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She’d called her home the jingshi, the quiet room, after the real one that was built back against the mountain, the one even Lan Wangji, who loved the quiet, had to be slowly acclimated to, the one that served as a means to strengthen cultivation and discipline the mind. He’d asked her once why she called it that, since it wasn’t a proper jingshi at all – it only had the basic arrays for privacy set at the windows, plus a few others he didn’t understand set into the floor, but those never seemed to be working when he was there.

She’d laughed weirdly (unhappily) and said that the sect’s quiet room was meant to discipline the mind and her quiet room was meant to discipline her. He didn’t understand, which he didn’t like – he usually understood mama, not the way he sometimes had trouble with other people – but she didn’t say anything more.

(That was the only time he’d ever seen the floor arrays active, the whole time he’d known her.)

He took to calling his home the jingshi, too, long after she’d left it. After all, the Lan sect rules demanded ‘Maintain your own discipline’, and quiet was discipline, and Lan Wangji always tried to do his best to follow the rules because following the rules made you happy. Right?

His older brother hadn’t liked that he called it that, but the name stuck – it’d been called it for so long, after all – and in the end he used it too. And so Lan Wangji lived in the quiet, even when it isolated him from the other boys his age, and he liked it that way.

And then, of course, he met Wei Wuxian, Wei Ying, who was the very opposite of quiet.

A bit like mama had been, actually, and for the first time it occurred to Lan Wangji that it wasn’t the quiet that he had liked so much.

When Wei Wuxian was gone, and he was hurt as much by his absence as he was by the whip marks that tore open his back – a punishment so dire he had scarcely believed it would actually be implemented until it was, and where before he might have accepted it as being his proper due he wasn’t so sure now – Lan Wangji turned to the quiet again, seeking the strength he gained from cultivation. Seeking comfort.

He found none.

He found –

Nie Mingjue was a heavy weight in arms that had begun to atrophy from disuse no matter how much Lan Wangji tried to train them, trapped as he was by his injuries, but Lan Wangji ignored the pain as he helped him back to his own quarters, his own jingshi, away from the other one.

(He ignored the way he took the lesser-used pathways to do it, making sure no one saw them.)

There was a lot of blood on Nie Mingjue, his hands nearly battered to bits, his throat abused by the silence spell, his face and ears covered in scratches caused by his own nails, and his eyes and ears had begun bleeding in the tell-tale sign of disorder qi wreaking havoc on his body from the inside as well.

It was not that Lan Wangji did not know of Nie Mingjue’s familial affliction. The man was his brother’s lover, after all, and they had all known each other since they were young. It was true that Lan Xichen no longer turned to Lan Wangji to confide in him his fears about Nie Mingjue, not after everything that happened over Wei Wuxian – it wasn’t necessary since he now had Jin Guangyao, some cruel part of Lan Wangji whispered, feeling jealous that his brother should have two great loves in his life while Lan Wangji had none – but it didn’t mean that he didn’t know.

“Why did you go to the quiet room?” he asked. He had always thought Nie Mingjue had hated the idea of it – it had always made sense to him, even if it didn’t to Lan Xichen. Nie Mingjue was a man of movement and noise, always loud in presence even when he did not speak; what succor would he find in the quiet, he who had never known it? “What happened?”

Nie Mingjue was weeping into his bloodied hands, salt tears mixing in with the tear tracks of blood on his face. Lan Wangji suspected it was the sound of Lan Wangji’s voice that affected him so – the voices of others always seemed to ring loudly after some time spent cultivating in the quiet room, almost deafening, and yet every time the din acted like a balm on his tender nerves.

And that was him. Lan Wangji couldn’t even imagine – for someone like Nie Mingjue, who didn’t have Lan training nor practice Lan techniques, who was notorious for lacking any skill in music and who couldn’t even protect himself by playing melodies in his head –

“What happened?” he asked again, more determined this time – there was a sick feeling in his stomach, a feeling not unlike the sick he had felt at the Nightless City, seeing his beloved do so much wrong. “Tell me.”

He got the story out of Nie Mingjue in bits and drabs, confused in sequence and time and not – not well – and –

Lan Wangji threw up into the small basin by the bed that he kept just for this purpose. It happened moderately often after he overexerted himself, whether in cultivation or movement or otherwise, and sometimes just after a particularly bad nightmare – and this felt like that.

A nightmare.

