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“What the hell,” Jiang Wanyin snaps, “are those. ”
Nie Huaisang finds himself frozen, and determinedly clears his head of the influence and weight of Jiang Wanyin’s stare; he is better than this, and turns away. “A sect matter,” he says, and he did not want to have to construct these walls again but will do what he must. “Will you ask again, or am I to leave?”
Jiang Wanyin says, tightly, “Huaisang -”
“Not in this,” Nie Huaisang counters. He faces the corner of the room, sorting and categorising his own spiralling.
He thought coming to Lotus Pier would be - fair. Wise. He was not expecting it to lead him here - an old friend’s quarters, with the sound of the water on the docks omnipresent in the background, half-dressed - but he was quite liking the direction in which things had been going, truly, until moments ago. Now he’s less the boy he used to be - less the construction of layered joys on top of that, less a man finally healing from the past - and all at once Nie-zongzhu keeping his secrets.
It’s like unravelling.
He is committed to doing better, really, so he turns, even as it wrenches at his side and his secrets and his instincts. The dark slashed stains across the right side of his waist have always stung him, like small animals with teeth, as opposed to his brother who felt an ache deep like a solid-rooted tree, like the foundations of a fortress. When he was alive. Before the scars took him whole. “I can tell you,” he says, and he wishes he were not born to categorise things, wishes he did not know the flurry of expressions across Wanyin’s face to be surprise, hesitant elation, irritation, pensive acceptance, in that order, low threat level, not volatile yet, the labels imposed by a different self, always wary -
Nie Huaisang separates himself from the flurry that is his thoughts, meets Jiang Wanyin’s eyes, and says “They are a mark of the Nie cultivation. I used to promise I would never bear them. I don’t like being reminded that I was wrong.”
Jiang Wanyin’s eyes widen. He says, “You shouldn’t be telling me this.”
“But I’m choosing to,” Nie Huaisang counters, and like this he can feel his old selves gathering around him like moth to flame. He smiles, and holds out his arms. “Come here.”