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i-will-cry-you-a-river · 9 days

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Do y'all want spoilers for the time travel fic I haven't updated in two years?

Of course you do!

So here's how the entire thing will go if I can ever hammer it into chapters.

(Cut to spare people's dashes. Also, thanks again to @micchikureshima for letting me use our discord convo to rant this out.)

Meng Yao manages to get a meeting with Yu-furen (with Jinzu and Yinzu on duty, of course). It's the first time he's ever seen her from within the same room (he only saw her once in the original timeline and it was from all the way across the marketplace during a festival) and he is desperately hiding how nervous he is.

She gives him a suspicious once-over, which has him sweating bullets that he might be recognized as a Jin Guangshan bastard, so he is infinitely glad when she instead identifies him as "that shadow chasing behind Nie-gongzi at the last conference in Qinghe."

Yes. Absolutely. He will definitely take that over being identified as anything else.

He tells her that he does pretty much whatever his sect leader needs him to do, which includes going out into the field as a scout because Nie-zongzhu doesn't trust the Wen in the slightest.

Considering word is already out about the attack on the Cloud Recesses, she agrees, then asks why, exactly, he has come to Lotus Pier instead of reporting back to the Unclean Realms.

He's already made up a lie about his mother having spent time as a maid in the Palace of the Scorching Sun before taking him and fleeing for their lives when one of Wen Ruohan's bad temper spells resulted in her being the only survivor of her servant cohort. He was young, true, but old enough to have seen the kind of man Wen Ruohan was turning into.

Then he tells her his observations and theory that since the attack on the Cloud Recesses failed to produce the kind of bloodshed the Wen Sect wanted for their threat, it's very likely that, as their closest neighbors, either Lotus Pier or the Unclean Realms will be next. And he has already seen (and killed) some scouts from the Wen sect sniffing around the outer edges of Yunmeng Jiang's territory on the way to the Pier.

Yu-furen, absolutely stone-faced, thanks him for the information and orders him to leave.

He goes far enough that no one will notice him, then pulls out some cloaking talismans that don't exist in the cultivation world yet because they were cribbed from the Yiling Laozu's notes back in his previous run of this life. Unlike the usual silence or stealth talismans, which can only bubble a staid location, these can be pressed to clothing to make a moving bubble. It's how he was able to kill the scouts.

He uses one to spy on the Jiang and find out whether or not Yu-furen will take his words to heart.

(He doesn't go spy on her directly because he knows she'll have to talk about it with her husband because he's the sect leader, and he got more than his fill of warring couples when he had to put up with both his father and Jin-furen.)

The security patrols are stepped up within the next week, more frequent, with two or three guards apiece instead of just one. Not enough that it would look suspicious to the Wen, but enough that he can tell his information got through.

He's especially relieved when he watches Yu-furen personally send her daughter and son off to visit relatives in Meishan Yu, ostensibly because she wants them to know more about that side of their heritage.

As head disciple, Wei Wuxian has to stay behind this time, which doesn't help his nerves.

For the umpteenth time, he can't help but wonder what in the world Jiang Fengmian was thinking almost two years ago, cheerfully putting a fourteen-year-old in charge of all their combat necessities, especially one who even now still seems to be goofing off. The Nie sect had been backed into an unfortunate position when it came to Nie Mingjue, a problem the Jiang sect didn't have, and even his own promotion from assistant to military aide had come after the war had started, when he was an adult.

Whatever, he's not going to think about it any more.

He's got work to do.

Meng Yao spends his time focusing on laying traps in the most likely spots for the Wen to infiltrate, taking out more scouts, and other such sabotage, while quietly sending reports to Mingjue.

For almost a month, it looks like his plan is going to work and the Jiang will be prepared if the Wen try anything.

-----

Then he's woken up in the middle of the night by screaming, and sees the orange glow over the trees from his window.

Fuck.

