There Must Be At Least Someone In The South That Think Of Them As Lovers, Build A Temple Based On That

Strong Nie Huaisang is strong (and a delicate flower)

Endou Yuu versus the cosmic unknown 

Do NOT think about Zukka x Cardigan by Taylor Swift unless you want it to envelop your soul

~

But I knew you'd linger like a tattoo kiss

I knew you'd haunt all of my what-ifs

The smell of smoke would hang around this long

'Cause I knew everything when I was young

~

Them getting so close leading up to Sozin’s Comet and then growing apart again after because of their respective duties

Mutual long distance reminiscing and pining over what could have been if they had met as emissaries of their nations in a peaceful world.

Zuko helping with the reconstruction effort and finding boomerang, Sokka building a fire and only being able to remember the warmth and smell of Zukos bending

They were both so young, so young, too young for the world to have been placed on their shoulders. They knew it was their responsibility, even now, they uphold their duties with straight backs and faces. They know, they know, they know it could never work, I mean- they never even confessed to each other.

But not even the brutality of war can stop children from dreaming.

ah…the timeless taste of gay chicken

xie lian: mu qing, are you still undressed? you've been in your room for hours now.

mu qing: *breathless* I just... I just can't find any nice clothing... to wear.

xie lian: what do you mean? your closet has a lot of nice things.

*xie lian opens up the door to the closet*

xie lian: see? shirts, pants, hi fengxin, shoes...

the sun and his little star ☀️🌟

"I need to do this. Zuko, Z-zuzu you know, you understand. He will find this amusing. Father will give me more time." Her eyes were blown wide with fear, silent tears streaming down her checks. He remembers when she would come crying to him like this when they were children.

She had been tiny then, still whole, but oh so very strong. Head held high, she would wait until the servents cleared his rooms before collapsing into sobs. There had been precious little that could make her cry even then, and Father had started desensitizing them to death early. But Azula, so small, so young, hadn't taken well to the lessons, not yet.

Zuko's family was filled with monsters. He wasn't the exception. He had stared at her, with all the love an older sibling could give to a little sister, and broken her so Father couldn't, like he had done to him.

He remembers comforting her, fixing her crown and wiping her face, before taking her small hand into his and sneaking into the prison. He remembers bribing the guards at the end of every lesson with silk cloth, leather shoes, and embroidered bags of rice, and teaching her how to hurt humans so Father wouldn't have to.

His fingers curl on top of hers-so old, already fourteen and her hands are still so small-like they use to, giving her strength, guiding her blade. He leans forward, grunting a little as the blade slides all the way to the hilt, to whisper advise in her ear.

"Twist the blade until the edge faces up. A hole will be harder and more painful to heal then a tear."

Her breath hitches in the next inhale, but she does not sob like she use to. He feels so proud of her, of her strength and at her resolve when the pain in his abdomen flares white hot. Zuko stumbles, but he catches himself before he can fall on Azula because he refuses to let his little sister deal with more then what she has to before she needs to. He hates to break her even more at all but he needs to.

Father had broken him with his love, and raged and stomped on him when his sharp edges didn't poke out to hurt anyone but himself. Father had picked and prodded at him until his insides were glass sand, not big enough to break free but sharp enough to hurt with each step, to tear his lungs with each breath and scrap at his bones.

He couldn't have left Azula with Father. But he also couldn't leave her with Mother who picked up and dropped her glass children equally and without warning, disgusted by the shards they left behind. Or Uncle, who sanded down his edges for them, but who's shaving floated in the air to cut bite and sting nor their cousin who's molten glass center ran so hot that his sheer presence fixed him and unavailablity left a void so cold he broke all over again. He had broken her so Father wouldn't feel the need to, so Mother's love and indifference wouldn't leave her desperate to please and hurting, so Uncle's careless words wouldn't cut into her skin and bury into her heart, so she would keep herself at a distance with their cousin and not break at his very absence.

Azula, better then him at everything, had broken in a way to hurt others, she learned to fit the pieces of herself to walk without hurting, had lived under Father's approval without falling victim to it as he had. When Father had burned half of his face and cruelly given him hope in the form of an impossible task, he had chased even whispers of it, not to come back to his sister or people, nor had he after a twisted sense of loyalty to the Fire Lord but out of nessercery. He had needed to go back home to the fire and pain, where burns and words and exhaustion would melt the glass whole again and grant him rest until the next time Father had him shattered.

Blood slipped through his fingers and reached hers despite his best efforts. He hoped his glass wouldn't sting her too badly or for too long.

"Good," he praised. She had always needed praise when she got like this when they were little. She was still so small. "Now run the knife up and stop before the heart."

