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Wen Ning truly doesn’t mean to intrude on Nie Huaisang’s personal matters.
It’s just, the walkways of Cloud Recesses are so quiet in the early evening, with most people at silent Lan dinner, that he can’t help overhearing the strained breathing coming from the other boy’s assigned quarters. He pauses along his way. Nie Huaisang looked healthy enough during their lectures today, but Wen Ning knows well sickness can come on quickly, what if he needs help? He takes a few steps closer to Nie Huaisang’s door and hesitates there.
“Nie-gongzi,” he calls, “are you feeling all right?”
The ragged sounds stutter. “I’m…fine,” Nie Huaisang calls back, but he sounds different from usual, his sprightly lilt slurred. He does not sound fine.
Should Wen Ning fetch one of the Lan healers, or would his sister be better if Nie Huaisang is trying to avoid a fuss? Would it cause too great an offense, to choose a Wen cultivator on the Lan’s own territory? He glances at the book in his hand—a medical text Wei Wuxian had asked him to please bring out, he wanted to check something at once, ignoring Lan Wangji’s forbidding gaze—as if it might tell him what to do. Maybe he should just take a look first, to assess the situation.
“Forgive my intrusion,” he says quietly, and lets himself into the room.
The book hits the floor.
Oh.
Wen Ning’s cheeks burn at his uninterrupted view of Nie Huaisang’s…situation. Delicate feet are planted on the bed, his knees up and legs spread while he pushes something inside himself. He’s—that’s—
“I’m so s-sorry,” Wen Ning sputters, “I’ll—”
“Close the door please,” Nie Huaisang says, broken in the middle by a faint sound that wakes something in Wen Ning’s body. His face is as red as Wen Ning’s must be, from exertion or—he trips over the unspoken—pleasure, and he’s even prettier than usual when he’s blushing all the way down to his collarbones, and that doesn’t matter, because Wen Ning has no right to see him like this!
“Yes!” Wen Ning throws the door shut. His mistake dawns on him when his back is flat against it. He…was supposed to be on the other side, wasn’t he? He blinks at Nie Huaisang, an apology already on his lips, he’s gone and tripped face-first into the privacy of the first real friend he’s ever made; the apology falls away when his eyes fall on the place where Nie Huaisang’s body clenches around the other intrusion.
Which he’s still working out of himself, as if there’s not an idiot fish-gaping at him.
“I’ll go!” says the fish-gaping idiot himself, fumbling at the door. “I won’t say anythi—”
“Ning-ge,” Nie Huaisang interrupts. Wen Ning freezes. The first time Nie Huaisang called him ‘Ning-ge’ he’d thought he might be experiencing a qi deviation, and stammered himself incoherent, and Nie Huaisang hadn’t even sounded like that: breathy and sweet. “Would you”—another little noise breaks loose from that pale, trembling throat, one Wen Ning can only helplessly think of as needy—“come and help?”
Wen Ning’s mind blanks. Did Nie-gongzi just…suggest he help? Help how? With this? He misheard or misunderstood, surely. Maybe today he really is qi deviating.
“Ning-ge,” Nie Huaisang says again. There’s a demand in it, even through the shake in his breath. Wen Ning’s gaze flicks again to the…the toy. Some sly, terrible little voice in the back of his head asks if he wouldn’t like to be the one pushing it in. He thinks he whimpers. “Come and tou-ah-ch me.”
“Y-yes,” Wen Ning answers this time, and somehow makes his way across the room without tripping over the disarray of paintbrushes and books and clothing, hypnotized by the sight of Nie Huaisang’s beautiful panting face, the way his toes are curling. He drops to his knees beside the usually indolent Nie heir as if he might pray to him. “What—should I do?”
“Whatever you want to do.”
Whatever he wants?
Wen Ning has rarely given much thought to this sort of thing, always blushing and looking away from the yellow books Nie Huaisang shares with the other boys. But those books do not have figures like Nie Huaisang himself.
Nie Huaisang’s usually perfect hair is a mess, strands sweat-stuck to his forehead and flying out in random directions. His lips are parted, and pretty. His thighs tremble, as if this is the most effort those legs have been forced to exert in months. His cock is hard and flushed and wet. One of his fans lays unnecessary and abandoned beside him.
No, however graceful the lines in his spring books may be, they paint nothing of the picture a nude, stretched out Nie Huaisang makes. Wen Ning suddenly understands all the fuss. Remarkable, what a moment can do. He realizes, now that they are here, he wants a lot of things he hasn’t considered before.
The first thing though, and the most important:
“Is it all right to kiss you?” he asks, and Nie Huaisang looks surprised before he’s smiling again. He smiles a lot; it was the first thing Wen Ning noticed about this sect heir, the most refined of their generation when he chooses to be, and the one with the easiest laugh.
