The first shichen of Nie Huaisang’s triumphant return home were spent settling Lan Xichen into his usual guest quarters – he asked about a cell and was told they were all occupied with Nie Huaisang’s spare fans, which very nearly made him look amused for half a moment before he remembered how terrible everything was – and putting Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian into another set of guest quarters so that they could work out their little hand-holding-and-abrupt-realization-of-feelings dilemma in private.

The next three were spent dealing with the fact that Nie Huaisang’s entire Sect wanted to talk to him.

Or even just look at him, with expressions of such deep and intense relief – as though staring at a priceless spiritual treasure that could save their lives – that Nie Huaisang felt deeply uncomfortable. Yet the ones who stared at him were still better than the ones who seemed to need to find a reason to touch him, as if they could rub good luck off of him.

It was bizarre.

He was a fierce corpse. The sabers’ instinctive attempts to obliterate him felt much more natural.

It took him until late in the evening to finally escape the crowd.

Luckily, sleep was now apparently optional - or possibly not an option at all, he wasn’t sure, he hadn’t really quizzed Wei Wuxian about the exact details of fierce corpse-hood yet and anyway when he did he intended to bring up a list of complaints and suggested improvements he’d started working on in the back of his mind – so he still had energy to do what he’d wanted to do all along.

Talk to Nie Mingjue.

Nie Huaisang’s da-ge had been by his side every second until they reached the Unclean Realm, eventually retreating to go rest at Nie Huaisang’s urging and eventual ordering, but he hadn’t – he hadn’t said anything. He’d had one of Nie Huaisang’s fans on him, he’d brought out the sabers for him, destroyed the Jin sect for him, he’d done so much –

But he hadn’t said anything.

Nie Huaisang went to find him.

It took a while, since Nie Mingjue had apparently taken refuge in Nie Huaisang’s bedroom instead of his own and Nie Huaisang wouldn’t have guessed that in a thousand years – though perhaps he should have.

“Da-ge?” he said hesitantly, walking up to where Nie Mingjue was sitting on the bed, vacantly staring at one of the walls without seeing a single one of the paintings Nie Huaisang had put there.

Nie Huaisang still wasn’t used to the way his brother’s face seemed vacant of emotion. His brother had always been full of life, always angry or glad or something – even if he tried to control himself he couldn’t, his eyes always giving him away, and even those who didn’t know him, the ones who mistakenly thought he was nothing but angry, which couldn’t be further from the truth, even they didn’t think he was…

Like this.

“Da-ge?”

Nie Mingjue seemed to hear him at last, turning to look at him.

“Huaisang,” he said, and there was the slightest tremor in his voice: fear and pain and loss, and so much of it that it was overwhelming him.

Nie Huaisang sat next to him, leaning over until their shoulders were touching.

He felt helpless.

He’d known his brother loved him, of course. They weren’t like the Jiang sect, where one side tried to show their affection by lecturing and the other side tried to show it through acts of sacrifice and neither side understood the other; they weren’t like the Jin sect, all smiles hidden behind daggers and not one of them actually liking any of the others; they weren’t even like the Lan sect, two brothers so closely attuned that they might almost have been twins born a few years apart, rarely butting heads over anything.

No: Nie Mingjue chased and Nie Huaisang fled; Nie Huaisang complained and Nie Mingjue scolded; Nie Huaisang teased and Nie Mingjue pretended he didn’t laugh. Through it all, his brother always tried to do right by him, sometimes spoiling him and sometimes being too strict with him – a child raising another child, fumbling through it clumsily but earnestly, determined to do the job because to give Nie Huaisang to anyone else to raise would have been to give him up entirely.

Because the Nie sect only believed in adoption when it could be done whole-heartedly. Giving Nie Huaisang to be the son of some cousin or another would have made someone else the heir, and that had always been unacceptable to Nie Mingjue. Not once, no matter how useless Nie Huaisang proved himself to be, had Nie Mingjue ever wavered in his belief that Nie Huaisang deserved everything good in the world.

No matter what things were said about them – that they were only half-brothers, that it was odd that Nie Mingjue kept him by his side, that it was such a shame Nie Huaisang was such a waste of time – it had never mattered one bit.

Yes, Nie Huaisang had always known his brother loved him.

He’d lived a happy life, for the most part, felt safe and content knowing that no matter what happened, he had his brother to hold up the world for him. And now his brother needed him, not the other way around, and he didn’t know what to do.

Helpless to help, again.

