allthelittlecreepycrawlies - Tumblr blog

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 8 days

Text

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)

#mdzs #nie huaisang #jin guangyao #nie mingjue #sangyao #wei wuxian #yu-furen #jiang yanli #wen ruohan #ideas #extended concept #AAAAAAAAAAAAA

14 notes · View notes

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 13 days

Text

Time for another incredibly indulgent post on the incredibly indulgent blog and if you didn't see this crossover coming already, you haven't been here long.

Anyway. Awhile back, I mentioned in an ask response that one of the stupidly indulgent things I would love to do is rewrite an old request to more blatantly be a crossover (since the only outside-one-canon character that appeared was my player character, it didn't much count, because she was easy to disguise), so here's an extension of the concept! (Also, most of my followers on this blog are from the MDZS side, so my GW2 reference links are for them. Cool? Cool.)

Gorrik and Taimi (the two pipsqueaks on the right) with assistance from a very understanding Commander and Shade (my sylvari twin girls) venture into The Mists to see if there's anything left of Blish's golem body that can be recovered for a memorial. They find the right area, but it's super wrecked from when Kralkatorrik arrived. Gorrik insists on searching anyway, and the others aren't going to tell him no.

Because the Dragonbrand in Ascalon and Elona didn't just vanish when Kralkatorrik died, I'm assuming his magic has some ontological inertia, so a Brandstorm kicks up while the small group is searching. Gorrik and Taimi get separaed from the Sisters and wind up getting tossed by the winds through a small rift.

Dazed, disoriented, and possibly injured, the pair drag themselves out of the bushes they landed in, only to find they've landed next to a hunting camp inhabited by a bunch of humans who look and dress somewhat similar to Canthans.

(cut to spare dashboard scrolling)

Either by magic or by sheer luck, there's (barely) enough language similarity for Taimi to (sort of) tell these strangers that they're not monsters or looking for a fight, that there's been an accident and they just want to go home.

The humans confer amongst themselves before one is sent off to grab-

"Reinforcements?" "Just their leader... I think. I hope."

Meanwhile, Nie Huaisang has been having a very weird week thanks to reports of strange purple lights and lightning in otherwise cloudless skies. Given the particular colors, he's still contemplating whether or not to contact the Jiang sect about this when a messenger arrives from the camp on the southeast side of the mountains, saying that two weird small creatures fell out of one of the holes made by the purple lightning and are asking for parley... sort of.

Curious despite himself, Nie Huaisang saddles up a horse and follows him back.

Those are indeed small weird creatures. But he's willing to hear them out, since they waited without trying to flee or attack his disciples.

It takes a combo of talking, little tiny glowing pictures coming out of the creatures' gauntlets, and drawing pictures on paper, but he manages to work out most of the story.

And... well... if anyone can understand being a younger brother desperate to bring even the tiniest piece of his big brother home, it's Nie Huaisang.

An arrangement is made where, as long as they don't make trouble and help with the unwanted light shows, Gorrik and Taimi can stay in a little-used room of the Unclean Realms while they try to find their way home or wait for rescue, since they're adamant that the Sisters will not just leave them.

And their conviction proves accurate. Only two weeks later, two more strangers arrive at the gates of the Unclean Realms. One woman(?) resembles a flower vine and the other the aftermath of a forest fire, but their faces are identical down to a mirrored burn scar.

Taimi and Gorrik are overjoyed and relieved to see them, and introduce the Nies to their Commander (the forest fire) and Shade (the flower vine), Cloeme and Sinnigia, who were assisted in getting there by Aurene, who is waiting to bring everyone home.

Nie Huaisang is caught off guard when Cloeme (having been told by Taimi) mentions his brother and the fact that Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao's fierce corpses are still trapped together in the coffin under the rebuilt temple.

"Would you like me to guide them on their way?" she asks, or he thinks she asks, since her and her sister's accents are even more difficult to understand than the creatu- asuras'.

"You... can do that?"

"I would be willing to try. I have some experience with the unusual when it comes to death," she says with a smile, prompting a snort from her twin and winces from the asuras.