He refused to leave her without instruction, to leave her alone while she was still so frail. He had always imagined himself a quick death, earth on the battlefield, the jumping in front of the blade of an assassin, tasting poison and warning his family before he passed, but for her he would hold on as long as he could. He curls up as metal tears his insides, muffling his scream on her shoulder to try to give her more time. Briefly, he stares at the ceiling and its glowing green stalactites and wonders when he ended up on the ground.

Her face is there, lips parted in shock, eyes bright with unshed tears. She won't let them fall again but he thinks it might of been nice for someone to publicly mourn him. He figures it won't matter to him for much longer anyway.

Her hand, still on the knife, shakes so he musters up the strength to lift his to hold to hers, but he forgets to factor in gravity and his vision goes white when he accidently shifts the knife inside him. Her eyes are dead when he comes back to, and part of him is comforted by the fact that in their three years apart, this part of her still hasn't changed. But his time is running out and he needs to tell her how to sell this to Father.

"Tell him... tell him-" his throat is dry and he can't shallow but he needs to finish this. Azula, so smart, so old, so small, sees and leans to hear better. He hears the screams and booms of battle but they sound far away from their little bubble. He wonders why the Avartar and his teachers haven't yet left.

"Tell him what knife you used. He'll ... he'll find it funny if you tell ... Uncle." It would hurt him to learn that the knife he gifted him would be the thing to kill him but-

"It will be enough to excuse my lack of fire," her eyes widen as realization sets in.

Azula was p e r f e c t; Uncle had betrayed their country, he could suffer the consequences.

The edges of his vision darken. He needs to hurry.

"Do," he tastes blood in the back of his throat. It feels like shards. "Do what you need to . . . to survive." Lie, steal, kill. Kill Father or the Avatar.

"You were always better the second time." These words come out like a whisper but by the widening of her eyes he knows she heard, can tell she understands. He hates doing this to her but the sounds of fighting are getting closer. They're almost here now.

"Lala, you're perfect."

Her face blanks. Azula isn't perfect, not yet, but she will tear herself and anyone opposing her apart for the next hour trying to be. As long as she gets out of this alive he doesn't care. Ty Lee and Mai have always been able to put her back together.

She stands smoothly, taking the knife with her. He barely feels it.

Blue eyes and dark skin replace her. He doesn't know his name but he can see him panicking. He wonders why. Pain flares up as he applys pressure to his wound and he no longer cares. Water Tribe can go die.

The scene starts moving and pain flares up periodically. Azula screams words. He doesn't know what she said but he wants to stay. He claws at blues and trys to summon fire but his inner fire is just dying embers now. He gets pulled in tighter. He wonders if the blue will let him go if he pukes.

Suddenly there is wind and stars and he is oh so very cold. Water smothers the last of his inner flames and agonizingly knits him back together. It hurts less as it continues. Zuko knows it is not a good thing. Water can heal but it cannot replace blood. He will die and Azula will be safe because of it.

Faces surround him with worry but he doesn't want them. He wants the sister he raised, the uncle that tried, the girls who already mourned him once and shouldn't have to again. He don't want enemies and strangers. But he never gets what he wants. He used up all his luck being born.

He looks at the stars and trys to will the sunrise. He knows it will not come. Zuko had been born at night away from Agni' presence. He was probably destined to die away from it too. He still hopes for the warmth of His rays.

His breath shallows. He hears Lu Ten's voice humming a song loud and clear and his mind fills in the lyrics of a soilder coming home from war. In the distant he notices the warm laughter of his lady grandmother, the grumbling voice of his grand sire, the quacking of turtleducks and the overwhelming sent of fire lilies. He briefly wonder about the whereabouts of Mother.

The sounds get louder. Home.

Over the sky of Ba Sing Se, the sound of sobs get muffled into warm bodies as faces turn to hide away from the glare of the rising sun.

Day 11 "Sparring"

Another mixed concept and scene snippet post from twitter. This one I actually hammered out a quick ending to!

Nie Huaisang is the insecure one of the relationship for a change. 

Even though they’ve been together from the end of lectures all the way through the Sunshot Campaign, even though Jiang Cheng always turns them down, even though Jiang Cheng chased off the matchmakers, there's always someone drawn in by Jiang Cheng’s pretty face or the allure of the Jiang-furen. 

And, eventually, Jiang Cheng will have to find himself a wife. 

An actual wife. 

Nie Huaisang can handle dealing with merchants and accounts and stuff like that, he’d even force himself to do it for the rest of his life if he has to, but there's so much more that would be expected of a wife and even if he were to learn it all, the etiquette and everything, he's still not a woman. He can’t give Jiang Cheng heirs of his own bloodline, and he knows how important that is.