Nie Huaisang had only just turned seven when their father had died, but he remembered more of it than he would like. The person Nie Huaisang had known as his father had been lost forever the moment his saber shattered, Wen Ruohan’s poisonous touch and smug smile a looming shadow behind it, but in fact it had been another six months before he’d actually passed away. Six terrible months of madness and pain, which to Nie Huaisang were mostly just faint snatches of angry voices and bruises littering his arms because his father no longer had the ability to remember that he was just a child that couldn’t fight back – Nie Mingjue had kept him as far away from it all as he possibly could, taken the brunt of it in a way Nie Huaisang hadn’t really understood as a child, but there was no escaping it.

Nie Huaisang remembered it being a relief when word had gone out that the Sect Leader had died: he’d been too young to properly understand filial piety back then, to understand that there would be three years of mourning and a lifetime seeking revenge awaiting them; all he’d thought was that he could finally stop hiding in his room all the time, keeping his voice down to try to avoid anyone noticing that he existed – Nie Mingjue had locked and barricaded the door so no one (one person in particular) could get in while in a frenzied rage, and the only way in and out being the high window that his brother smuggled him through for a few short outings in the middle of the night when it was a little more safe.

He’d made his way out of his room on his own, somehow, and run to find his brother, foolishly thinking of sharing the good news that the monster was gone.

Instead, he’d found his brother kneeling on the floor in one of the inside rooms that had once been their father’s. There had been blood everywhere, Nie Mingjue’s precious saber discarded on the floor as if it were nothing but trash, and his brother’s arms had been wrapped around himself as if he’d been cold, his whole body shaking uncontrollably as if he were suffering from some sort of fit.

Nie Huaisang had run up to him and asked him if he was all right, if something had happened, if it was going to be okay, and the only thing his brother said in response, repeating it over and over again as if it were the only words he knew, was I don’t know…

Nie Huaisang hadn’t been able to do anything back then – and now he was fully grown, having lived and even died, and he was just as helpless to help his brother’s pain as he’d been when he was a child.

He’d never felt more useless than he did now.

“Da-ge…”

His brother suddenly moved, pulling Nie Huaisang into his arms as if he were a little child again. “Huaisang,” his brother said, and his voice was truly shaking now. “Huaisang, forgive me.”

“Forgive you?” Nie Huaisang asked, astonished, even as his arms came up around his brother, letting him bury his face into his shoulder as he shuddered and wept as if he were the child. “For what?”

“I lost you,” his brother whispered. “I lost you, I failed you, you were gone –”

“You didn’t lose me, you didn’t fail me, you didn’t! I’m here now, aren’t I? You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t know what would happen. You had no way to know that he would violate his oath to you – that he’d fix his attention on me. You even avenged me – okay, perhaps you overdid it a little bit –”

It was more than a little bit.

Nie Huaisang’s brother had achieved in a single murderous night what Wen Ruohan had struggled for years to accomplish and still failed: with the Wens gone, the Jins gone, the Jiang and Lan sects still rebuilding, there was only one sect with any power or influence left, and now everyone knew it.

As he’d learned from the countless hours he’d spent with his sect, the world had already started changing even while they’d all been preoccupied with their own personal dramas: Nie sect commanders were already starting to be asked questions as if they were everyone’s commanders; their forces had been forcefully swollen by any number of overly-eager volunteers, who were currently being sent out to sweep the land for evil if for no other reason than to keep them too busy to ask the aforementioned questions; and one of the inner sect disciples in charge of correspondence had casually mentioned to Nie Huaisang the truly monstrous pile of applications from small sects seeking to officially register as loyal subordinate sects under Qinghe Nie.

There was even, it seemed, a very stiff one from Jiang Cheng himself, asking for a formal acknowledgment of the new state of affairs –

If Nie Huaisang had known about everything, he might have been a little less eager to take Lan Xichen into custody. He didn’t actually think Lan Xichen was to blame for his sworn brother’s actions, but he did think it was a good idea to have a proper trial on the subject. Lan Xichen needed the cleanness of a trial, of judgment and punishment, to wash away the filth that his sworn brother had left him covered in – it was the ambiguity, the questions, that would be the true torment. Only once everything was acknowledged, the burning light of the truth shining on all the dark places, would he be able to accept that his only crime had been trusting the wrong person for all the right reasons.

Only then would he be able to move on.

Only then would Nie Mingjue be able to move on, from the role he had also played: Jin Guangyao had been his sworn brother as well, and he’d been the one to give permission for Nie Huaisang to go.

Only then would Nie Huaisang be able to forgive himself for having not figured it out in time to stop – all of this.

He’d been stupid. He’d known Jin Guangyao’s loyalties were with the Lanling Jin, that tensions were escalating – he’d even known, as his brother had learned the hard way, that Jin Guangyao was more ruthless than he appeared. And yet he’d liked Jin Guangyao’s indulgence, his little gifts, his sympathy, and that had been enough for him to ignore the rest; he hadn’t thought for one minute to be worried.

