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“Why do you call him that?” Nie Huiasang asked, seemingly out of nowhere.
Jiang Cheng, who had been furiously jabbing at the air with his sword, stopped to look at him.
Wei Wuxian had just abandoned their sparring session to swan off after Lan Wangji, no doubt in search of trouble. Nie Huiasang had been watching since the start, but hadn’t offered to fill in for him. He had a saber, ostensibly, but Jiang Cheng had never even seen it unsheathed.
“Who?” Jiang Cheng asked. “And also what?”
“Wei-xiong,” Nie Huiasang clarified, like this made perfect sense. “You call him Wei Wuxian.”
Jiang Cheng stared at Nie Huisang for a long moment, trying to determine if he was serious.
Unfortunately, he seemed to be.
“It’s his name,” he finally spat out, and went back to practicing against an imaginary opponent.
“Wei Wuxian!” Jiang Cheng roared at his receding back. No one paid him much mind; it was a period of quiet study, and there was no lecturer for Jiang Cheng to interrupt. (If there had been, he wouldn’t have shouted.) The other students were used to the sound of him scolding Wei Wuxian, by now.
“Sorry, Jiang Cheng!” Wei Wuxian called over his shoulder, with a cheery wave goodbye. “I have to get to my punishment. Lecture me about it later, okay?”
“Really,” Nie Huisang said, leaning over from his adjacent desk. He was lazily fanning himself with the papers he was supposed to be using to take notes. “Why do you call him that? He calls you much more familiarly. He buzzes around all day long going Jiang Cheng, Jiang Cheng.”
“It’s Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Cheng muttered. “He does that with everyone.”
“Well, that’s not true. He’s still mostly calling me Nie-xiong and Huiasang-xiong, and we’re great friends now,” Nie Huisang pointed out. Which was, admittedly, true. At least part of it; Jiang Cheng was no great judge of if Wei Wuxian would call himself and Nie Huisang great friends, rather than average friends, or intimate friends. Or companions, or accomplices, or even allies. Wei Wuxian was friendly with so many people with such great ease that it was sometimes difficult to tell who he especially liked, and how much. At least he made no secret about who he hated. “And you’re his sect heir. It’s not as if you couldn’t put a stop to it, if you wanted.”
“You try making Wei Wuxian do anything other than what he wants to do,” Jiang Cheng challenged, and ignored the fact that he had not, in fact, made any recent efforts to get Wei Wuxian to call him anything else.
“A-Xian,” Jiang Cheng’s sister chided, humor still warm in her voice. “You’re making such a mess. Give me your bowl.” The four of them were clustered at a table in one of the Cloud Recesses’s picturesque courtyards, settled between the kitchens and the guest disciple’s quarters.
“I can’t help it, shijie!” Wei Wuxian protested, though he offered it up without complaint so she could finish filling his dish. “It smells so good, of course I’m eager!”
“It’s both of you,” Nie Huisang mused, leaning in closer to Jiang Cheng like this observation was meant to mean something to him. “You can’t tell me your sister couldn’t call him by his given name, if she wanted to. Even Lan-xiong is doing it, now, for some reason. Doesn’t she want to?”
Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes.
“If you want to keep being invited to eat my sister’s food, stop being nosy,” he told Nie Huisang, who, to his credit, protectively curled his hands around his bowl and didn’t bring it up for the rest of the night.
“Seriously, Jiang-xiong, why do you call him that?”
It was the after-dinner hours, and they were sitting together on the floor of Nie Huiasang’s room in the hall kept for guest disciples. Nie Huiasang had already unearthed his stash of contraband: candy and snacks smuggled back from outings to Caiyi Town, and spring books from home. Jiang Cheng had no idea where he had originally gotten them, and Huiasang hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with answers. Mostly, he’d been sly and smug.
Now, they were just waiting for Wei Wuxian to get back from his latest bout of detention.
“Your fixation on this is weird,” Jiang Cheng told him. He was idly flipping through one of Huiasang’s books, but he hadn’t yet mastered Nie Huaisang or Wei Wuxian’s nonchalant approach to this sort of thing. He caught a sudden glimpse of an illustration that was too racy to look at directly, and closed it at once, trying to seem unaffected.
Luckily, Nie Huiasang didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to his face to notice.
“Well, maybe!” Nie Huiasang agreed, convivial. He scooted closer, a concerning glint in his eye, and nudged his shoulder up against Jiang Cheng’s. “It certainly beats studying, though, doesn’t it?” Before Jiang Cheng could disagree, he started up again. “You’re essentially hindering my cultivation by not telling me, anyway. How often is it that I want to learn something?”
“You seem to want to learn plenty,” Jiang Cheng grumbled. “If it’s about dirty books, or art, or snatching defenseless animals out of the wilderness and then not even doing them the favor of eating them afterwards.”
Nie Huaisang snickered, sounding entirely carefree.
“But really, Jiang-xiong, why not just tell me the answer? You’re one of my closest friends here, now, which means you must know how irritating I can be. Really, you’ve brought this on yourself by not simply answering the question when I first asked it. Now it’s much more intriguing than it was in the first place, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be sated unless I know.” He tapped at his mouth with the top of his closed fan, an almost-passable impression of a man in deep thought. “Can the answer truly be that bad?”
“I did answer. Remember? When I informed you that Wei Wuxian is his damn name?”