"That's extremely generous of you, isn't it?" Nie Huaisang notes, unable to keep himself from being wary.

"Not at all. Your kindness-" Hahaha, when was the last time anyone called him kind and not in the 'too stupid to know better' way? "-means that we have two less names to memorialize. Two souls for two souls, hm?"

Well...

Well, then.

He's not so sure he wants to let Jin Guangyao move on, but if the Commander's "unusual experience" and the oddities of Tyrian magic can solve the problem he's found no solution to, who is he to look a gift horse in the mouth?

He takes the offer.

#mdzs #gw2 #crossover #ideas #nie huaisang #nie sect #gorrik #taimi #cannonballing into full-fledged I Do What I Want territory

2 notes · View notes

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 15 days

Text

By request, I kludged together the two misconception and inheritance crisis posts into a more legible storyline and prettied up the writing. It's now here in the archive fic.

3 notes · View notes

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 20 days

Text

So I'd made a joke about possibly doing Sangyao Week as a jam and... I think I'm gonna get serious about that? So here's basically how it would go down.

I'll reblog the prompts the day before it starts, and then each day of the event, y'all send me which one of that day's prompts you want with a little request attached, and I'll do my best to give you a shorfic or page of concept notes. As far as I can tell, the only prompts I'm nixing straight off are "First Time" and "Bad Idea Sex", because I am shit-terrible at writing smut. Other than that, it'd pretty much be fair game.

I do realize this means I will be essentially doing a nine-day writing jam, which I have literally never done before and have no idea how well my health will hold up to it, but fuck it, I wanna try. It could be fun!

So stay tuned.

5 notes · View notes

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 23 days

Text

Early morning angst idea: any of y'all seen the 80s Cronenberg version of The Fly? A gif set of the part at the end where Seth puts the end of the shotgun Veronica's holding to his head made me think of a super painful Nie bro scene where Huaisang manages to bring Mingjue home and uses a blood ritual that *maybe* gives him some of his mind back, and Huaisang gets to be hopeful for .3 seconds... then Mingjue silently takes hold of Huaisang's wrist and brings the knife still in Huaisang's hand up to his neck. It looks a little weird, since, like, he's already a reconstructed undead, but the meaning is still crystal clear.

#mdzs #nie huaisang #nie mingjue #ideas #angst #mercy kill

11 notes · View notes

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 26 days

Text

OK so tiny goofy idea. in GW2, one of your character's friends reveals that he bets on each of your battles. Because he's personally *seen* the bullshit you can pull off, he always bets in your favor no matter how long the odds are (you have a reputation, but most people assume you've got to lose *eventually*). By the end of the latest expansion, he's won *millions* off your battles and has opened his own casino, where you get free lodging, drinks, and food for life.

Imagine Wei Wuxian finding out someone has made a tidy sum for the same reason. No one knows who it is, but he finds out it's Nie Huaisang. At first, he's mad, until Nie Huaisang reveals that he'd been setting aside a good chunk (at least 35-40%) of each bet in case he ever came calling.

It's... a *lot*. Like, more than Jin Ling and Lan Wangji's allowances *combined* a lot.

"How many times have you bet on me?"

"Only eight so far."

*So far.*

The bets are being conducted among the gentry (and considering how many people must have been betting *against* him for Huaisang to get this much on only eight bets...), so it's not like he'd be taking money from farmers if he allowed it to keep going, and this way, he would be able to give his husband gifts in return instead of always relying on his money.

But... still...

"I'm well aware of how many times you've refused payment for a night hunt. Just think of it as back pay."

Okay, then. That he can do.

#mdzs #wei wuxian #nie huaisang #ideas

14 notes · View notes

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 1 month

Note

I saw you had a Slay the Princess AU in one of your sangyao posts. Which princesses would you pick for Huaisang to be?

This has the possibility to change when the Pristine Cut gets released, but for now the order of sacrificed Huaisangs is:

The Tower/The Apotheosis

The Beast/The Den The Wild (changed my mind, The Wild is more thematically fitting for those two)

The Witch/The Thorn

The Damsel (may or may not have The Grey)

The Stranger

And as mentioned in the previous post, Meng Yao would be the MC and Jin Guangshan would be The Narrator.