He quickly dresses, grabs his hidden weapons and talismans and sword, and makes a beeline for Lotus Pier. He slaps on a cloaking talisman as he breaks the treeline, and is stuck just staring for a moment at how many buildings are on fire.

How did this happen?!

No time to wonder about it. He shakes himself out of the stupor and immediately starts looking for survivors, waiting until the soldiers and cultivators aren't paying attention to grab them into his stealth bubble and drag them to a safe spot.

He's not a hero. He doesn't want to be doing this. But he can't imagine having to go back and look his sect leader and young master in the eyes and admit that he watched the Pier burn and did nothing.

It's not lost on him at all that most of the ones he's finding still alive are children and very young teenagers, left to die on their own while the adults were more thoroughly finished off.

He finds Jinzu (dead) and Yinzu (barely breathing) and drags the latter out, having to soothe her protests by promising to look for their lady.

He drags out an injured and half delirious Wei Wuxian, who somehow finds the energy to mumble a thousand questions about the talisman on his clothing.

Then he goes back in to look for Yu-furen.

Of course, she's in the middle of the mess, Wen Chao and his annoying girlfriend gloating over the bodies of her and Jiang Fengmian-

-then Meng Yao sees her hand twitch and oh, hold up.

Yu-furen, stunningly, is alive, though she's not gonna be for much longer if he can't get her out, which is looking increasingly difficult with more and more guards joining the -gag- lovebirds and Wen Zhuliu.

Then a charred flag waving in the wind gives him an idea. He sticks a stealth talisman to it and charges the hell out of it to act as a distraction for what he's about to do, then turns around and uses another burst of qi a knife directly at Wen Chao's throat.

The asshole has the unbearably frustrating timing to move right then, but he still hits a target, the knife zinging right past his face to bury into Wang Lingjiao's, killing her before she even hits the ground.

Wen Chao, naturally, completely loses his shit and starts screaming orders as he drops to his knees to cradle her body, and Meng Yao runs like hell towards Yu-furen, leaving behind the cloaked lure flag to make people think the assassin's in the spot he's already abandoned.

He barely manages to get his stealth bubble over Yu-furen before anyone can notice, but they realize she's gone as he's dragging her into the forest.

Ha, let 'em search all they want, he thinks triumphantly, but the adrenaline euphoria wears off as he reaches the rest of the sect members he managed to rescue.

Roughly two dozen kids and teenagers, a badly injured Yinzu and Wei Wuxian, who are trying to tend their injuries as best as they can, and now a nearly-dead Yu-furen.

His time-melded body is somewhere in his twenties, and he's the most capable adult standing here. Damn, he really didn't think this through.

But that's usually how it goes when he gives into impulse, isn't it? Like with-

No, he is absolutely fucking not going to think about the Jin captain from his last life. He is going to think of a way to get himself and this sorry little squad of Jiangs somewhere safe.

Of course, Meishan Yu comes to mind. Getting around the Wen now patrolling the forest won't be easy, but he still has plenty of stealth talismans. The real problem will be managing to get there with any speed, considering all the injured.

"How conscious are you?" he asks Wei Wuxian and Yinzu. Their answers aren't exactly encouraging, but will have to be good enough.

Some of the kids are starting to look at him warily, so he introduces himself as a member of the Nie sect, who'd been sent to warn the grown-ups this attack was coming and had… partially succeeded.

He gives Wei Wuxian some of the stealth talismans and they split the group to make it harder for the Wen to catch them, Wei Wuxian leading one and he and Yinzu leading the other, carrying Yu-furen on a makeshift stretcher between them.

When they reach the front gates of the Yu Sect compound, the guards on the walls recognize Yu-furen and guards come to hustle the Jiang group in.

He, on the other hand, is made to stay outside the gate,

It's not like he really expected any different, being from an unallied sect, but the blunt snub still stings a bit.

He sits down to wait for Wei Wuxian's group to show up, exhaustion creeping up on him as the hours pass. He's almost asleep when someone clears their throat from the wall above.

