives Nie Huaisang back out to the tiled sidewalk. He doesn’t look back, but when the sounds pick up again, they’re quickly transformed — profanities turning into muffled gasps, enveloped by rasping, growling, clanking, finally dissolving into an increasingly distant clatter of footsteps.
Nie Huaisang will not look this particular gift horse in the mouth. He stumbles up the stairs to his apartment and passes the hell out on his bed without a single higher thought.
He dreams of running through a gilded iron hall, gray and olive robes just beyond his grasp.
iv.
“Are you renting something or not,” Nie Huaisang says when the second hand over the door hits 12 again. His heart isn’t really in it, but it does shut up the cluster of freshmen whispering spiritedly amongst themselves in the corner. He’s picking up extra hours at the video equipment desk, in hopes that by limiting his time to work on his final, the stress will… make something happen. It’s not the best plan he’s had.
The whispering resumes. Nie Huaisang tries to tune them out, and notices that the patterns he’s been absently scrawling are on a loose checkout form instead of his sketchbook. Bending closer to squint at the ink, he realizes it’s not just the same repeating shape, but that it’s something he’s seen before. Something he’s been seeing a lot of recently, actually, and definitely not while awake.
Heirloom, he thinks, for some absurd reason.
What the hell. He smacks his cheeks and slams both his hands onto the desk, rattling the pen cup and crumpling the page. The freshmen scurry out the door.
“Oh my god you’re having kin dreams,” Wei Wuxian says way too loudly, bits of egg and tomato spattering out his mouth and off the ends of his chopsticks.
Nie Huaisang stares at him. Jiang Cheng’s expression has transcended irritation to achieve absolute emptiness. Lan Wangji, a gorgeous series of silver bracelets ringing down his wrists, tenderly and rapturously wipes Wei Wuxian’s face clean. Nobody else reacts —
At the other end of the table, Jin Zixuan spit-takes his tea. Everyone ignores this as well.
“Please,” Nie Huaisang begs under the cover of Jin Zixuan’s coughing fit. “I’m telling you this because I trust you. And because Wei-xiong, you’re probably the only person who would believe me.”
“Fair enough,” Jiang Cheng says, still mildly horrified.
Wei Wuxian leans in close, eyes alight with excitement. “Have you seen anyone you know?” he asks. “Have you seen me!”
“Um,” Nie Huaisang says. He makes like he’s trying to remember, but he just wants to put off saying it out loud as long as possible. “I’ve seen, uh. Meng Yao.”
Wei Wuxian makes about seven different expressions at once.
“It was one time!” Nie Huaisang cries. “It was a really weird moment!”
“I am not letting you off for that, but I accept you,” Wei Wuxian says, and Nie Huaisang sags in relief. “But Meng Yao? And no one else?”
“There is someone else,” Nie Huaisang says slowly. “I’ve never seen their face, but I’m sure it’s always the same person. Somehow it feels wrong that I can’t tell who they are.”
“Well, if they’re really all connected,” Jiang Cheng says, after all the whimsy has deflated out of the conversation, “you’ll probably find out who it is soon enough. You just need to find out what they look like, right?”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Nie Huaisang says, resisting the urge to bury his face in his elbows. Maybe he does want to get to the bottom of this, but he has a hierarchy of needs, okay, and he needs to achieve ‘just one good night’s sleep’ first.
“Meng Yao,” Wei Wuxian is mumbling, with a note of what could be anguish. “Meng Yao?”
v.
If this feeling was something physical, if there was something hollow in the space between his ribs, maybe, or a weight in his lungs, Nie Huaisang is sure it would be better. Better to have something he could hold and take apart, that he could try to understand rather than something that just unmoors him whenever he gives it even the slightest consideration.
He’s so tired. He wishes he could skip ahead to — to something.
He jams his elbow into the walk button again and watches the light at the other end of the street stay stubbornly red. There aren’t any cars on the road, not at this ungodly hour. He steps off the curb.
Halfway across the street, a faint yellow glow shines into Nie Huaisang’s peripheral vision and doesn’t stop getting brighter. He turns and looks directly into the headlights of a city bus that is absolutely not slowing down.
Ah fuck it, Nie Huaisang thinks. The bus system won’t allow him their services, so they’ll have to take responsibility for this. He eyes the windshield, distantly hyperaware of every second going by. It’s flat like a plow. Maybe it’ll just push him along for a while, like a poor road trip mosquito, and he’ll get home faster.
The bus screeches as it stops by force, jerking the people inside forward in its abruptness. They — driver included — look even more surprised than Nie Huaisang himself. He makes several long seconds of eye contact with them, trying to understand what’s just happened, and almost misses the figure darting into the night behind the bus.
Something makes a soft smack as it falls to the ground back there. Still half-blinded by the headlights, Nie Huaisang squints hard, and thinks it looks kind of like an arm.
What does he say in this kind of situation? Hey, you dropped your —
The large, shadowed form reemerges from the alley, quickly stooping to grab whatever the hell that was before disappearing once again.