“Please,” Nie Huaisang says, all Wen Ning needs to hear before he leans over. He had not considered how much his hair would get in the way, how many times he would need to shove it over his shoulders, the way something like that might make Nie Huaisang shake with laughter, petal-soft lips vibrating against Wen Ning’s. The first playful dart of tongue comes as a shock, but within moments he’s making a soft sound of his own while Nie Huaisang explores his mouth.
Another thing he had not thought about was how wet it could be, or how it would narrow his whole world to the person he’s kissing. There could be anything happening outside these quarters and he wouldn’t know about it, too absorbed in tasting the tea on Nie Huaisang’s lips.
“Was that okay?” Wen Ning asks once he’s reluctantly pulled away. “It’s the first time…”
Nie Huaisang’s mouth, shiny and redder now, twitches. “More, ah, more than okay.”
“I don’t know anything,” Wen Ning confesses. He expects Nie Huaisang to laugh at him, tell him he should have looked at the yellow books with the rest of them, maybe even that he’s free to find one and study now.
Instead Nie Huaisang gropes for Wen Ning’s sleeve with his unoccupied hand to tug him in and whisper, breathing labored, he’s still—how is he still doing that?, “You’ll learn like this. What do you want, Ning-ge?”
A lot, Wen Ning doesn’t say, because he doesn’t want to sound as starved as he feels with Nie Huaisang like this. He has to choose, when he is not accustomed to choice.
Nie Huaisang flumphs back onto the bed as if his energy has been spent. One leg kicks out as he goes, a sound punching out of his throat, his toy must have shifted. He adjusts it himself, while Wen Ning drinks in the sight with wide eyes that must give him away. As Wen Ning forces his gaze to drag up again, he thinks, Oh, that’s what comes next.
He allows his palm to skim over Nie Huaisang’s chest, to feel the sweat. Curious, testing, he scrapes a fingernail down a nipple, and Nie Huaisang arches into the touch, breathing out hard through his nose. The nipple stiffens under his attention, and Nie Huaisang is squirming, but not protesting, so he does it to the other one, too. His own are not sensitive like Nie Huaisang’s seem to be.
“Do”—his mouth is dry, he has to swallow as he presses his bitten nail into Nie Huaisang’s skin, creates a crescent indent—“do you like it?”
Nie Huaisang makes a haaa sound, laugh and moan together. “Is Ning-ge really asking that?”
He really is; he wants to hear it. He manages a ducked nod.
“I like it so much,” Nie Huaisang breathes, “there must be a rule against liking things this much on that wall.”
Wen Ning surprises himself by laughing, then kisses him again. He groans at the sharp catch of teeth in his lip. Nie Huaisang makes a questioning sound, and Wen Ning has to learn right then how to kiss him harder, to answer without pulling away.
His hand roams from nipple to abdomen, where it’s immediately more obvious that Nie Huaisang is still making some effort to drag the toy in and out of himself in slow, uneven movements. He is smaller than Wen Ning, more delicate, and so much lovelier, and it still seems so strange Nie Huaisang was the one to notice him, quiet and timid and lonely during all their lectures, and then to beckon him over and start chattering away as if it was natural, as if they had been acquainted for years. That day, Wen Qing had thought he might have a fever, and he could not explain that he had only met the sun and stood too near to it.
Nie Huaisang has showered him with attention since then, asking his opinions on everything from the simple Cloud Recesses food to the poetry he keeps in his head, told him a hundred times or more to stop being so formal.
Touching him this way—being allowed to touch him this way—is stranger yet, but the best strange he has ever experienced.
“Nie-gongzi is beautiful,” Wen Ning says, earnest and longing, and Nie Huaisang’s eyelashes flutter just like his painted fans, but better.
“Ning-ge too,” Nie Huaisang says, which is a nice sentiment, even if it’s not true. Wen Ning knows that he is plain and unassuming, and Nie Huaisang noticed him anyway. “More?”
“Yes,” Wen Ning says a little too seriously, and finally wraps his fingers around Nie Huaisang’s dripping cock. It’s so slick with precome it’s easy for Wen Ning’s hand to glide down to the base, up again, while Nie Huaisang whines in the back of his throat. The sight of his fingers around that cock, longer and slimmer than his own, transfixes him like a snaring array. Even this part of Nie Huaisang is beautiful.
Wen Ning says so aloud, and Nie Huaisang makes a loud sound. Although the toy is still inside him now, he has stopped playing with himself. Is he too overwhelmed? By Wen Ning? There is no need to inherit a sect or have the strongest golden core, he thinks, when he can make Nie Huaisang’s legs shake and fingers grasp at nothing. This is the only power that matters, and it has been placed carefully in his inexperienced hands.
Wen Ning moves until he is between slender legs, where he can once again see Nie Huaisang’s body stretched around his toy. He wets his lips and asks, “Can I…?”
Nie Huaisang gives him a mournful look. “Why aren’t you already?”
So Wen Ning reaches for a pillow, and slides it beneath Nie Huaisang’s hips. He nearly takes a flailing foot to the face, has to catch an ankle and place the foot on his shoulder. Finally, he slips an experimental hand where both of them want it to be. His first touch to the rim earns a beautifully needy sound. Nie Huaisang reaches clumsily for his hand, like he wants to feel Wen Ning feeling him.