It's Jiang Yanli, who carefully lowers down a basket on a rope laden with food. For rescuing her mother and the kids, she says before disappearing from the wall.

Grateful and hungry, he tries to keep himself from just wolfing it all down in seconds, with the wistful thought that he should have tried to get to know her better in that life before.

Night falls, he sleeps at the gate, and morning arrives with Wei Wuxian's group still not having shown up.

This can't possibly be good.

-----

Almost on reflex, he makes his way towards Yiling, stopping only to take an extremely quick bath and get -most of- the blood off his clothing in a river.

As he gets closer and closer to the town, the rumor mill gets more and more animated. Most of it is expressly about the sacking of Lotus Pier, but there's one that makes his stomach churn.

A bunch of little Jiang sect kids were tortured, possibly killed, just the day before, and the Wen are forcing some local laborers to haul all the sect corpses from the Pier to the Burial Mounds.

He hears nothing about Wei Wuxian himself, which is… well, he knows better than to hope he just got away clean. The man destroyed his reputation and got himself killed once to shield former enemies, there's no way he would have up and abandoned his shidis and shimeis to save his own skin.

Which means Wei Wuxian must be on the way to the Burial Mounds as well, alive or dead.

And Meng Yao now has a very, very difficult decision to make.

So, pros and cons here.

On one hand, they have a lot more of the Lan sect available to fight this time, and because this whole mess has started two years early and without the Indoctrination Camp (yet… he really hopes it doesn't get to the point that happens again), many of the sects the Wen had absorbed are still independent and could be lured to the Sunshot side.

On the other hand, that's a lot of people available to potentially get killed, and corpses would do a lot more damage with a lot less… casualties, he'll say, even though that's not the right word for whatever goes on with a corpse army.

And then, there's also the possibility that Wei Wuxian is simply dead, or that he can't master the resentful energy necessary to form the corpse army while still having a core.

Though if he could, there would be an entire army already waiting for him because Wen Chao had been stupid enough to dump so many semi-fresh bodies there as an act of spite.

It's not his business.

It is his business, because he'd been impulsive and gotten involved at the Pier.

Fuck, he has the worst headache forming.

Looking down, he realizes he has wandered close to the "border" that the Yiling Laozu had once made by positioning hundreds of corpses around the Burial Mounds. There aren't any bodies about right at the moment, but he can feel the resentful energy trying to find fissures in his qi flow, recognizing him as a potential tasty snack.

He takes a deep breath and focuses on keeping it out, and the pain in his head lessens enough to let him think clearly.

He decides he'll send word to Jiang Cheng -because Yu-furen is in no condition to lead and probably won't be any time soon- about the body dump and the possibility that there might still be survivors, and let him decide what to do with that.

They might end up getting a corpse army anyway.

He still knows how to make the butterfly messengers. It will invite some questioning if too many people see it, since that's a technique he shouldn't know, but he has to make sure the message arrives.

And after one more night of restless, uncomfortable sleep driven by nightmares of the war as it had unfolded last time he'd gone through it, he turns towards the Heijan front.

Towards home.

After days of travel on foot to keep from being noticed and a few unfortunate fights when he failed at that, he barely makes it three steps into the military camp before almost being knocked off his feet by a fierce hug.

"You're back, you're back- you look like hell."

He snorts. "Hello to you, too," he says to Huaisang dryly. But inside, his heart is suddenly full to bursting at the knowledge that his young master must have been keeping a very sharp eye on things to have already known he was coming.

Had been keeping an eye out for him specifically.

Meng Yao knows he should go report to his sect leader first and foremost, but Huaisang drags him off towards the hospital and kitchen tents, dead set on getting him stuffed with food and checked over.

"I'm surprised your brother let you out here," Meng Yao admits as the medic tuts over the condition of his qi from all the stunts he'd had to pull at Lotus Pier.

