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robininthelabyrinth · 4 years

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Light on the Door (ao3) (WWX in the Nie sect) - on tumblr: part 1, part 2, part 3

Nie Mingjue had hoped, somehow, that he would be able to avoid having this conversation. He wasn’t sure how he intended to avoid it – fobbing it off on another family member was beneath his dignity, it was pretty much inevitable to need to happen at some point during adolescence, and no matter how tempting he wasn’t going to up and die just to avoid some awkwardness – he’d still been hopeful.

The time for hope, however wistful and unsustainable, was gone.

“I want to start by telling you that this is a normal development,” he said, trying to keep his tone straightforward and casual, and failing miserably by the expression on Wei Wuxian’s face. “When you start to get older –”

“Please tell me we are not having the sex talk,” Wei Wuxian said, his voice faint with horror. “I have read way too much porn to be having the sex talk with you.”

“I wish we were having the sex talk,” Nie Mingjue grumbled. “I could give you a book, tell you to ask me any questions you like, and call it a day. Sex isn’t even an embarrassing subject.”

Wei Wuxian’s shoulders loosened. “Good point. Okay. So what talk are we having?”

“The secrets of the Nie sect cultivation method talk,” Nie Mingjue said, a little dryly. “Or, as my father called it, ‘when a boy and his saber start feeling strange things about each other’.”

Wei Wuxian’s face suggested that he was, once again, suffering horribly and unjustly from the Nie clan sense of humor. Which he somehow shared, so Nie Mingjue didn’t know what he was complaining about.

“I’m going to ignore that,” Wei Wuxian eventually decided, “in favor of focusing on the key parts of that sentence, namely ‘secrets’. What secrets?”

“Our cultivation path starts in a manner that’s very similar to orthodox swordsmanship paths,” Nie Mingjue explained. “And we are open to guest cultivators and outer disciples continuing to practice that sort of path, but the main part of the Nie sect, especially the clan, practice something a little bit more…unorthodox.”

“Unorthodox,” Wei Wuxian said, sounding as if he were rolling the word around in his mouth to savor the taste. “What do you mean, unorthodox?”

Nie Mingjue decided to just cut to the chase. “We utilize resentful energy from shedding the blood of the evil creatures that we hunt to cultivate our sabers into saber spirits capable of fighting evil semi-independently.”

Wei Wuxian’s jaw dropped. “Wait, what? That’s why I keep imagining that I can hear Suibian? Or, well, not hear…”

“Saber spirits don’t really talk, but they certainly have feelings,” Nie Mingjue agreed. “Lots of them, sometimes.”

Baxia calmly radiated a fuck you too feeling at him, but in a fond sort of way.

“Mostly ‘I want to destroy evil’ feelings,” he added, because it was true.

Wei Wuxian still looked stunned, so Nie Mingjue figured it was time to continue explaining.

“In orthodox swordsmanship cultivation, only the most powerful cultivators have swords that obey only their master – but because we cultivate our sabers’ spirits, all of them only obey a single master. Because they’ve been cultivated through the shedding of blood, they’re full of resentful energy themselves; they become far more powerful, but also more difficult to control.”

“Qi deviation,” Wei Wuxian said, jumping ahead at least ten steps in the talk. “Because of the proximity to resentful energy?”

“Not proximity. We cultivate our sabers through our own cultivation – processing the resentful energy and purifying it so that our sabers stay true to our principles. As the saber’s cultivation grows, it becomes more difficult to process it without becoming unbalanced, and eventually, absent a breakthrough, it will result in a qi deviation. It’s the trade established by the founder of our sect: we gain the ability to defeat evil now, but we pay the price later.”

Wei Wuxian obviously didn’t like that, and Nie Mingjue didn’t want to jump straight into the ‘so eventually all men die and some sooner than others’ section of the talk anyway, so he pulled it back.

“You’ve reached the point in your cultivation where you’ve started to sense Suibian’s rage,” Nie Mingjue explained. “It will affect you, making your temper shorter and you more impulsive; you’ll need to keep a careful check on it…as much as is reasonable, anyway. I’m not exactly one to talk about keeping your temper.”

