Don't Come Around

by Michi

Content warnings: metaphorical description of strangulation and a brief description of the beginnings of a panic attack

It’s supposed to be something quick and simple.

Jiang Cheng feels unease settling in his chest at the familiar surroundings, the weight of Zidian around his finger heavier than usual. His feet follow a path he knows all too well, through darkened corridors and winding pathways until he finds where he needs to be.

Every inch of this place is stained with memories of Nie Huaisang. If he closes his eyes, he can almost feel the warmth of his palm and the gentleness of his voice as he guides him through it. If he closes his eyes, he can pretend everything is still the same.

Jiang Cheng cannot afford to close his eyes right now. He takes an uneven breath, and then slips soundlessly through the window and approaches the desk before him.

Find the floorplans, retrieve them. It’s a simple task.

What makes it difficult is the familiarity of the room. Jiang Cheng remembers this room all too well, knows the grooves in the table and the smell of candle wax. His fingers drag lightly across the top of a desk and he remembers how it felt to be pressed into it, the weight of Nie Huaisang’s lips on his and the edges of the wood digging into his palms as he braced himself against it.

Jiang Cheng forces down the bitterness of it and instead focuses on the task at hand. Everything else… everything else, in the scope of things, doesn’t matter.

Limited by the darkness, Jiang Cheng sets to work sifting through the stacks of papers and books strewn throughout the room. Now more than ever he misses his golden core and the ability to form light whenever he needed it—but the moon outside is full, and for now, it’s enough to see what he needs to.

It isn’t hard to find the floorplans. He knows where Nie Huaisang hides things as well as he knows the gentleness of his touch, and it’s almost too easy to find what he needs. He slips them into his sleeve, preparing to leave, when he raises his eyes and sees a familiar set of characters on a sheet of paper buried underneath the rest.

Jiang Wanyin.

His name. This is Nie Huaisang’s war table, where he scripts out hundreds of deaths and then sets them in ink. What is his name doing here?

Curious, Jiang Cheng extracts it from the stack of papers surrounding it, and what he sees makes all of the air leave his chest in a strained exhale.

The strokes are messy, but he knows better than anyone that they undeniably belong to Nie Huaisang. The characters are written almost frantically, too sharp where they hook, and Jiang Cheng wonders distantly if Nie Huaisang’s hand shook when he was writing these kinds of things down.

Bile rises in his throat, and Jiang Cheng drops the paper as if just touching it burns him. From where it rests around his finger, Zidian crackles weakly to life in response to the anger that threatens to overwhelm him.

Nie Huaisang wants me dead.

There are pages upon pages of writing, all of them littered with his name. Thousands of plans to erase him from a narrative he should have disappeared from years ago. To finish digging the grave Jiang Cheng had stood so precariously at since he lost his core. Nie Huaisang holds the length of the rope tied to his neck, and with these papers, he pulls it impossibly tighter.

Jiang Cheng feels the world spin around him. I trusted him. I trusted him, and he… wants me dead. I am just as disposable as anyone else to him. Suddenly there is no air left in the room to breathe. The words on the page blur into incoherency.

Zidian sparks furiously, the faint purple light bouncing off of his skin, and Jiang Cheng is reminded of when he gave control of it to Nie Huaisang. The memory, which was once one that used to make his chest ache, now makes him feel nauseous. The hand bearing Zidian shakes as he curls it into a fist.

I should have never trusted him. He—

Something catches his eye, illuminated by the dim moonlight that creeps through the room.

Jiang Cheng glances up and focuses on the stack of papers thrown across Nie Huaisang’s desk. Ink forms a pool across the pages as it spills from an overturned bottle, silver light reflecting off of the surface.

Nie Huaisang is a neat person. He prefers order and cleanliness if only because he has been trained into it; it’s second nature for him.

So why is his personal study in such disarray?

With the hand that isn’t occupied by Zidian, Jiang Cheng lifts up the paper he tossed away earlier and stares at it until the words come into focus.

This isn’t Nie Huaisang’s writing—not his usual precise and careful script. The words he writes are desperate and afraid, a scramble to cover a gaping wound.

Deep down, a part of him finds thrill in Nie Huaisang’s panic. Deeper still, he feels fear.

“If Nie Huaisang wanted somebody dead, not even the gods could get in his way.” Hadn’t he himself said that before?

Karma, he decides, is cruel.

Jiang Cheng lifts his hand so that it’s better illuminated in the moonlight. Looking closer at it, he begins to see faults; tiny, nearly imperceptible cracks in Nie Huaisang’s plans.

Jiang Wanyin. Death. To poison? To falsify suicide? To capture and imprison? All of the plans are, for Nie Huaisang, laughable in their mediocrity. Jiang Cheng can barely believe the same hand that scripted such intricate death plots wrote the child’s play of an assassination attempt before him.

Still, through the slashed characters and torn and crumpled papers, Jiang Cheng can see the same qi deviating Nie Huaisang that made him want to leave the Unclean Realm in the first place. Jiang Cheng can feel the fear in between each character, and Nie Huaisang has always run from what he fears.

It’s strange, he thinks, to see Nie Huaisang as the same kind of Nie as his elder brother, violent and rash. Nie Huaisang had always preferred words and secrets and hidden smiles as his weapons, never the blade. And when he had been pushed—

Jiang Cheng’s fingers tremble against the paper in his hands. I did this.

Something in his heart tugs hard at the thought of Nie Huaisang brought to such a state by him.

When Nie Huaisang senses danger, he protects himself the only way he knows how: by building a safety net of assassination plots and defamation and burying corpses until the panic no longer threatens to swallow him whole. Jiang Cheng has seen him do it countless times. It’s the same as burning bridges under the cover of moonlight and running from the scene before dawn.

This is almost laughably feeble in comparison to the things Nie Huaisang has written before.

Suddenly, the weight of Zidian on his finger feels less like a comfort and more like a vulnerability. Jiang Cheng carefully places the paper where he found it, the moonlight dancing off of the ring’s silvery surface as he does. It wouldn’t take more than a whisper to remove Nie Huaisang as one of Zidian’s owners.

If Nie Huaisang truly wanted me dead, Jiang Cheng thinks, curling his fingers into a fist, I would already be long gone.

Jiang Cheng hates backing down when cornered. If he was the same person as he had been before he lost his core, he would have burned this place to the ground and Nie Huaisang with it. But this time is different.

His knuckles are white as he slips Zidian back onto his finger and steps away from the table. He has what he came here for. He needs to leave before he gets caught and gives Nie Huaisang a reason to finish his plans.

As he swallows, he feels the pressure of the metaphorical rope Nie Huaisang has wrapped around his neck. With one last glance at the scene before him, Jiang Cheng gathers up his courage and soundlessly leaps out of the window.

Don’t make me regret this, Huaisang.