After all, Nie Mingjue had been adamant about keeping Huaisang as far from the battlefield as possible in their past life, burying him in paperwork in either the Unclean Realms or the Cloud Recesses.

"I'm really only allowed these places," Huaisang says, giving him a conspiratorial grin. "After all, in a kitchen or infirmary, I'm never really disarmed, right?"

Very true. Huaisang had taken to hidden weapons training much more readily than he'd ever taken to the idea of a saber,

and even Mingjue had eventually been forced to admit he was quite good at improvising. Their sect leader still tried to drag him out with a practice saber occasionally, but wasn't nearly as vehement about it as he'd been in Meng Yao's memories.

After he's finally released from the infirmary, he makes his report, and then… he's tired. Too little sleep, too much stress, and even if his core was much stronger than it had been in his past life, he'd pushed it past most of its limits.

"You're staying with me," Huaisang announces. "Until they can get you set up somewhere else. Maybe even then."

He's too fried to argue, but once he's collapsed on a cot, Huaisang clinging to him like a barnacle, he finds he wouldn't have wanted to argue anyway. This feels right, similar to how the Unclean Realms had started to feel like home.

He would like- he could see himself getting very comfortable with this.

But there's still a war going on, and he can't rely on the mere hope that Wei Wuxian is alive and able to figure out resentful energy channeling.

So, with great misgivings, he slips out early in the morning, before Huaisang's awake, to go present his plan about installing a spy in the Wen sect to Mingjue.

He doesn't want to leave again, not so soon after arriving. Mingjue looks downcast about it, and he knows Huaisang is going to be upset.

But there's no one better suited to the task. He already survived Wen Ruohan once when the man had been at the peak of his volatile madness, he's the only one who knows how to predict the unpredictable. It has to be him.

Changing out of his sect clothing back into the dull travel robes, he slips out of the camp like a ghost and begins making his way toward Qishan.

-----

The next time he sees Nie Mingjue, it's in the throne room of the Palace of the Scorching Sun. Wen Chao is dead, Wen Xu is in the pits of the palace, essentially being kept on life support after he barely survived a fight with Mingjue, and the corpse army is tearing its way across the jianghu, bolstered by the rest of the Sunshot forces including an undecimated Lan sect and all the rogues who've rallied to Jiang Cheng.

Unlike the first time this happened, Nie Mingjue is in on the plan, the both of them having agreed to Lan Xichen being their go-between (maybe they could end up friends after all... he could at least hope).

Unlike the first time this happened, the 'killings' of the Nie cultivators are carefully staged.

Unlike the first time this happened, Wen Ruohan catches his movement out of the corner of his eye.

The force of hitting the wall shocks him to the point he doesn't even feel the pain that should have come with so many bones fracturing at once.

But even if he didn't deal the killing blow this time, it's fine. He made a good enough distraction for Nie Mingjue to get his chains around the tyrant's throat.

The last thing he remembers before he loses consciousness is his sect leader desperately calling his name as he drops Wen Ruohan's corpse like a discarded rag and rushes towards him.

-----

He wakes up to the victory banquet having come and gone without him ever meeting his father, and he is relieved

He wakes to the realization that he has already changed an entire war so much that manipulating the political aftermath to an ending that benefits everyone but his father should be easy, and the spiteful little ember he has always carried in his chest finally quiets into smoke.

He wakes to Nie Huaisang clutching his hand, having fallen asleep in a chair beside his bed -"The brat only ever left you if I personally dragged him out,"- Nie Mingjue tells him with an annoyed eyeroll that is immediately disregarded for a fond, proud smile as he ruffles his brother's hair.

And Meng Yao thinks, for the first time in two lifetimes, that he is completely satisfied with the results of all his hard work. (THE FUCKIN END)

#OF COURSE I DO WANT SPOILERS #I LOVE THIS SO MUCH OMG #i adore time travel aus and this is just soooo delicious #mdzs #nie huaisang #meng yao #sangyao

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