He tried. Very hard, even, and he mostly even succeeded in mastering his temper into more appropriate channels – look, he hadn’t once tried to stab any other sect leader over the table in a Discussion Conference, and he was sitting across from Jin Guangshan, a walking pustule with wandering hands and no morals; Jiang Fengmian, too lukewarm to do anything except apparently whine about how Wei Wuxian preferred to stay in the Nie sect; and Wen Ruohan, his father’s murderer, a narcissist with delusions that he deserved to be emperor of the world, and all around creep.

A few instances of having to excuse himself to go break a table or stab a wall was totally reasonable.

“You’ll go a lot more night-hunts from this point onwards, which will help you shed more blood and strengthen your saber further,” he continued. “But you have to remember at all times that your saber will reflect you; that means it’s your duty to cultivate it properly, to teach it to hate evil and value righteousness. Principles are just as important – no, more important – than increasing power.”

“I didn’t even know resentful energy could be used like that,” Wei Wuxian said blankly. “Isn’t it something we have to fight against? Or is it just – it’s energy. We use spiritual energy for the most part, but we use resentful energy for the sabers…couldn’t we use resentful energy for ourselves, too?”

Nie Mingjue rolled his eyes and flicked him in the forehead. “No. Using resentful energy without a channel is demonic cultivation.”

“So what?” Wei Wuxian said, his eyes bright. “If you can use it –”

“Are you made of steel?” Nie Mingjue interrupted. “Our sabers can absorb and redirect resentful energy without suffering from moral corrosion; even so, they eventually become fixated, obsessive, reckless and undiscriminating, which is why they need masters – someone who can direct them towards defeating evil when they lose the ability to tell the difference themselves. If you use resentful energy yourself, you yourself may become subject to those same issues, and where would you be?”

“Letting you and Nie Huaisang order me around,” Wei Wuxian said promptly. “Obviously.”

“Brat. Do you want to hear the details or not?”

“Of course I do! I’m just surprised that Nie Huaisang didn’t slip up and tell me about it earlier.”

“He doesn’t know,” Nie Mingjue said, and winced when Wei Wuxian stared at him. “It’s not necessary to tell him until he starts feeling Aituan the way I feel Baxia or you feel Suibian, and given the extremely slow rate of his cultivation, that might be a while out yet. He’s happy as he is; why burden him with secrets?”

“Because he deserves to know that you might die?”

“He knows that,” Nie Mingjue said, his mind suddenly pulled back to the terrible months before his father died. “Trust me. He knows.”

Wei Wuxian was quiet for a moment. “He might cultivate more if he knew that he could eventually have conversations with Aituan,” he suggested.

“He might cultivate less if he knew it was increasing his chances of an early death,” Nie Mingjue rebutted. “It’s the cultivation path of his ancestors; he can’t abandon it, but he can waffle and drag his feet. And if he doesn’t form a golden core properly, if he doesn’t learn to defend himself, he’ll die sooner than any qi deviation will kill me and that’s – that can’t happen. You understand that, right?”

“Of course,” Wei Wuxian said. “Don’t worry, da-ge. I’ll take care of Huaisang.”

Nie Mingjue put his hand on the back of Wei Wuxian’s nape and shook him. “I don’t want to send you off before I go either, brat; don’t get so wrapped up in protecting Huaisang that you forget that. So be careful.”

“I will,” Wei Wuxian said. “I promise.”

“So, do you think it’s time to give Wei Wuxian the talk?” Nie Huaisang asked Jiang Cheng as they dangled their feet in the river.

“What?” Jiang Cheng said, turning to look at him. “Are you joking? You have so much porn –”

“Not the sex talk,” Nie Huaisang said, rolling his eyes. “Sex isn’t a talk; learning about sex is a book explaining the mechanics, a lifetime of listening to soldiers, and a very enjoyable process, to hear the stories. And to read them, of course.”

“Shut up,” Jiang Cheng said, flushing red. Nie Huaisang assumed his version of learning about sex had been a little different. “If you didn’t mean that, then what did you mean?”

“Porn can teach you about mechanics, as long as you take it with a solid pound of skepticism about how flexible the human body is and remember where the holes are,” Nie Huaisang said wisely, even as Jiang Cheng put his head in his hands and groaned. “But it doesn’t teach you about feelings.”