Still raw from his near-bus experience, the next night finds Nie Huaisang watching bemusedly as a rowdy group of men coming down the sidewalk toward him suddenly jaywalk across the street with no warning, giving him the widest possible berth.
When they’ve scattered far enough that he can’t hear them anymore, he focuses on the white noise of the city, picking out every stream of sound he can identify: the puttering of an old scooter, the barking of stray dogs, an old song radiating from a metal balcony several stories above.
He slows to a stop and closes his eyes. One, two.
When he mouths eight, the iron clanking he’d dismissed as just another part of his Urban Sonic Experience comes to a halt as well.
And then it just… doesn’t go away. He takes the extra-long way home the night after that, trying to clear his head from the fumes of another completely fruitless day. Suddenly feeling a bit fanciful, he hops onto the low brick railing of a bridge spanning the short length over a gutter, and takes a few steps with his arms spread out, tuning into the burble of the stream.
A brick dislodges beneath his feet. Before Nie Huaisang can get a word in, he’s falling off the low bridge, but instead of filthy water and concrete, his shoulder whites out with the pain of hitting something dry and absolutely solid.
He just lays there for a moment until there’s nothing but a dull ache, questioning the state of his life. When he’s managed to tamp down his budding hysteria, he pushes up with his good hand into a sitting position on a rusty sheet of scrap metal.
He’s sure this wasn’t here before he fell.
“I know you’re out there!” he shouts into the echoing pipes beneath the bridge. Of course there’s no reply. Nie Huaisang wouldn’t be so certain about this someone, if there was.
vi.
The ceilings of these halls vault too high and hollow and Nie Huaisang feels lost in them, which is good, because he hopes he’ll never, ever be found. Incense, cold and unfamiliar, wafts through the air, and when he squints he imagines he can see its smoke curling around the looming beastly embellishments on the walls.
His knees smart. The fronts of his robes are already beginning to stain brown from where he’d skinned them, but the sting is nothing compared to his vice-tight grip around the perfume sachet in his hands. If he holds tighter, he thinks, if he can just hold tight enough, the scent won’t completely disappear. With the balls of his fists clenched together like that he wipes the last tears off his face and wishes he would disappear already.
He hears the doors slide open — he can’t see them, from where he’s curled into himself, tucked behind a chest of drawers. With confident footsteps, the gray and olive robes of Nie Huaisang’s every night enter the room.
For the first time, it occurs to him that this is just a boy. That he’s still young, a child, really, but older than Nie Huaisang is right now in the way that teens seemed grown up when he was little, the way he’ll never see them again. The boy doesn’t spend long looking — he comes straight to Nie Huaisang and crouches down before him.
Look up! Look up, damn it!
The Nie Huaisang of the past won’t budge. He stares resolutely down, unable to catch even a glimpse of the boy’s face.
Square hands marked with the beginnings of calluses enter his field of vision, and open Nie Huaisang’s palms. His movements are firm and assured, but somehow Nie Huaisang knows that he could refuse them, if he wanted. The boy takes the old sachet and carefully, if a bit clumsily, ties it to the handle of a fan he takes from his sleeve. It’s painted with watery inks, the high walls and mountainous landscape of a place whose name just eludes him.
When the knot is complete, the boy holds the fan out to Nie Huaisang, who immediately takes it and clutches it tightly to his chest. He stands and Nie Huaisang stands with him, without exchanging a word. They don’t need to, not right now.
With the fan safe in one small hand, Nie Huaisang reaches the other out and holds on to the end of the boy’s sleeve, lets himself be led out into the cloudy daylight.
He glances just high enough to see the beginnings of a firm jaw despite the still-lingering softness in the boy’s cheeks, a brow that gentles at the sight of him.
He wakes and his face is wet.
By the time he’s done swearing up and down to his studio professor that he’s working from home today, honest to god, phone held between his shoulder and his cheek so long his neck cramps up, the sun is already at its peak. He hardly notices, too busy sweeping a month’s worth of dead-end sketches off his desk.
There’s no time to stop and doubt himself — if he were any more conscious of his movements, he would’ve thought his hands were possessed. Everything he needs is crammed into the bottom two shelves of his closet from years of magpie hoarding action: he measures out lengths of wood and black rice paper, cuts and folds, sands, lacquers, and polishes, grinds and dilutes a dusty ink stick, movements measured and sure. Then the bronze paint, the shape he’s been tracing for days, as large as he can remember it.
The battered old street lamp outside his window blinks to life. Nie Huaisang arranges a panel of fans into the maw of a beast.
It’s not home like it’s perfect, not by any means — but it’s home like it’s where he is, where he has been, longer than he’d ever realized.
vii.
“Really, Nie-xiong,” Wei Wuxian says from where he’s got his legs kicked up on Jiang Cheng’s dashboard, not helping in the least. “This is cool as hell and all, but couldn’t you have soul searched your way to something with reasonable dimensions?”