I haven't decided whether the ending would be the mortality one or the universe traveling one, but it'd be one of those two because I don't wanna split them up.

#mdzs #slay the princess #nie huaisang #jin guangyao #ideas

6 notes · View notes

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 1 month

Text

OK big thanks to @micchikureshima for letting me rant this concept out in discord because otherwise I probably never would have gotten it typed.

This is basically throwing together multiple ideas i've already posted (the meng yao has serious misconceptions idea and the tumblr post about the sect rejecting huaisang as heir and him leaving to keep from forcing mingjue between a rock and a hard place) into one vaguely coherent storyline.

Also it's gonna be long, so some of it will go under a cut.

Starting with that fic where Meng Yao wakes up to find Nie Huaisang burying a bird he couldn't save, slide to the left into a timeline where Meng Yao didn't go outside and thus never got his POV recontextualized. Having only his preconceived notions and gossip to go on, he starts quietly developing a resentment against Huaisang.

It kind of comes to a head when he's convinced to accept some local wine at a dinner and is so not ready for the paint thinner they drink in Qinghe. In vino veritas or a reversal of the 'confessing to a crush while drunk' trope where he says some very uncharitable things about Huaisang while plastered.

When he wakes up the next morning with a massive hangover and remembers what happened, he's mortified and convinced he's in so much trouble.

But... he's not?

In fact, his insults towards the sect heir seems to have actually gained him some popularity, even among disciples and soldiers who didn't like him before. And while Nie Mingjue isn't among the ones who outright thought it was funny, even he says his silly useless brother brought it on himself, and maybe he'll learn from it.

And Huaisang definitely learned from it, even if the only lesson he took was to avoid Meng Yao completely to keep from being further humiliated. The only time they're in the same room together after that is if Huaisang can't get out of it.

Like when Nie Mingjue sends Meng Yao along with the prospective students to make sure there are no Incidents, not caring how uncomfortable his brother is about it. Grow up, Huaisang, you're going to be dealing with people who don't like you your entire life, it's just a thing people expected to work in politics have to live with.

On the trip, Meng Yao notices that while he doesn't keep any, Huaisang seems to be able to charm wild birds with ease. It briefly makes him wonder about the aviary… but no, not important.

It's not enough for him to start questioning his earlier opinions.

Veering fully into CQL-territory for a moment, Huaisang gets home on time this go around instead of making the long detour because he doesn't want to be stuck with Meng Yao any longer than necessary, but the Yunmeng group still arrives with Xue Yang in tow, the Wens still show up, Meng Yao still gets injured, Xue Yang still gets freed, and the captain still gets killed.

When Meng Yao finds himself banished, he is caught off guard when Nie Huaisang is angry about it (this time entirely because he thinks it's bad form to exile someone who's still badly wounded, especially when they got that wound in the line of duty), but he correctly believes nothing will come of it when Huaisang says he'll talk to his brother, so he leaves while Huaisang is gone. Back to MDZS canon but with a bonus character, It's not until the Phoenix Mountain Hunt, when Jin Guangyao is having to put up with his family's general everything that the situation changes.

Shortly after his father has read him the riot act over the Jiang sect's behavior during the hunt, he comes across Nie Huaisang and Nie Zonghui quietly talking on one of the guest balconies.

"It's probably just different when it's family. Or else I'm just that much of a monster, if I'm less forgivable than someone like Jin Guangshan."

…Oh.

Jin Guangyao doesn't stick around to hear what Nie Zonghui says in response, but the short exchange haunts him as he goes back to his duties.

What has Huaisang done that's in any way comparable to his relatives' behavior?

Now that he's trying to actually think of anything, he can't find an answer.

In fact, he can't stop wondering if he hadn't been coloring Huaisang's behavior with Jin gold the entire time, his first encounter with his father's sect having tainted his opinion. He'll apologize, he decides.

But he doesn't get the chance before the conference is over, kept so busy by everyone's demands that he can barely catch his breath. and even after the other sects are gone, his father constantly has new tasks and orders and creepy little plots for him to carry out.