He’d never thought Jin Guangyao would kill him.

Just as he’d never thought Jin Guangyao would hurt Nie Mingjue in such a vile way, slowly driving him insane with insidious poison. Based on the little the Lan brothers had said on the way back, the song would have been forcing Nie Mingjue back, step by slow step, into a qi deviation, the ultimate fate of their family, and the mere thought of it put the taste of bile and ashes into Nie Huaisang’s mouth.

If he hadn’t been just that little bit too curious, his brother might have one day – might have ended up just like –

He didn’t want to think about it. As a child, he’d had nightmares about it for months, both during and after – panic attacks during the day, triggered by loud noises or sudden movements or not seeing his brother for too long, and terrors at night that kept him awake and trembling even as he took up space in his brother’s bed, keeping the exhausted newly appointed sect leader from getting any rest himself.

He’d spent hours staring at his brother’s face, afraid that if he blinked, his brother’s eyes would become bloodshot, his cheeks flushed, veins pulsing even as they shattered from the strain of ceaseless rage –

Jin Guangyao would have done that on purpose.

And Nie Huaisang had very nearly missed it – for what? A smile? Not having to train? Some pretty fans?

He would rather they had all been burned.

Yes, they needed a trial. They all did, to wash themselves clean.

Perhaps insisting on a trial was just Nie Huaisang finally living up to their family heritage. After all, their sect had always put justice first and foremost, justice and its close cousin revenge; it was only once justice was accomplished, the scales balanced, that they could move on to healing and purification, to building up again from a new and better foundation.

But putting aside what the trial would mean to them all personally, Nie Huaisang had to admit that he hadn’t thought about the impact of it, the wider implications. How did this all look to the rest of the world? The Lan sect’s leader, willing submitting himself to trial at their hands – acknowledging the Nie sect’s right to lay judgment on his head –

Even if they didn’t want to be in charge, they weren’t going to have much of a choice.

“…we’re going to have so much work to do,” Nie Huaisang said out loud, reaching the conclusion with a grimace. They had a responsibility, now. He knew his brother: his brother would never accept the right to rule without the duty of care, and that meant that they had to care about the whole world…

He thought he knew his brother, anyway –

No. No.

He still knew him.

This was still his da-ge, still Nie Mingjue – a little broken, a little damaged, all those shattered pieces put back together in a way that would never be the same again, but still his brother.

(It wasn’t like their father again. It wasn’t.)

His brother huffed, his own quiet version of a laugh; his breath was warm against Nie Huaisang’s neck, and Nie Huaisang knew that if he embraced his brother the same way, it wouldn’t be the same. “You would be most concerned about the prospect of paperwork, wouldn’t you?”

It wasn’t what Nie Huaisang was most concerned about, not by a long shot, but he’d put years of effort into being a shameless dandy that he wasn’t going to throw away, so he forced a laugh and said, “I mean, can you imagine? Our ancestors would roll over in their graves to think of a fierce corpse filling out orders on behalf of the sect –”

“I broke open the graves,” Nie Mingjue said, and Nie Huaisang stopped, because yes, he had, hadn’t he?

He’d desecrated the tombs of their ancestors, and all of it for Nie Huaisang.

“I don’t regret it,” Nie Mingjue said. “Let me be punished or cursed as an unfilial child or a disgrace to our name; I don’t care. It was worth it to give them what they deserved – that and more, for what they did to you. We all deserve to pay.”

He was going to have to be very cautious in the sort of things he said or did for a while, Nie Huaisang realized. Whether it was because of what had happened to him, or maybe the poisoned music had already pushed Nie Mingjue too far down that road to the dead end – yes, his brother was still his brother, still beloved, but there was a streak of bitter madness in him now, one that would have to be very carefully tended to if Nie Huaisang wanted to see his brother fully restored to health and sanity.

If he didn’t want to see more devastation.

If he didn’t want to see his brother turn Baxia onto himself, in the end.

“You avenged me,” Nie Huaisang finally said. “You avenged me, and you had Wei-xiong bring me back – you did everything you needed to do. You did it, da-ge. You can – you can rest now, okay? You did everything you needed to do, and now it’s my turn to handle things for a while.”

His brother laughed a little at the thought of Nie Huaisang handling – well, anything, and Nie Huaisang supposed he deserved that, but in the end he managed to coax his brother to finally get some sleep, lying down beside him on his own bed like they hadn’t since he’d grown out of childhood.

Nie Huaisang was pretty sure it was the first actual sleep his brother had had since he’d died.

He himself did not sleep.

He looked up at the ceiling of his childhood bedroom, and for the first time in his life –