“Help me do it,” Wen Ning whispers, his own ignored cock twitching at the answering nnngh. “I don’t know what I’m doing, you have to help, and tell me if it’s bad.”
“Ning-ge,” Nie Huaisang says, and it would sound like a complaint if he wasn’t curling his fingers around Wen Ning’s and guiding him to tug on the wide end of the toy.
The choked sound Nie Huaisang makes as they push it in together suggests it isn’t bad at all.
“Like this?” Wen Ning asks. Nie Huaisang’s hand is mostly limp when they pull and shove again. Instinct turns his head to press a clumsy kiss to the inside of Nie Huaisang’s ankle.
“Like—harder,” Nie Huaisang gasps, cock twitching hard. Wen Ning wants to see him come. Wants to make him come.
He follows his kiss with a swipe of tongue, maybe it doesn’t matter if he knows what he’s doing as long as it makes Nie Huaisang feel good. The fourth time they’re pushing the toy in, Nie Huaisang drops his head back and moves as if he wants to rock against it in return, but doesn’t have the leverage.
“I can’t,” he whines, “I can’t help anymore, ge.”
“Okay,” Wen Ning says, “you don’t have to.”
Nie Huaisang’s hand falls away the moment he says so. He drags Wen Ning closer with the heel on his shoulder.
Wen Ning has learned the motion of it now. In and out, it isn’t difficult, but he thinks there is more to learn. He studies every scrap of reaction: the way Nie Huaisang’s breathing stutters when he’s rougher with the toy, the long arch of his neck and high “ah-haa” when he aims a certain way. He is an archer, after all, he knows how to hit a target. By himself, he can work the toy deeper than Nie Huaisang’s own hands, and he has better control.
Power, he thinks again. It’s a type of power, drawing pleasure from Nie Huaisang’s body. He doesn’t care about the tightness of his own trousers, it doesn’t matter that he’s the hardest he’s ever been, only that Nie Huaisang’s heel is digging harder into the back of his shoulder and he’s making broken sounds, mouth opening and closing.
“Nie-gongzi,” Wen Ning says. He doesn’t expect an answer with Nie Huaisang in this…condition. It does not enter his mind that Nie Huaisang is being louder now than when Wen Ning overheard him, someone else might find them like this, not when he is so focused on pushing the toy in the way that makes Nie Huaisang spasm.
“Close,” Nie Huaisang pants. “I’m really—really going to.”
Wen Ning has the sudden thought that he wants to feel it. His gaze falls on Nie Huaisang’s stuffed entrance, and then he’s teasing the rim without thinking about it. The skin twitches under his touch. “Greedy,” slips unconsciously from his mouth, and Nie Huaisang moans. “And pretty.”
“S-stop, ge, stop looking!”
Wen Ning does not stop looking. He says, “Nie-gongzi told me to do what I want,” and Nie Huaisang makes a sound that fails to be outraged, considering he’s whimpering all the way through it.
Just a little more, he thinks. He swipes a finger through the precome pooling on Nie Huaisang’s stomach, and Nie Huaisang yelps, “Ge! You—” when he begins to push it in.
He is up to his second knuckle when Nie Huaisang stiffens, and comes all over himself.
Wen Ning stares.
Nie Huaisang is panting, his eyes shut tight and his face redder than Wen robes.
“I’m…going to take it out now,” Wen Ning says softly. He works finger and then toy free with care, then eases Nie Huaisang’s foot from his shoulder. He has absolutely no idea what happens next. Should he find a cloth and help Nie Huaisang clean up, or will Nie Huaisang want him to get out now that they’re finished? The second he’s alone he’ll have to—
“Now will you call me A-Sang?” Nie Huaisang’s playful question interrupts his thoughts.
Wen Ning stammers nonsense, while Nie Huaisang smiles at him. They have done that before, but not in this sort of position. “It—if—if it was someone else walking by, would you—” He looks away, he didn’t mean to ask that.
Nie Huaisang makes a floppy, dismissive gesture. “It would not have been, since I asked Wei Wuxian to make sure you came back alone.”
“You what?”
Though his leg is still shaking, Nie Huaisang smiles and drags his toes up Wen Ning’s ribs. “He didn’t want to know the details,” he goes on, “but he must have some idea, the amount of time he’s spent with Lan Wangji.” He beckons Wen Ning closer, and Wen Ning’s body obeys without needing the rest of him.
Nie Huaisang palms between his legs, and just that is enough to make him moan. “Why are you still clothed, Ning-ge? Next time I want this in me instead.”
“Next time?” Wen Ning squeaks. He’s still so far behind Nie Huaisang in this conversation.
“There are going to be a lot of next times,” Nie Huaisang says, all cheerful assurance. “Could you ask your sister for some salves? She’ll probably know the best ones.”
It is entirely possible Wen Ning passes away on the spot.