Before he realizes it, it's been almost a month.

And then his spies in Qinghe tell him about the inheritance chaos going on in the Unclean Realms.

And then Nie Huaisang is gone. Walked out into the night and vanished with only a letter to his brother left behind.

Nie Mingjue of course doesn't bring it up with him, why would he? Even if they've sworn brotherhood, they're still mostly on the outs. but he hears from er-ge that Nie Mingjue won't talk about it with anyone, not even him. Just keeping it all bottled up and boiling.

He should be relieved, even with this new source of tension. Now it doesn't matter if he apologizes or not.

That doesn't make the discomfort go away, though, because he's plagued by the same doubts as Nie Mingjue, wondering how much he contributed to public opinion eventually forcing Huaisang out.

Months later, just after Jin Ling is born, Jin Guangshan is already expecting to throw a massively extravagant hundred days celebration and has Jin Guangyao making all the arrangements and gathering all the necessary supplies.

His current assignment is to visit some merchants the Jin sect occasionally does business with in a little port town in order to arrange some expensive future kitchen deliveries.

There's a painter doing portraits for a tourist couple on one of the piers.

Nie Huaisang is almost unrecognizable. He's thinner, his clothes are plain and unadorned, his hair pulled up into a bun with no braids. If it weren't for the black and gold bird singing on his shoulder as he works, Jin Guangyao would have overlooked him entirely, and even then, it's only the green eyes that make him realize just who he's looking at.

He watches as Huaisang chats amiably with the couple, all bubbling cheer like he used to be whenever trying to win friends, and Jin Guangyao wonders if leaving the sect has really had any effect on him at all. And then as soon as they walk away, happy with their souvenir, the mask vanishes and he looks so tired and withdrawn, even as the bird comforts him by pulling at his hair.

Ah. Jin Guangyao knows all too well what it's like wearing that mask.

It looks like the apology will still be necessary.

Jin Guangyao manages to coax huaisang into at least meeting for dinner if only for a free meal, and it becomes clear as they exchange (mostly) meaningless small talk that while Huaisang has a lot of 'neighbors' because he does a lot of small clerical or scribing jobs here and there, he has completely given up on any actual social relationships and mostly keeps to himself.

And he doesn't really believe the apology, mostly because it seems everyone else agrees with Jin Guangyao's original opinions of him, so why would he walk it back? But he's grateful for the food anyway, so Jin Guangyao decides that has to be enough for now and he'll work on proving his change of heart in other small ways when he's not as constrained by having to conduct sect business matters on this trip.

With the hatchet sort of buried, Jin Guangyao will report on what he's seen to Nie Mingjue.

It turns out Mingjue hasn't even opened any of his brother's letters, though he's been keeping them all. He's convinced himself they'll just make him madder and he's barely holding it together as it is. But whatever Jin Guangyao tells him makes him finally read them, and when the last one mentions giving up on writing, he realizes it's been almost a month and a half since it was sent, when before, the letters had been arriving practically weekly.

Fuck. Huaisang really did give up. All he's been doing by keeping this bottled up is pushing his brother even further away.

He decides that a response letter at this point won't do, and besides, he wants to see for himself this new (difficult, if Jin Guangyao didn't lie) life Huaisang's been living.

The resulting…. not a confrontation, but not exactly a reunion in the seaside town is super awkward and uncomfortable for both Nie brothers, but at least it ends with them understanding each other a little bit better? At least they'll start writing each other properly, as will Jin Guangyao and Huaisang.

(And that's pretty much as far as I got on this idea, so it'll stay pretty open ended.)

#mdzs #ideas #nie mingjue #nie huaisang #jin guangyao #nie sect #possible future sangyao? i mean not guaranteed but it IS me writing this

18 notes · View notes

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 1 month

Text

Fuck it, today has sucked and I need some self-indulgence.

So!

In which Sect Leader Yue finds himself meeting a newly-ascended goddess from a whole-ass other world.

------------

'Are you Yue Qingyuan of the Cang Qiong Sect?'