Nie Huaisang throws his head back and laughs, hoisting his end of the rolled canvas tarp higher over his shoulder. Where does he even begin. Jiang Cheng glares daggers at his brother and shoves Nie Huaisang’s monstrous final piece at a new angle through the trunk of his car, narrowly avoiding crushing Wei Wuxian in the passenger seat. “Why did I let you come with,” he snaps.
“Because you love me, and we love Nie-xiong?” Wei Wuxian says guilelessly, biting the straw of his chrysanthemum tea box beyond recognition.
“Keep saying that and I’m gonna have to kiss one of you about it,” Nie Huaisang says. Wei Wuxian waggles his eyebrows obnoxiously. Jiang Cheng turns a fascinating shade of pink.
After finishing his piece, Nie Huaisang had passed out for fifteen hours and then woken up to realize there was absolutely no way he could get it to the studio on his own. He’d wrung his hands about calling Jiang Cheng for the better part of the morning, but this is — it’s nice. It’s fun. Something light is bubbling in Nie Huaisang’s chest.
A few well-placed shoves and what’s shaping up to be an awful rug burn on Nie Huaisang’s forearm later, he tucks himself into the corner of the back seat, balanced precariously against his fans and buzzed on the adrenaline of being in a motorized vehicle for the first time in an eternity. He shares a grin with Wei Wuxian as they watch Jiang Cheng drive with his jaw clenched, visibly resisting the urge to sing along with the woman crooning a sad love song on the radio. The sweet spilled wine, the fallen petals, the dust-covered dreams, the whole nine yards.
The gallery door shuts with a muted slam and metallic click, finally leaving Nie Huaisang alone with his thoughts. Under the respectable guise of needing longer to finalize his setup, he stands there blankly, trying to drown out his second guesses beneath the harsh fluorescent tubes.
The gray and bronze fans stand stark against the black screen, almost floating. If not for the traceable outline of their patterns, he’d be tempted to step through them, as though they were an array.
Overhead, the lights flicker out, the motion sensors having gone too long without Nie Huaisang proving any semblance of life to them. He blinks once, hard, and turns to look into the night through the window.
A dead man watches him from the other side of the glass. Nie Huaisang slips on a tarp and crashes into a display stand.
The light comes back at once, washing over him with an elevated air of reality. He stands and shakes the staples and binder clips off his palms, the torn knees of his pants. Everything, somehow, is perfectly fine.
He slides open the window and thanks the heavens, for the first time ever, that the visual arts building sits at the center of a massive commons of lifeless concrete tiling and bizarrely intervalled lamps, because the corpse hasn’t yet vanished into the night like always. Nie Huaisang watches him stumble stiffly across the empty, well-lit plaza.
“Wait!” he cries. His voice echoes throughout the cement, but the corpse continues at his moderate pace. “Wait! Da ge!”
His brother freezes.
Nie Huaisang’s legs are trembling so hard, it’s like he’s not walking on them at all. Like he just floats over the windowsill, down the wide stairs, across the plaza until he’s right in front of him. God, he doesn’t even know his name, but he knows this is realer than anything.
His brother’s skin is ashen, papery and dry, and his brow is exactly the same as in his dreams. Nie Huaisang’s hands waver over his every feature, and for all that he always has so much to say, for now it’s enough to call him, over and over, the words unfamiliar on his tongue from this life, but not from the other.
“I just wanted to see you again,” Nie Huaisang whispers.
Nie Mingjue nods haltingly and tilts his face into his brother’s touch. If he could still breathe, his chest would be shaking.
.
After centuries of silence (the occasional roar notwithstanding), it’s an endeavor for Nie Mingjue to find his voice. His words catch jagged in his throat, gravelly and airless and replete with antiquated vocabulary, but Nie Huaisang is both a massive nerd and patient for the first time in his life, exclusive for Gege, so they get by just fine.
“You’re sure…” Nie Mingjue says, “this will… work.”
“Of course it will, don’t you go underestimating me,” Nie Huaisang says, frowning in concentration. He sets down the brush and angles Nie Mingjue’s head toward the light.
“Not you,” Nie Mingjue says. “It’s... powder.”
Nie Huaisang frowns at his work and picks up his blender again. Even sitting down on the bed, his brother is essentially the same height as Nie Huaisang standing, something he doesn’t have the cerebral capacity to process, not now, not ever. He’s dressed in the absolute largest set of street clothes Nie Huaisang could find, while his spiritual energy-maintained robes are half-folded into the hamper until Nie Huaisang can figure out how to deal with them without just throwing them in with the laundry.
“You can do so much more with powder now,” Nie Huaisang says, and steps out of the way of the mirror. “See? Definitely the face of a living person.”
Nie Mingjue hazards a brief glance at Nie Huaisang’s masterwork before looking back down at his lap. Nie Huaisang’s birds are hopping cheerfully on and around his hands, cupped stiffly so they won’t be crushed. “If you… think so,” he says. “Then it is.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say to fine art,” Nie Huaisang sniffs. For him, at least, it’s hard to look away, but he has to for a moment.
rmber my place at 7 everybody <33
theres someone i want u to meet!