“Feelings.”

“Yes, feelings. I-like-you feelings. Like the stupid expression that Jin Zixuan get every time he sees Jiang Yanli practicing saber, or when he hears about those rumors that Sect Leader Nie would snatch her up as his bride in a second if he ever broke the engagement…”

“Why are we talking about feelings?” Jiang Cheng said, not raising his head.

“Because Wei Wuxian is an idiot.”

“Hey, that’s my best friend you’re talking about,” Jiang Cheng said, notably not disagreeing with the assessment. “And other than getting himself thrown out of Teacher Lan’s class because of his stupid theorizing about demonic cultivation, he’s usually pretty smart.”

“I’m well aware. He’s my shixiong,” Nie Huaisang pointed out. “And a genius. Doesn’t mean he’s not an idiot.”

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes. “What type of feelings talk? The one about not marrying someone who doesn’t love you because you’ll be miserable your entire life one?”

“No, and I’m not touching that with a ten-foot spear, but if you ever want to talk about it, I’m here for you,” Nie Huaisang said. “I meant the one about liking people, and how to recognize it when that’s what you’re feeling.”

“Wait,” Jiang Cheng said. “Are you saying that Wei Wuxian likes someone?”

Nie Huaisang closed his eyes. “Oh,” he said, in tones of pained revelation. “That’s my problem. I’m surrounded by idiots.”

“Hey!”

“I’m going to write to da-ge and tell him he needs to find more smart people to join the sect. Otherwise there’ll be no help for it; my brain is going to end up deteriorating into nothing but mush –”

“Hey!” Jiang Cheng slapped him upside the head, which Nie Huaisang supposed he deserved. “Now stop being a jerk and tell me who Wei Wuxian likes. I didn’t even know there were any girls around for him to like.”

“For the first time in my life, I want my saber,” Nie Huaisang said.

“…what?”

“It’s supposed to give you strength. To support you as you suffer through hardships untold –”

Jiang Cheng pushed him into the river.

Nie Huaisang surfaced a moment later, dripping wet. “Okay, okay,” he said, grinning; it was a hot day and he had been asking for it. “I’ll stop. The reason you’re confused is because the person Wei Wuxian likes isn’t a girl.”

Jiang Cheng looked blank.

Nie Huaisang mimed scissors and pretended to snip at his now soaked sleeve.

“Wei Wuxian?” Jiang Cheng said doubtfully. “But he flirts with girls all the time. Like when we went to Caiyi Town –”

“To be fair, that threw me for a while too,” Nie Huaisang said. “But no one ever said you couldn’t like girls and boys. After all, they’re both really pretty!”

“I guess,” Jiang Cheng said.

“Well, you don’t count. You like boys and girls equally, too.”

“I do not!”

“Yes, you do,” Nie Huaisang said patiently. “Zero interest in either is still equal.”

Jiang Cheng scowled in the way that suggested that Nie Huaisang was right, but shouldn’t say it.

“Look at it this way: if you never end up liking anybody, you can be friends with your future wife and she’d never need to be worried about you liking anyone else.”

“…that’s true,” Jiang Cheng conceded, looking intrigued by the idea. “Anyway, enough about me. We were talking about Wei Wuxian. Who does he like?”

“Lan Wangji.”

“I know that,” Jiang Cheng said with a scoff, and Nie Huaisang had a momentary hope that maybe he’d been the slow one for once when Jiang Cheng ruined it all by adding, “He’s his best friend, too; we all agreed on that. I was talking about who he liked.”

Nie Huaisang covered his face for a moment and sighed.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start this from the top: how would you like the opportunity to be Wei Wuxian’s only best friend?”

“…what do you mean? How could that happen?”

“I’m Wei Wuxian’s shidi, my da-ge is his da-ge, and you’re his best friend – and Lan Wangji can be his boyfriend.”

“Oh, I see, that – wait. Wei Wuxian likes Lan Wangji?!”

“And he has no idea,” Nie Huaisang said. “And that’s why we need to give him the talk.”

Jiang Cheng seemed to be struggling with the idea, but in the end he said, “And I get to be his only best friend afterwards, right?” so somehow Nie Huaisang thought it was all going to be fine.