Yue Qingyuan blinked at the character he'd just badly smudged when his arm had jerked, then inhaled slowly and let the air back out at the same pace before raising his head.

The room was empty.

But he was positive he had heard-

Ah.

There was a gentle pressure in the back of his mind, a presence that gave the sense it was trying very hard not to intrude where it might not be wanted. Recognizing that must have been the source of what he thought he had heard, he closed his eyes and tentatively tilted his thoughts towards it.

'I am. To whom am I speaking?'

The presence seemed both delighted and amused to have its politeness returned, and when it spoke again with more volume, he now registered the voice definitively as female, layered and echoed as though it were speaking from several corners of his brain at once.

'Before I tell you, may I confirm one more thing?'

...Huh.

'What do you want to know?'

'Are you also 'Qi-ge'?'

He inhaled sharply, his chair and the floor seeming to have dropped out from under him for a moment. 'I-... I am,' he thought when he had managed to recover his composure. 'But no one has used that name for me for a very long time.'

Especially not the one person who would have-

The presence in his mind... inexplicably grew warm, as if it were trying to physically comfort him despite not being present in the same room. It gently tamped down on the pain that had welled up in his chest, but left the desperate curiosity lingering.

'Who are you?' he thought again, with more urgency.

'My name is Aurene. And I hope you have nowhere of importance to be soon, because what I am about to tell you may take a little while.'

---

Trembling hands splashed the tea as he poured it into a cup, but he managed to keep from making enough of a mess that anyone else in the meeting would notice.

He knew of the potential of other worlds of course, particularly thanks to the attempt Luo Binghe had made at merging the realms tied to their own.

But for someone -no, not just someone, an apparent god- to reach out from a faraway world to him specifically would have been a shock for any-

Hah.

No, not anyone, he thought, gaze flicking to his left at the familiar/not familiar wave of a fan.

Not if even half of the information Aurene had offered to him was true.

He silently sipped his tea, still watching out of the corner of his eye as Shen Qingqiu -and Qingqiu only, not... not- argued animatedly with Shang Qinghua.

He should have been sleeping in the hours between the end of his -first, she had promised- conversation with Aurene and the monthly peak lord meeting, but instead he had spent the time studying texts on memory repression and how they applied to himself.

Might have been applied to himself, either by his own shattered heart or by someone else.

How else could he have forgotten that they'd once tested Shen Qingqiu for possession, only for everyone but him to decide they just didn't care?

How else could he have ever tricked himself into believing the person he saw now had still been...?

"Zhangmen-shixiong? Are we ready to begin?"

Yue Qingyuan swallowed the last of his tea, then put on the usual placid smile he wore for these meetings and set the cup down. "Yes, let's get started."

---

'Is he safe?'

It was the question he had asked at the end of their first conversation, but he couldn't stop himself from opening their second with it as well.

Fortunately, Aurene's presence didn't feel annoyed with him, nor pitying. Rather, it felt as though she fully understood the anxiousness humming in his nerves, as if she'd experienced the same sort of fear herself.

'He is safe,' she promised gently. 'He is well cared for. My hatch-mother and aunt are cooking dinner for him and the rest of their traveling group right now.'

Like poison seeping out of a lanced infection, he felt the tension leak out of him at the reassurance. 'Can you tell me more what his new life is like? What your family is like?'

'Of course. What would you like to know?'

If I had to choose the most self-indulgent “nobody else is gonna read this” idea lurking in my brain right now, it would be the Scum Villain/Guild Wars 2 crossover where Shen Jiu’s soul gets caught up in a cataclysm in The Afterlife/The Mists/The World Between Worlds and instead of being reborn in his own world, or even the demon realm, he gets tossed about twenty-five worlds over and is reborn in Tyria.

As a Kodan cub.

It’s not an easy life, especially since he loses both parents to the ice dragon Jormag and winds up in the Still Waters Speaking settlement. But without the memories of his previous existence, he’s not doing so bad.

And then when the Void is unleashed and begins unraveling Tyra, a little cub is caught in a pocket of Non-Reality. By the time the adults manage to free him, he’s curled up in a tiny ball in tears and screaming about someone named ‘Qi-ge’.