“Well, you didn’t answer very satisfactorily!” Languid, he leaned more heavily against Jiang Cheng, undeterred when he tried to shrug him off. “I suppose I can’t make you. And really, I don’t particularly want to make you. I just don’t understand. It’s obvious how much you and your sister care for him, and you’ve known each other for such a long time. Why wouldn’t you use something more affectionate?”
Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes, even though Nie Huiasang couldn’t technically see them from this angle. They settled into silence for a long moment, and Nie Huiasang, shockingly, actually didn’t push it any further.
Jiang Cheng let out a frustrated sigh, tilting his head back to stare, baleful, at the ceiling.
Unfortunately, Nie Huiasang had stumbled upon some of the right things to say. There wasn’t only one reason why, of course — almost nothing in Jiang Cheng’s life was simple enough for that. But there were reasons.
Was there one of them that would satisfy Nie Huiasang’s endless, mercurial wants?
“My mother calls him Wei Ying,” Jiang Cheng began, his voice low. Nie Huiasang opened his mouth as if to speak, and Jiang Cheng shoved a hand into his face and pushed him upright, so he’d sit without support. “Don’t interrupt,” he snapped. “If you talk out of turn before I’m done, I’m not telling you anything else.”
Behind Jiang Cheng’s palm, Nie Huaisang nodded eagerly at him, his eyes wide.
Jiang Cheng huffed out a breath.
“My mother calls him Wei Ying,” he repeated, dropping his hand from Nie Huisang’s face and wiping it on his own robes. “And that’s also his name, obviously. It’s been his name since before we even knew him. Wei Wuxian might technically be more proper for us to use, due to our respective roles within the sect.” Proper according to his mother, at the very least; so much of a-jie’s visible care was already derided as inexcusable weakness or over-familiarity. He could hardly imagine her expression if she heard Jiang Cheng call him something shameless and ridiculous like A-Ying. He winced even thinking about it. “But there’s also— Ugh. I don’t even know if this makes any sense. I guess I feel like someone should be sure to call him Wei Wuxian, even if he is an informal idiot, because that means recognizing he even has a right to a courtesy name. Along with, you know, all the things that would mean.”
Nie Huiasang was being remarkably well-behaved, so far. His expression was carefully, studiously attentive, like he only sometimes bothered to do during lectures. There was still something around the corners of his mouth that made it obvious to Jiang Cheng how pleased he was to get his way, but if he wasn’t looking for it, he might not have known.
Jiang Cheng smoothed down the folds of his robes as an excuse to look away. That still wasn’t the whole picture. But he’d come this far, hadn’t he? It wasn’t as if the last part was especially embarrassing — it was just stupid. He’d never actually said it aloud. He had no idea if a-jie felt similarly about it, or if he was the only one.
“I’m sure you’ve heard that Wei Wuxian wasn’t born in Lotus Pier,” he told Nie Huiasang. “He joined as a disciple when we were kids. He was already Wei Ying, then. His parents gave him that. But he wasn’t Wei Wuxian until after he was a part of Yunmeng Jiang — not immediately, obviously, but still. Wei Wuxian is a name he got as a Jiang disciple. He was only Wei Wuxian after he was ours.”
Ours felt like too much, both harsher and more blatant than he’d meant it. But — wasn’t it a claim, in a way? An easily-identifiable, permanent marker that Wei Wuxian belonged there? Wei Wuxian was Lotus Pier’s name for him. It was part of Lotus Pier putting her hands on him, embracing him into the fold. The disciples who were born there had never had a name or a life that was disconnected from Lotus Pier — Wei Wuxian had. But being Yunmeng Jiang had made him Wei Wuxian.
The moment stretched out with no immediate response. Jiang Cheng looked back up at Nie Huiasang, a reflexive scowl already forming.
Nie Huiasang was looking back, looking surprisingly placid.
“Oh,” he said, with feigned surprise, “may I speak now?”
Jiang Cheng screwed up his face at him, and waved him onwards.
“I think that all makes wonderful sense, Jiang-xiong,” Nie Huiasang said. “I like it, and I think I understand. Thank you for telling me. I’m much more satisfied, now. Sated, even. Really, it was just eating at me, and now all of that tension has been released in one beautiful rush.” (“Gross,” Jiang Cheng informed him, under his breath.) “However,” Nie Huiasang added, suddenly serious, flicking his fan open with a flourish that Jiang Cheng was sure he had practiced.
Jiang Cheng went still, too, and waited.
“Jiang-xiong,” Nie Huiasang said. Already, something suspicious was creeping back into his voice. “Who knew you were so sentimental! That’s so sweet! I can hardly bear it! I may cry!”
Jiang Cheng tackled him to the floor.
When Wei Wuxian walked in a few minutes later, swinging dubiously-sourced wine from his fingers, it was to the sight of Jiang Cheng straddling a struggling Nie Huiasang, trying to get him pinned for a proper smack.
Nie Huiasang, for his part, was thrashing around and definitely breaking the rules on excessive noise by yowling things like “I yield! I yield! You are such a brute! This is bad form, I take it back, get off!” Despite his protestations, he was also fighting dirty, trying his best to pull at Jiang Cheng’s hair or kick him somewhere sensitive.
“Jiang Cheng!” Wei Wuxian cried, pretending at scandalized but sounding mostly delighted. He stopped to put his alcohol down on the table. “Are you murdering Huiasang-xiong?”
“Yes,” Jiang Cheng growled, determined not to be distracted from it.
“Not without me! Make room!”
With absolutely no hesitation, Wei Wuxian leapt onto Jiang Cheng’s back, toppling him and crushing them both beneath his weight.