“I need to have a talk with my saber,” Wei Wuxian said, batting his eyelashes at the door guards. “You don’t mind, do you?”

Of course they minded. The Wen sect hadn’t taken away their weapons for their own good – it was a move designed to humiliate them, to weaken them, to show them their place.

But under the circumstances…

“Let him in,” Wen Zhuliu said, his arms crossed over his chest and his face as unmoving as stone. “Once the issue is resolved, he returns to the rest of the group and the incident is never spoken of again.”

The incident being the mysterious snapping of several Wen sect swords during the night when no one was around, which went on for a few days before someone stuck around and realized it was the angry spiritual energy pouring out of Suibian that was causing the issues.

Weird, but, well, everyone knew Nie sabers were weird. The best weapon to use against resentful energy by far, of course, and yao spirits in particular, but still – weird.

Wei Wuxian went into the armory, his heart hurting at all those brilliant shining swords sitting around as if they were merely spares for the Wen sect instead of treasures for their respective masters; there was Sandu over there, and Bichen, and even Suihua. Only lucky Aituan wasn’t here by virtue of Nie Huaisang having believably ‘forgotten’ it back at home; that had been good – Nie Mingjue had nearly had a fit at the idea of Wei Wuxian taking Suibian anywhere near Wen Ruohan and it would’ve been worse if there’d been Aituan to worry about, too.

They’d had to talk him down for a long while to get him to agree. To convince him that the Wens were not yet so daring that they’d commit murder at their indoctrination camp, that they’d be safe enough even if uncomfortable, that the time could be better spent in finalizing the preparations for the war that they all knew was coming.

Having to hand over Suibian at the beginning, though – it’d been hard.

“Hey, baby,” Wei Wuxian said, reaching out to run his fingers down her blade.

Saber spirits didn’t speak the way people spoke, more an amalgamation of raw feeling and sub-human levels of thought, but he liked to think he could hear Suibian saying where have you been you jerk let’s get out of here I want to stab something already.

“No stabbing,” Wei Wuxian said. “And sadly, no getting out of here; we’re stuck. I just got let in here long enough to try to talk to you…since when do you break swords?”

Baxia said.

Suibian didn’t have a word for Baxia, only a feeling like lightning turned solid, a blood-drenched pillar made of stone that could hold up the weight of the world, accompanied by an incredible amount of respect that Suibian certainly never felt about any human up to and including Wei Wuxian – who Suibian seemed to treat more as a little brother than anything else.

A moderately stupid little brother, even.

“Nice try,” Wei Wuxian said patiently. “Baxia isn’t here, so she couldn’t have possibly told you to go break Wen swords.”

Baxia said they broke one of ours.

Wei Wuxian stared. “You can’t possibly mean…old Sect Leader Nie’s? You weren’t even forged then.”

Baxia was. Baxia remembers. Baxia hates them.

“Hey, I hate them, too. Remember me? Your master?”

If it makes you happy.

“Wow, really? Jackass.”

Jerk.

“Pointy object.”

Oblong meat.

Wei Wuxian snickered. “Okay, anyway, you need to stop.”

They are the tools of evil men. If they are not destroyed, they will do evil in the future.

That was Suibian in a nutshell: carefree and arrogant, with a bone-deep sense of righteousness regardless of anything.

They said sabers reflected their masters – Wei Wuxian could only hope that it was true.

He ran his fingers down the flat of the blade again, as much to comfort himself as to calm Suibian.

“I know. But we don’t have a choice right now, okay? I know you’re not very good with thinking about the future, about consequences – I know I’m not very good at it, which means you never had anyone to teach it to you – but right now we need to behave or else bad things will happen to people we love. I told them the breaking of the swords was because of a talisman I carved into you that I forgot to deactivate, so they don’t know about you, but if you keep it up, they might figure it out…”

He sighed. “Don’t make me make it an order.”

Suibian was not happy with him right now, but Wei Wuxian could feel the reluctant agreement.

“Just wait,” Wei Wuxian said. “Soon enough you’ll have all the evil you could possibly want to fight, and more besides.”

Soon, there would be war.

#mdzs #nie mingjue #wei wuxian #nie huaisang #jiang cheng #suibian #my fic #my fics

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