The adults are rattled by more than just the Void attack. Reincarnation is the basis of Kodan faith, true, but for a soul to jump directly from Human to Kodan, especially with such a disharmonious life as Shen Jiu had, is unheard of. Because he keeps mumbling to himself -or, rather, to the memories of people from an entirely different world- he is dubbed Speaks With Lost Shadows and no one is quite sure what to do with him.

Until Cloudseeker, being acquainted with the Sylvari sisters known as The Dauntless Commander and The Relentless Shade (my “canon” Commander and her second-in-command) well enough to know some of the history of the Commander’s murder and self-resurrection, gets an idea. While the situation is not exactly the same, the Commander’s situation gives her an entirely unique perspective on death and the recovery of memories that might make her capable of handling Speaks With Lost Shadows’ troubles. Moreover, she has a familial connection to Aurene, She of Facets and Time, who can potentially see the world he came from and give necessary context to his memories.

It’s an unorthodox path to take, but if they can help the cub, they can help the cub, so he contacts The Vigil to send a request for assistance.

The whole thing ends up with Speaks With Lost Shadows/Shen Jiu being informally adopted by the sisters and gaining a found family in the Dragon’s Watch guild.

And if, at one point, Aurene’s foresight has her decide to reach across The Mists to see about giving a certain sect leader one last chance at reconciliation and closure, well, that’s her own business.

#svsss #gw2 #shen jiu #yue qingyuan #ideas #fanfic

10 notes · View notes

allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 1 month

Note

Reblogging this here becuse I don't have an actual extension for it yet, but I have Discord notes on how it would go:

I'm thinking that for a few months, it does seem like Meng Yao and his unexpected companion are bonding. Huaisang's smart enough to keep his head down and not draw outside attention to himself or try to escape, and their conversations, though sparse, aren't unpleasant. Meng Yao's even starting to grow fond of him, and Huaisang is opening up more in turn. It's a nice respite from his usual duties in the fire palace. And then Wen Ruohan suddenly demands Huaisang back. Meng Yao can see how much his sect leader's state of mind has gone downhill -news of Wen Xu's death arrived four days ago- and smells a trap. Deciding he's not so fond of Huaisang as to get snared in the trap with him, he hands Huaisang over without hesitation, which Wen Ruohan is both delighted and inexplicably amused by. Huaisang never shows up in the fire palace, nor any other places prisoners are typically kept, so Meng Yao has no idea what's happened to him, and though guilt creeps in, Wen Ruohan's mood swings are getting even more unpredictable and violent, enough that his position as a favored servant is under threat, and his life with it. He keeps his mouth shut. When the fierce corpse army overruns the palace, Meng Yao knows to get the hell out, the mental image of his now former master laughing madly as the crush of corpses started to push past his personal defenses lingering in his brain. He gets caught anyway. His one advantage is that none of the prisoners recognize him because he'd been smart enough to always stay out of range of vision. Some think they recognize his voice, but that's hardly enough evidence. And then Huaisang, clearly having not had a good time wherever he was hidden away, is brought out, and Meng Yao is sure he's as good as dead. But Huaisang just kind of stares at him for a little bit, head tilted like a confused bird, then looks away and tells his brother and the other Sunshot leaders gathered that Meng Yao... had been kind to him??? Had taken care of him??? Which... yes, that had been true at some point, but- He might end up in a dungeon, but he's not going to be executed. And the question of why Huaisang didn't implicate him eats at him. Thinking of the Nie sect deciding to let him work off his sentence since he's not a member of the Wen family and no one can pinpoint him as having done anything particularly heinous. Irony of ironies, he gets assigned as Huaisang's minder (with several guards because Nie Mingjue may be giving him a second chance but he's not stupid) because Huaisang needs one after the damage of whatever Wen Ruohan did to him. And, gradually, Meng Yao finds out that's the reason Huaisang didn't speak against him. Whatever happened to him after Wen Ruohan took him was apparently so awful that his mind completely shut it down. He doesn't remember that Meng Yao gave him up or anything after that. And as long as he keeps not remembering, Meng Yao is safe, and as long as Meng Yao is safe, he can afford to go back to being a gentle caretaker, reinforcing the bond between them so that Huaisang won't want to remember anything else.