His brother – his brother – who always meant well, who tried so hard to do the right thing, who was kind and gentle and approachable the way Lan Wangji wasn’t – who was dutiful, who followed the rules, who had two loves in his life, each of them appropriate and approved of by the clan elders –

“He didn’t mean to hurt me,” Nie Mingjue lisped, his tongue still swollen from having been nearly bitten through, his voice hoarse and torn from his silent screams. His eyes and ears were still seeping blood. “He just wanted me to get better…he thought I wasn’t listening to him…being irrational…”

He nearly killed you, Lan Wangji wanted to scream. He didn’t trust you.

Just like he didn’t trust me.

“You need to go,” Lan Wangji said, seized with a sudden urgency. “Before –”

He didn’t know how to verbalize it. He didn’t want to verbalize it: he didn’t want to say that his brother’s lover should leave and never return, never trust himself again into the hands of the man (his brother) who did this to him, who put him in a room of nightmares and left him there unsupervised, who was probably at home having tea with his other lover while his childhood sweetheart died by inches in torment.

(Did Nie Mingjue even know about Jin Guangyao? Lan Wangji wondered for the first time. He’d thought they were a triad – Lan Xichen certainly spoke as if they were, confident that his sworn brothers’ troubles with each other were temporary, because love would eventually conquer all; he’d said that Jin Guangyao had told them that they were once lovers, attracted despite themselves, that it was a lover’s tiff that was sure to pass – but Nie Mingjue didn’t speak like that at all, distant and wary and even a little hateful towards the man he only reluctantly called his brother. He spoke of Lan Xichen as his lover, his beloved, and Jin Guangyao as someone who had betrayed him and who he was trying to force himself to get to know again, to tolerate, all on Lan Xichen’s say-so, and that was wrong, that wasn’t the relationship Lan Xichen seemed to think they had, and if Lan Xichen was so horribly wrong about that, then what else was he wrong about?)

“What happened to you?” Nie Mingjue asked instead of leaving at once, his hand raised and pointing as best as he could with broken fingers at Lan Wangji’s back. “Why…?”

Lan Wangji wet his lips. He knew, of course, that the Lan sect had not disclosed to outsiders what had happened to him – his betrayal of the sect, his punishment – but he had assumed Lan Xichen would at least tell Nie Mingjue.

“He said you were punished, and that you went into seclusion after,” Nie Mingjue said, before turning and spitting out some blood into the basin Lan Wangji had just cleaned. “But not – details. Why? What could merit that punishment?”

“I aided Wei Wuxian in escaping the Nightless City before he could be executed,” Lan Wangji said, because while he wanted to help Nie Mingjue he didn’t know if Nie Mingjue wanted his help – he didn’t know if he would turn away from him the way everyone else in his family had turned away from him. After all, there had been plenty of Nie sect cultivators who had been wounded or worse by what had happened there – and Nie Mingjue had been one of the ones who’d heeded the call to go to the Burial Mounds to lay siege.

But Nie Mingjue just nodded. “Should’ve had a trial,” he muttered through bloody lips. “Should’ve had a chance to explain what happened. Might’ve died anyway, but not – like that.”

Those were the kindest words on the subject that Lan Wangji had heard since it had all happened. They were probably true, too; Wei Wuxian should have had the chance to explain, to meet justice on his own terms, even given what the outcome would likely have been…Lan Wangji might not have even been able to tolerate that much. Like his father before him, he couldn’t bear to see his beloved executed for their crimes, though at least he’d kept himself from imprisoning him against his will until he lost all will to live.

(Not like Lan Xichen, who put his lover inside the jingshi just as their mother had been put inside a jingshi and left him there alone –)

“You need to go,” Lan Wangji said again. “It’s not – safe. Here.”

He hated to say it. He hated to think it.

Nie Mingjue looked at him, the same shared sorrow in his eyes. “Is it for you?”

That night, Lan Wangji went to children’s quarters and collected a very sleepy A-Yuan, who had been reluctantly named Lan Yuan by elders who didn’t accept him and sometimes resented him and who would not live well here without Lan Wangji to protect him –

Collected an equally sleepy Lan Jingyi, a little orphan who hadn’t yet been assigned a guardian, who liked noise and play a bit too much for the elders’ liking and who screamed for days after even the smallest introduction to the quiet room and no one seemed to care because surely he’d get used to it eventually –

Collected Bichen and Wangji and all the things he thought he might miss, which turned out to be far less than he’d thought –

He ignored the pain on his back, mounting on Bichen with Baxia under Nie Mingjue’s feet as well for all that the man was still bleeding and couldn’t stand without leaning on him, though he held Lan Jingyi securely in his arms like a man who knew his way around children –

He left.