Chapter Text
“I’m sorry,” Nie Mingjue said, his teeth gritted together and his arms shaking from the strain of holding Baxia up. “He’s mine.”
The massive tiger glared down at him over Baxia’s blade, currently stuck in its teeth, and growled something.
“I know,” Nie Mingjue said. His legs were shaking now, too. “I know, trust me, I know! I’m human, he’s – young, yes, yes, I know. But he’s my little brother! I’m not giving him up!”
The tiger spat out the blade, knocking Nie Mingjue backwards on his ass.
“And when you change your mind?” the tiger demanded. “Will you abandon him then?”
“No!” Nie Mingjue exclaimed. “Never! He’s my brother!”
“Mark your words,” the tiger said ominously. “Or else.”
It turned and stalked off, its tail waving arrogantly in the air, until its towering white form disappeared into the distance.
Nie Mingjue sighed in relief. “Huaisang?” he called, and a small head popped out of the nest the tiger had started building, blinking owlishly at him. “Come on, come to da-ge. It’s time to go home.”
“But Master Tiger said we were going to play…”
“Yes, well, he wanted to play for too long,” Nie Mingjue said. “Only a few centuries, give or take. Let’s go.”
-
It started back when Nie Huaisang was born.
No, more accurately, it started when Nie Mingjue’s father fell in love with someone he probably oughtn’t have, which according to the sect was not a terribly uncommon problem for him to have, and decided to bring home a bride.
Nie Mingjue could still remember the first time he’d seen the Second Madame Nie. They’d all been lined up to greet her, all the sect and close members of the clan in rows according to rank, Nie Mingjue fidgeting in the inside of the house proper in his first tangle with formal clothing outside of the discussion conferences. She had come sweeping in with her head held as high as a princess, seductive and bewitching.
Every movement had been perfect, the eyes of all the men fogging over in lust and the women in admiration – or visa versa, depending on their personal preferences – and a wicked smile had lit up her face when she had stepped across the threshold, officially becoming the sect leader’s wife, and maybe everything would have gone along with whatever plan she’d had back then if she hadn’t next seen him.
“Oh, look at you,” she exclaimed, rushing over to pinch Nie Mingjue’s cheeks between her hands. “What a delectable little morsel you are!”
“Uh,” Nie Mingjue said, staring up at her with big round somewhat-worried eyes.
“You charming little dumpling,” she said. “You adorable mouthful of meat! Spoonful of egg yolk!”
Nie Mingjue cast his eyes around to see if anyone would be willing to help him.
“My eldest son,” Nie Mingjue’s father said, not without pride – albeit perhaps a puzzled sort of pride. “He’s probably just about old enough to come to the forecourt, if you don’t want him to live with you –”
“Oh no,” she said. “He’s definitely living with me.”
And so she stayed, and Nie Mingjue stayed with her, and she doted on him in a way he found pleasant if mildly disconcerting. Within a year, she was pregnant, and irritated with it; six months after that, she was round and complaining, even though Nie Mingjue solemnly assured her that she was as beautiful as ever.
“This is your fault, you know,” she told him, and he blinked at her. “It is! Don’t get me wrong, your father’s a charming bull when he wants to be, and of course he fucks like a champion stud, but I stayed here for you, my little cabbage roll, my charming chunk of liver.”
She patted her belly.
“That means this here is all because of you. So you’d better take responsibility!”
Nie Mingjue considered the issue for a little. The argument seemed plausible, so he raised his hands and put them on her rounded stomach. “I will take care and watch over him for all my life,” he vowed, and the baby inside kicked his hand in response, sealing the pact.
“Oh you are so cute,” she said, pressing her hands to her cheeks. “My darling pork bun! My little fish cake! I could eat you right up, if only you were just a little bit older!”
When Nie Huaisang was born, she disappeared in a welter of blood, but Nie Mingjue’s oath remained.
The trouble started after that.
-
“You can’t raise a cub like that properly,” the winged lion argued, bating its wings as if that would help it make its point better.
Nie Mingjue glared at him. “Watch me!”
“It’s for your own good, little human. He needs his own kind –”
“I’m not listening to a treasure-seeker!”
The lion scowled at him. “I’ll have you know that most humans think I’m good luck!”
“You’re not trying to steal most humans’ little brothers, are you?!”