Okay, sending the picture doesn't work, sorry about that, so:

Anything for the Au where Meng Yao gets snatched up by a wen solider, works his way up and is one day 'rewarded' by wen Ruohan who has Nie huaisang sent to his room?

Ah, yeah, nonnies can't send images. Submitted images require a name attached too, but with that I can at least edit you to be anon in the actual post. Totally understandable if you'd rather not, however, no push.

(note: I originally had an opening conversation between Meng Yao and Wen Ruohan for this, but my WRH "voice" felt... slightly off. Not up to my standard. I didn't want to extend your wait while I fought with it, so I might try revising it another time.)

---------------

By the time he opened the door to his room, he had gone through over two dozen possibilities for what this 'mystery present' could possibly be-

-and what he found was not any of them.

He put a hand over his mouth to keep any sound of surprised dismay from escaping, lest someone be listening in where he couldn't see them, then stepped into his room, closed the door, and immediately pressed a silencing talisman to the seam before approaching his bed.

Where there was a boy tied to one of the posts.

Almost immediately, his mind began instinctively taking an inventory of information. Which was good. As long as it was occupied doing that, it wasn't panicking.

First off, the clothing that bore all of the hallmarks of the Nie sect- captive, an important one, clearly, yet sent here instead of the Fire Palace.

The overall ragged state of his hair- clearly pulled more than once in a struggle- and the painful looking bruise that spread down from his left temple over his cheekbone- a favorite knockout tactic for attempted escapees.

Gingerly, he lifted the boy's chin, and estimated that they weren't that distant in age, maybe two or three years at the most.

As he continued his examination, his unexpected... guest made a faint little disoriented moan, eyes fluttering open just enough for him to see they were a vivid pale green before they closed again and the boy once again went slack in his bindings.

Meng Yao took a very slow, deep breath and let it out.

Then did so again.

The number of Nie family members who were in or close enough to the central bloodline to inherit that eye color could be counted without running out of fingers, which, put together with the other things he'd made note of, meant he'd been handed none other than the brother and heir to the sect leader currently leading the war against his own.

He had heard quite a bit about the Brothers Nie since he'd first come under the direct command of the Undying Sun. Wen Ruohan's opinions and feelings about them wandered the entire gamut from 'upstarts to be crushed under heel like bugs' to 'wayward children who merely needed to be taken well in hand," depending entirely on his mood at the moment he happened to be -frequently- thinking about them.

One of his very few requests of his sect leader was that he be allowed to keep his job and his home entirely separated, so given that... that Nie Huaisang had been sent here, it seemed that Wen Ruohan's opinion was currently in the 'wayward child' category.

Which didn't exactly make things easier for him, since, again, it could change at any time. For all he knew, this was anything from a genuine gift to some kind of test.

He sighed and rubbed his head.

Alright.

He would simply -as if anything about the situation he'd been handed was simple- focus on 'for now,' to prevent giving himself a headache.

For now, this was intended as a gift.

One to be taken care of, akin to a surprise puppy.

He could do that.

Maneuvering into a position that would make it easier to catch Nie Huaisang once he was no longer bound, he pulled a knife from his sleeve and went to work on the ropes. When the last came free, Nie Huaisang slumped forward into his arms.

Huh.

He was a lot lighter than expected.

Filing that away in his mind in case he needed it for later, Meng Yao managed to get him laid out on the bed with very little difficulty.

He was not, however, a fool, so before he resumed examining for other injuries, he tied both of Nie Huaisang's hands back to the bed post.

By the time he was done, he'd found a handful of other bruises -though none as serious as the blow to the head- and some minor scrapes, as well as a qi-slowing sedative that would need to be burned out of Nie Huaisang's system.

And then it would just be a matter of figuring out what to do once he woke up.

#mdzs #long post #nie huaisang #jin guangyao #sangyao #wen ruohan #ideas #fanfic

24 notes · View notes