It’s a stupid question, and Nie Huaisang knows it as soon as it comes out of his mouth. Wei Wuxian looks up at him from where he is gathering a few personal supplies, eyebrow raised and smile tugging at his lips in baffled amusement.
“Well I wasn’t planning on killing Wen Ruohan from here, even I’m not that good,” he laughs, stuffing some spare robes into a bag. Nie Huaisang wishes that laugh would comfort him like it used to.
“No, no, I know,” Nie Huaisang responds, face flushing in embarrassment. “I just thought, well...”
Wei Wuxian looks at him, still smiling at Nie Huaisang’s flustered state. He’s waiting for Nie Huaisang to continue and Nie Huaisang suddenly realizes that he can’t. What is he supposed to say? “I just thought that you would realize you are not well enough to battle? That you would stay here in the Unclean Realm, with me, and tell me what happened to you these last three months? That I know what it looks like when a soldier comes home with the invisible scars that hurt the most and I can see you are covered with them and please, please, don’t go, for once let someone else fight the battle, you don’t need to protect everyone if you would just let me protect you now?”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Nie Huaisang says. “You know me!” He flutters his hands, tapping his fan against his head. “Mind made of feathers, this one!”
Wei Wuxian laughs again, and Nie Huaisang hates how he can hear the emptiness behind it. Wei Wuxian steps toward him and reaches a hand out to cup the side of Nie Huaisang’s head, who so naturally leans into the touch. Wei Wuxian meets his eyes, gaze intense as always despite how his eyes are crinkled up with laughter.
“Ah, well I like that mind of yours, feathers and all.” Wei Wuxian leans in toward him, and Nie Huaisang thinks he’s going to kiss him in the easy way that the two of them do, but Wei Wuxian barely moves before he stops and drops his hand from Nie Huaisang’s hair, that same faraway look in his eyes that has been haunting him the past few days.
Nie Huaisang has always considered himself an exception to the rage and violence that the Nie clan is reputable for, but this moment seems to laugh that assertion in its face. Nie Huaisang has never felt so angry in his life. He wants to break apart everything in the room, he wants to cry and scream, wants to march to Nightless City himself and fucking kill everyone who dared hurt his A-Xian, he-
He gives a pouty frown as Wei Wuxian steps back.
“If you ask me, though,” Wei Wuxian continues, retrieving his pack from where it lies on the table. “You can be a real genius sometimes.” He casts a sly grin at Nie Huaisang as he straightens back up, pack slung across his shoulder.
Nie Huaisang knows how he is supposed to respond. He is supposed to open his fan and hide coyly behind it, clucking out a flustered “A-Xian, A-Xian,” at the compliment and its obvious reference to their misbehavior at Gusu. Nie Huaisang cannot bring himself to play along now, the old familiarity making too apparent the contrast between the Wei Wuxian he would sneak into the back hills of Cloud Recesses with to swim in the stream and lie with on the shore, soaked and breathless with kiss-sore lips, and the Wei Wuxian before him now, distant and hurting in ways that Nie Huaisang can’t kiss and laugh away.
Instead Nie Huaisang just smiles, and he lets it come out sad. Wei Wuxian looks at him differently for a moment, and Nie Huaisang thinks maybe, but then he’s looking at the door, the footsteps of other cultivators sounding through the passage as the troops move to gather in the courtyard. Nie Huaisang thinks once more of begging of Wei Wuxian not to go. But Nie Huaisang knows him well enough to know it won’t work. At best Wei Wuxian will laugh off his concern, and at worst he’ll be hurt by it, accuse Nie Huaisang of not thinking him capable, question why his concern doesn’t extend to Nie Mingjue if it’s simply a matter of caring for him.
And of course Nie Huaisang worries about his brother. But it is not Nie Mingjue who was missing for three months, who flinched from Nie Huaisang’s familiar touch, who has been making a ghost of himself in the halls of the Unclean Realm, who looks so far away at times that Nie Huaisang thinks he might already be lost.
But Nie Huaisang cannot say these things. They would only lead to pushing Wei Wuxian further away from him.
“A-Xian,” Nie Huaisang says, and Wei Wuxian’s gaze snaps over to him, as if Nie Huaisang had brought him out of a reverie. Nie Huaisang pushes past the pit in his stomach. “Promise me you’ll come back.”
Wei Wuxian smiles, a soft thing that Nie Huaisang knows he is lucky to be privy to. He steps closer to Nie Huaisang, lifts his hand as if to touch him and then lowers it again, and Nie Huaisang barely stops himself from throwing something.
“I promise,” he says, voice soft and broken like his smile. He lets Nie Huaisang stare at him for a few moments, as Nie Huaisang tries to find truth in Wei Wuxian’s eyes, but finds something dark he cannot name instead.
Wei Wuxian starts to step past him, and without thinking Nie Huaisang darts his hand out to catch Wei Wuxian’s hand in his. As soon as their fingers touch, Wei Wuxian flinches his hand away. Nie Huaisang jerks his own back in response, guilt curling low in his belly.
“Ah ha,” Wei Wuxian laughs, and Nie Huaisang hates it, wishes he would just stop. “I must have gotten into battle mode early.”
The excuse stabs deep into Nie Huaisang, and he looks away to keep the hurt from showing on his face.
He hears Wei Wuxian take a breath of air, as if about to speak, but then he just breathes out again. Silence has never felt so heavy with him, and that hurts just as much as everything else.
“Well,” Wei Wuxian states abruptly, and Nie Huaisang turns back towards him. “I have an evil tyrant to overthrow,” he continues with a cocky grin, and if things were normal, this is where he would cup his hand on the nape of Nie Huaisang’s neck, tilting his head up as he bent down to kiss him. But Wei Wuxian only moves to the door instead, calling back to Nie Huaisang as he goes, “I’ll see you at the victory feast, Nie-xiong!”
He leaves Nie Huaisang standing in an empty room, feeling more helpless than he’s ever felt.