The winged lion sighed, a deep sound, so very noble and long-suffering that Nie Mingjue couldn’t resist the urge to lift his foot and kick the lion right in the paw.
“Brat!”
“Don’t care!” he shouted. “You leave my brother alone! He’s my responsibility, not yours! Piss off!”
“You can’t even feed him properly -”
“I’ll figure it out!” Nie Mingjue bared his teeth and wished he was old enough for a saber.
“You little…fine. Fine! I’ll bring you a book on how to feed a huli jing kit, and you keep to it, you hear me?”
“I will,” Nie Mingjue said. “But don’t you even think of taking him away!”
“On your own head be it,” the winged lion grumbled. “Not everyone’s as understanding as me.”
-
“Why are you wet?” Nie Mingjue’s father asked him.
“Water monkeys,” Nie Mingjue said shortly. “There was a nest.”
“Water monkeys? Don’t they normally stay away from people…? Or, I suppose, were these ones feral?”
“Thieves.”
“Ah. Well, nothing to be done about it, I suppose…bad luck for you to run into them here, of all places. But good experience! How many people your age can say that they fought water monkeys?”
“Can we go home?” Nie Mingjue asked, a little plaintively, and rubbed his nose. “How much can you really have to say to the Jiang sect, anyway?”
His father chuckled. “More than either of us would like, unfortunately. But if you’ve had enough of water, which no one can blame you for, maybe you and Huaisang can go shopping in the pier instead?”
That would work, Nie Mingjue thought, and nodded happily.
(Sect Leader Jiang was extremely embarrassed about the ghostly rats in the night-market – he claimed they’d never seen neither nose nor tail of them before the Nie brothers had accidentally tripped over their trap and had to flee from the swarm...)
-
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Nie-er-gongzi,” the white-clad cultivator from the mountain said, smiling broadly and saluting deeply.
Xiao Xingchen had made himself famous during his first half-dozen night-hunts alone for his extraordinary grace, bearing and strength, and he said he was on a mission to help the world. He was beautiful, virtuous, and matched each ideal of gentlemanly arts.
Sects throughout the cultivation world were drooling at the thought of enticing him to join them, fighting for the opportunity to put in a good word with him.
Not all sects.
Nie Mingjue stepped forward, purposely putting Nie Huaisang behind him.
“Don’t you even think about it,” he said, hand on the hilt of his saber. “Buzz off, birdbrain.”
Xiao Xingchen might wear white, but Nie Mingjue knew a zhuque chick when he saw one.
-
“I found something for my aviary, da-ge!” Nie Huaisang, seven years old and delighted with his clumsy autonomy, announced.
Nie Mingjue, less than a full year into his new role as sect leader, rubbed his eyes. “Oh?” he asked, only somewhat wanting to scream endlessly into the void, which was better than usual. “That’s nice, Huaisang…”
“Come look! It’s so pretty!”
“I’m a bit busy –”
“But da-ge!”
Nie Mingjue sighed and got up, following Nie Huaisang to the door only to come to a complete stop.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he said to the fenghuang currently pretending to be a rooster in a cage, as if anyone would actually mistake phoenix flames for regular feathers. “Do you have no dignity left?!”
-
“You can’t adopt the bashe,” Nie Mingjue said to Nie Huaisang, who pouted. “It eats elephants; we’d be broke within three months.”
He turned to the giant python.
“You can’t adopt Huaisang,” he said. “I will literally murder you.”
-
“Why can’t I go watch the eclipse?” Nie Huaisang complained. “Everyone else is going!”
“I’m not risking a tiangou.”
“The…dog that eats the sun? Really, da-ge, is that even real?”
“You know what,” Nie Mingjue said, “you’re grounded just for saying that.”
Nie Huaisang grinned.
-
“Maybe I want to go and live among the qilin!” Nie Huaisang screamed, fourteen and hormonal about it.
“Well you don’t get a choice!” Nie Mingjue bellowed back.
“You’re not my father! I don’t have to listen to what you say!”
“I’m your fucking sect leader and yes you do!”
“I hate you!”
“I don’t care if you hate me! You still aren’t going to go live in a field with some magic pointy deer and that’s final!”
The qilin herd wisely chose to withdraw.
-
“Da-ge,” Jin Guangyao hissed, and Nie Mingjue looked up from his work at him – he hadn’t heard Meng Yao this upset since he’d shoved him into a closet to get him out of way during the whole dangkang boar hunt debacle. “Da-ge, there’s a dragon outside.”