So even though he does his best to help out with rebuilding the Pier, Nie Huaisang makes himself scarce if there's even a hint of flirting because if this is going to be the one that Jiang Cheng reciprocates, he doesn't want to be there to see it.

He even stays through the fallout and the first siege, only for a new problem to pop up as the dust settles.

On top of everything else, Jin Ling can’t stand him. Even at that age where babies are upset about everything, it's clear Nie Huaisang is his least favorite adult, even though Nie Huaisang is doing his best, and is actually doing things correctly 95% of the time.

It's absolutely crushing. It's worse than the flirting, worse than the proposal letters, because he knows more than anything, Jiang Cheng needs a partner who can do right by his nephew.

As Jin Ling howls angrily in his arms, only to immediately quiet as soon as someone else takes him, Nie Huaisang finally starts contemplating throwing in the towel and letting Jiang Cheng find someone who actually deserves to be by his side. 

And eventually… he does give up and break things off. 

Not wanting to leave Jiang Cheng feeling like he's in the wrong, he explains everything before he quietly goes back to Qinghe.

Unbeknownst to him, Jiang Cheng takes this as a challenge. 

Nie Huaisang left because people wanted him to marry better? Fine! He finally accepts the matchmakers' attempts to set him up, and then purposely bombs the dates. When rumors start getting out, he pays the matchmakers to support them.

He can't do anything about the fact that Jin Ling doesn't like Nie Huaisang, and that guts him, because his nephew comes first. But Jin Ling's a baby, surely his opinion will change as he grows? 

Right?

He can make this work. He will make this work.

It's been a year and a half since he and Nie Huaisang have seen each other in person, but they've been tentatively exchanging letters. 

When Jiang Cheng arrives at the conference in Qinghe, he takes the first day to gather his nerves. On the second day, he thinks he's ready.

And then the screaming panic erupts in the courtyard.

---

From there, it goes as canon did. Nie Huaisang grows distant as he sinks into grief and revenge and Jiang Cheng throws himself into running the sect and raising Jin Ling. 

(Neither of them ever tells Jin Ling about their history together, so he grows up having never known they were even an item, just that Nie Huaisang is that weird annoying guy who's always pestering shushu. Ironic that he ends up remaining completely disdainful of Nie Huaisang his whole childhood, but for totally different reasons.)

It's painful and bewildering to see the way Nie Huaisang acts around Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao, because Nie Huaisang wasn't that clingy with him even when they were lovers.

(Once the final confrontation at the temple concludes, Jiang Cheng realizes that Nie Huaisang might have been shielding him from All Of That, but he's still kind of hurt and confused.)

Something forces them to talk: Jin Ling eventually does find out about their backstory.

Not the actual backstory, of course, but during a 'friendly' night hunt, Wei Wuxian offhandedly muses about the fact that Jiang Cheng and Nie Huaisang aren't together anymore.

Wait, when were they ever together???? 

"Oh, it ended before you were even old enough to remember?" Wei Wuxian asks. "Though I guess that's not surprising, since you were only three when Chifeng-zun died."

"It was probably because even they couldn't stand each other for long," Lan Jingyi says, earning a swat from Ouyang Zizhen.

But Wei Wuxian just grins and says "Yeah, that's probable, too," or something like that. Jin Ling doesn't really hear it clearly because he's already mad and stewing in his own thoughts.

His jiujiu-! With that guy-!

And he's going to get to the bottom of this. Since his jiujiu never said anything about Nie-zongzhu all those years, good or bad, he knows he won't get any information that way, and even though he grew up seeing Nie-zongzhu as a silly harmless annoyance, recent discussions mean he doesn't feel comfortable going to the Unclean Realms either.

Time to start asking the Jiang sect’s second-in-command some questions. 

---

Jin Ling doesn’t get much, but he gets enough that he knows he’s going to have to press Nie-zongzhu for the full story. 

So he sucks up his nerve and heads to the Unclean Realms.

He’s received with little fanfare, but when Nie Huaisang offers tea, he can tell by the smell that it’s his jiujiu’s favorite, and he can’t help but wonder which of them loved it first.

It throws him off guard enough that rather than the snippy confrontation he had been planning on the way over, the first question out of his mouth is “Do you regret any of it?”

Nie Huaisang tilts his head, expression uncomfortably probing. Jin Ling braces himself for the usual deflections and protestations of ignorance, but whatever Nie Huaisang sees makes him simply sigh instead. “Your shenshen. I never predicted she would react the way she did. I thought she would go home to her parents.”

“What about the cu- Mo Xuanyu? Did you make him do it?”

“No. It was his idea to begin with, actually. But there was a possibility, however small, that I could have stopped him, and I never tried.”

