or, Catharsis: The Fic In which Wei Wuxian, shortly after being called into Mo Xuanyu’s body, is further forced into the past, where he proceeds to tumble his way into absolutely nailing a time travel fix-it.

After their end, a plea and a wish for things to have been different by Lan Xichen sends Nie Mingjue and Jin GuangYao back in time and gives them a chance to do better. With their knowledge of the 'future' they came from, they have to figure out how to deal with each other.

“I once heard a rumour that this is how Lan An and his cultivation partner did it,” Ma Qiao piped up. “Which, I mean, if anyone could…” “The Lans are far too boring and repressed for something like this,” Wei Wuxian said, with the authority of one who had been resoundingly ignored by a Lan for the past month. “Can you imagine Lan Wangji dual cultivating?” Everyone knows that dual cultivation is a myth that only works in porn. Wei Wuxian discovers differently.

Lan Wangji gets cursed with a ~woman's body~ and has to orgasm to go back. Since he's 1) a virgin 2) super repressed and 3) SUPER gay, he has no idea what to do. If only he had a super nosy friend who's read lots of erotic novels who could help him figure out what to do... hm...

Nie Mingjue would be the very first to admit that devious plotting was not his strong suit – but if it meant he could make things better, make it so that his brother never had to dirty his hands to avenge him, he would do his best. His best, in this instance, was a forbidden ritual that sent him back in time to before their father had died, before Wen Ruohan's perfidy was revealed, before Meng Yao was twisted by the world's cruelty, before Wei Wuxian was orphaned... Nie Mingjue had a lot to do and very little time in which to do it. Best to get started right away.

Nie Mingjue leaves his first Discussion Conference as a Sect Leader early, desperately needing to find some fresh air and possibly something to hit. Instead he finds a small, dirty child that reminds him of his brother, cowering away from some dogs - Maybe he should take him home.

Possibly some of these will become longer, but not yet. Currently featuring (among others): - child!Jin Ling gets himself kidnapped by a well-meaning Wen Ning - truth serum trope - Nie Huaisang steals the Ghost General - Nie sect adopts the Yiling Patriarch - a variety of arranged marriages - crossover (Leverage, Naruto, Legends of Tomorrow) - dragons dragons everywhere - unintentional black widow WWX - Jiang Cheng is thrown into the burial mounds - NHS wields a fan as a weapon - JC interferes with the events on the Qiongqi Path - Lan Sizhui is Wen Ruohan's son and meets him unknowingly - WWX is named chief cultivator - Jiang Yanli's spirit responds to Lan Wangji's constant playing of Inquiry - WWX & LWJ locked away behind the Wall - LWJ stays in the burial mounds but it affects him - JC does impossible things

There was no way the old contract Jiang Cheng found arranging a marriage between the direct disciples of the Nie and Jiang sects was, as Jiang Cheng insisted, the way to solve the problem of the Yiling Patriarch - if only because there was no way the Nie sect would agree to it. Except - they did. And now they're coming to discuss terms. With Lan Wangji as the official chaperone.

Wei Wuxian was fully prepared to be rejected – no matter what Jiang Cheng said about the Sunshot Campaign caring more about defeating the Wens than anything else, the fact remained that his cultivation was most decidedly abnormal and unorthodox, the sort of thing the cultivation world most scorned. He’d already decided that if they did that, he would return to his previous approach of stalking the Wens from the shadows, fighting them in his own way, on his own. Instead, he walked into the command tent, Chenqing gripped tightly in his hand, and Nie Mingjue didn’t so much as blink, just said, “Can you do anything but ambushes?” and the next thing he knew, it was three shichen later, he’d shared far more than he’d meant to about his new cultivation style, and there were eight different plans of attack that would greatly increase his effectiveness on the battlefield. It was – exhilarating, actually. (in which Nie Mingjue and Wei Wuxian become sworn brothers)

Figuring out that the second daughter of the Jiang clan was, in fact, their son and heir - if you look at it by Qinghe standards - when no one else in Yunmeng had yet figured it out caused Nie Mingjue enough of a headache, and it must have given him a bit of a reputation for sticking his nose into other people's business. That must be the reason that Jiang Cheng would come to him of all people after the fall of the Lotus Pier, hand a little too low down on his stomach for the problem to be food poisoning, to ask for advice - or maybe it was only that he had nobody else to turn to.

When Lan Wangji ran away from the jingshi to look for himself, his back still raw, and on Yiling he found only a small child, feverish but still capable of a little bit of babbling, still able to tell the story of what had happened – when he found the traces of blood on the ground, Wei Wuxian’s from when his power had backlashed on him – when he saw the bodies in the blood pool, already rotting – For the first time in his life, Lan Wangji didn’t want to go home. (what if he had another option?)

There was another boy there at the base of the balcony outside of Meng Shi's window, where Meng Yao liked to sit: a boy few years older than him, taller, in finely made clothing that would normally make Meng Yao itch all over in futile envy, but the other boy’s eyes were white around the edges in a way that was immediately, painfully familiar. “Someone’s chasing you?” Meng Yao asked, and the boy’s eyes widened even further, surprised, but he nodded in confirmation. “There’s a trellis around the left side – can you climb up? I'll hide you.” "Thanks," the boy said, later, once the man he called Wen Ruohan had left. "My name is Nie Mingjue. What's yours?"

Modern AU: Mingjue and Xichen are living in different cities, no longer entirely boyfriends as such, more in a best-friends-sort-of-dating-long-distance-in-an-open-relationship scenario. But in practice this largely involves having long distance phone sex most nights while both watching the same porn. Which, for several months now, has mostly meant watching a sunny little femmeboi called A Yao, who has dimples to die for, an Only Fans page, an endless supply of stockings and dildos, and the kind of flexibility that makes your eyes water. Mingjue and Xichen are maybe just a little obsessed with the idea of wrecking him. Lately, A Yao has started including his roommate "Xiao Tang" in his shoots - with his face pixelated, because Xiao Tang is shy, and is not entirely ready to be internet famous in this way. Mingjue and Xichen are both extremely enthusiastic about this turn of events. Which is going to be a little awkward in the immediate future...

Saving people, hunting things: the family business. Modern AU: the Nies are hit by a demon's death curse, which is NOT fuck or die - it's fuck AND die, a kind of reverse cultivation curse that's usually directed against cultivation partners, destroying their golden cores little by little every time they fuck. NOT a clever curse to use against brothers! ...except that the curse comes with a chaser: its targets share blisteringly horny sex dreams every night, as a way of encouraging them to go ahead and give in to the whole fuck-and-die schtick. Awkward. So it makes sense to search for a cure to the curse, right? Especially since the cure might actually help stabilise Mingjue's golden core. Obviously they have no intention of actually boning once they've got rid of the whole fuck-and-die curse... (...for the life of me I can't remember who suggested a Fuck AND Die trope on Twitter many weeks ago - evidently it has been living rent free in the back of my head ever since, though, and so here we have some Niecest.)

It doesn't take an especially strategic mind to recognize that a poorly-maintained weapon is no weapon at all. Nie Mingjue can fix that.

A generous allowance from his parents or Wei Wuxian in his life: Jiang Cheng would make the same choice a thousand times over, but his grad school stipend is barely enough to support himself, let alone the two of them. An arrangement with an older man might keep his head above water—if he doesn't wade in too deep.