“Again?” Nie Mingjue said, standing up to stretch and feeling oddly unbalanced. They’d just finished another session with the song of Clarity, so he really shouldn’t be feeling like this; he would need to write to Lan Xichen again about his fears that the treatment really wasn’t working. Lan Xichen would probably only say to give it more time, another chance, but still… “Let me go talk to them. Dragons are the worst.”
“No, da-ge, you don’t understand,” Jin Guangyao said. “It’s not a water-serpent or – or even a jiaolong – it’s a dragon.”
“A flood-dragon is a type of dragon,” Nie Mingjue said, following Jin Guangyao outside. “You know that, it’s in the name, what’s the big – oh, I see. It’s a celestial dragon.”
Jin Guangyao glared at him with an expression suggesting that he was under-reacting, but Nie Mingjue really didn’t have the capacity in him to reach with appropriate fervor at the moment. He and Nie Huaisang had been fighting a lot recently, every little thing escalating into a giant argument, and he was no longer sure if he was doing the right thing in trying to force Nie Huaisang onto the path of his ancestors. After all, unlike Nie Mingjue, Nie Huaisang had – somewhat different ancestors, on his maternal side.
And, he supposed, Nie Huaisang was old enough to decide otherwise, if he truly wished…
Still, Nie Mingjue was as stubborn as a mule and had no intention of giving up his baby brother without a fight, so he braced himself and went over to the frankly massive creature draped over the entrance gateway and much of the training yard that the entirety of the Nie sect was doing its utmost best to pretend that they weren’t seeing.
Nie Huaisang was sitting on the thing’s five claws – an imperial celestial dragon, apparently – because of course he was.
“Excuse me,” Nie Mingjue called up to the dragon, which turned its head to regard him, an entire production that took nearly a quarter ké to accomplish. “The brat there is mine, please return him.”
“Da-ge!” Jin Guangyao hissed again, but Nie Mingjue waved him away.
“You have raised him well,” the dragon said, which was…a good deal nicer than most of these interactions usually went.
“…thanks?” Nie Mingjue said suspiciously, ignoring Jin Guangyao’s splutters of “It talks?!” “I think?”
“I have chosen to grant you a boon,” the dragon announced.
“…right,” Nie Mingjue said. “If this ‘boon’ is that you’ll take him off my hands, I’m afraid I’m going to have to refuse. He may be trouble, but he’s still my brother.”
“Da-ge!” Nie Huaisang exclaimed, indignant. “Don’t be rude. I asked him for this!”
Nie Mingjue frowned at him, unable to resist the feeling of hurt even though he’d already told himself to expect something like this. “…you want to leave?”
“No, da-ge, don’t be ridiculous. I asked him to improve your health!”
Ah.
“Huaisang –” he started to say.
“Don’t you ‘Huaisang’ me!” his little brother shouted. “I know you’re trying to hide it, but it’s getting worse, isn’t it? San-ge told me so! He said I should get ready!”
Nie Mingjue made a mental note to strangle Jin Guangyao, who had no right to say something like that to Nie Huaisang even if maybe it wasn’t the worst idea in the world to emotionally prepare Nie Huaisang for the upcoming bereavement and inheritance he would need to face.
“Anyway, he said to get ready, so I did!”
“You can’t just ask a divine dragon to fix me, Huaisang. That’s not how this works.”
“Uh, it totally does, and I did, and he agreed. So there!”
Nie Mingjue crossed his arms and glared. “And what did he want in return?”
“The boon is a reward for your past merit, not a trade for the deeds of the future,” the dragon said, not even slightly hiding how its whiskers were shaking with suppressed laughter. “You have travelled a difficult road, and borne the weight of it well. And besides…”
“Besides?”
“If you were to die, he would undoubtedly petition the creatures of the underworld to return you.”
“Well, fuck,” Nie Mingjue said, having not considered that. “Fine. Whatever. Heal me and I’ll try to keep an eye on my health going forward.”
Maybe more Clarity? He could try to free up his schedule, get in a few more sessions…
“I just give up,” Jin Guangyao said behind him. “I just fucking give up.”
Nie Mingjue, assuming that he was talking about Nie Huaisang’s nonsense, agreed whole-heartedly.