Jin Ling is… not sure exactly how he feels about the answers he’s been given. But he does believe them. So he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, lets it out… and without any of the irritation he’d been carrying with him on the way, asks the question that has really sparked this visit.

“Did you break up with jiujiu because of me?”

Nie Huaisang chokes on his tea. “Where did you hear that from?” he wheezes after getting the coughing under control.

“Not any one person in particular. I heard you’d been together from shijiu, and started putting the pieces together after talking to some others,” Jin Ling only partially lies, not wanting to put his jiujiu’s second in any possible line of fire. “Did you?”

Nie Huaisang rubs between his eyes, and it looks like he won’t answer at first. “It wasn’t your fault,” he finally says. “There were over a dozen different issues that probably would have sunk us eventually. We’d been keeping the relationship quiet during the rebuilding, so there were potential wives being tossed in his path constantly, none of which I could measure up to.”

“He would have picked you anyway,” Jin Ling says, eyes narrowed. “So tell me the real reason.”

“I did. Choosing me would have only put more stress on him, especially since-”

“Since what?”

“Since nothing.”

“So it did have something to do with me.”

“Jin-zongzhu-”

“Tell me,” Jin Ling insists, practically leaning over the table.

Nie Huaisang scrubs his face with his hands. “Fine. Fine. I hated seeing how miserable he was having to split time between us because you screamed yourself blue if someone tried to hand you to me. I wasn’t going to make him choose, and I wasn’t going to make him feel guilty when he inevitably chose you. It was better for both of you to just take myself out of the running.”

Jin Ling sits back down and processes this, remembering all the times he’d heard his jiujiu absolutely shut down a dinner date with anyone. How he always changed the subject when Jin Ling brought up the question of why he hadn't married yet.

He must have been missing Nie Huaisang the whole time, and it’s clear just from watching Nie Huaisang during this discussion that he’d been hurting too. And yet they’d never breathed a word about it around him because they didn’t want him thinking he’d ruined things for them.

“Okay,” he says finally. “I’m summoning jiujiu here and we’re discussing this in full.”

“What?”

—

Things finally seem to be going well. With Jin Ling's blessing, Jiang Cheng and Nie Huaisang are tentatively mending the bond between them.

And then a night hunt goes horribly wrong, with Jiang Cheng taking a blow that would have killed his nephew and once-shixiong. Much to everyone's surprise, including his own, he ascends.

As a god of devotion.

He laughs until he realizes the other gods are serious, and then he's bewildered and angry because why him?

Worst of all, he can't leave the heavens without permission for literal years because he has to 'settle in' first, which just seems like a lot of bureaucratic bullshit to him.

—

Of course he goes to Jin Ling first, who's now fully-grown and well-established, but still greets him with tears and a fierce hug like a kid. After they've spent almost the whole day catching up, Jin Ling suddenly gets very quiet and serious. "You might want to go see Huaisang next. Before it's too late."

Jiang Cheng stiffens. "I was already planning on it, but what the hell do you mean 'too late'?"

"He's... really not been doing well since you ascended. I think the only things still keeping him alive at this point are his promise to his brother and the fact that the disciples insist on taking care of him even though he abdicated."

Jiang Cheng feels sick, because he knows.

He knows why.

He thanks Jin Ling and, in a blink, he's at the Unclean Realms. Ignoring the stunned reactions, he turns to the man he recognizes as having been the head disciple the last time he visited and is likely the sect leader now. "Where is he?"

He's guided to a set of rooms deep in the side of the mountain, where the only light is from torches and lanterns and candles. When he enters the door indicated for him, the sight inside makes his stomach drop.

Nie Huaisang is sleeping on a bed of furs and soft pillows, an array Jiang Cheng can't identify stitched over the chest of carefully arranged robes. Despite the fact that his face is still smooth and unlined, there are silver streaks among the braids in his hair. He's far too thin and just... looks ill. 

Kneeling beside the low bed, Jiang Cheng reaches out to touch his cheek, his hair, something, but his presence rouses his former lover before he can make contact.

Nie Huaisang blinks at him, then smiles, but his gaze isn't focusing right. "Ah, Cheng-er, look at you," he murmurs, barely audible. "Always knew you were too good for a monster like me."

—

Nie Huaisang only lives long enough to complete the purification ritual.

Jiang Cheng decides to remain on earth, waiting. He passes the time by occasionally checking in with the sect, or with Jin Ling, or even with Wei Wuxian, the shock of his ascension having forced them to have some very weighty conversations.

It takes another fifty years, but eventually he crosses paths with a young man who has familiar green eyes and an even more familiar infectious laugh. 

My best friend’s best friend