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Hurt/comfort 2025
Mar. 8th, 2025 10:12Thank you so much for coming to check out my letter! Below you'll find likes, prompts, and DNWs. While some things have more bullet points than others, I would be delighted to receive a fic about any of them. Thank you again, and I hope this is helpful to you!!
DNW:
General: pregnancy, risk thereof, babies or children | noncanonical religion | therapy or psychiatry | gore or torture | chatfic | pure fluff | crack | racism including fantasy racism | real-world politics | age regression to childhood (canon-typical amnesia to when XL was a teenager is fine) | genderbends | soulmates | omegaverse, bdsm AU, cakeverse | characters talking about gender, sexuality, abuse, or mental health like they have a tumblr | crossovers, including cameos from other MXTX books | noncanonical major character permadeath
NSFW: rape/noncon between requested characters (sex they feel complicated about or are conflictedly into is fine) | underage <15 | serious bodily harm during sex | scat or piss | titles eg sir or master (dianxia/your highness is fine) | rimming or ass to mouth | tearing or prolapse | breeding kink | humiliation | tickling | weight-related kinks | daddy or mommy kink | vore | bestiality | sexual assault being the good ending, a misunderstanding with nobody involved really at fault, or for the victim's own good | traffic system or safewords other than "stop" | formal BDSM
TGCF: aspec Mu Qing | entirely asexual Xie Lian (demi is fine + encouraged) | Feng Xin and Mu Qing's animosity having been UST, pigtail pulling, or a misunderstanding without real grievances | FXMQ's dislike/distrust of Hua Cheng being silly or unreasonable | unrequested fengqing | junmei | trans headcanons other than transfem Shi Qingxuan | setting depicted as non-homophobic
- Subtext!!
- Character studies, relationship studies. Complicated, messy relationships, conflicts that can't be resolved in one conversation.
- Bittersweet endings, hopeful endings, open endings, complicated endings, "and then the rest of canon happened and we know how that went" endings (that last applies whether it makes a sad ending hopeful or a happy ending bleak – I'll be delighted either way).
- Missing scenes and canon compliance
- Snapshots in time, one scene in a larger-scale story; open ambiguous endings where things don't get resolved.
- Characters who aren't meeting for the first time (especially in small-wordcount exchanges!)
- Dramatic irony, fluff with ominous foreshadowing.
- Unreliable narrators; not just ones who lie to the audience on purpose but also ones who are wrong about what's going on outside their vision or in other people's heads, who make guesses and assumptions and whose assumptions aren't always right. Tight POVs that narrate the character's experience rather than the full truth of what's going on.
- Gender; characters with issues and complexes about gender performance. Setting-typical attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and queerness. Closeted characters – not necessarily self-closeted (and if they are self-closeted I'd like it to feel like they have good reason to be and aren't just stupid).
- Complicated relationships with desire, wanting things you know aren't what you're supposed to want; these things being tangled up in one another. Characters who don't know what they want, who don't admit to what they want, who want contradictory things.
- Hermaneutic injustice; characters who don't have a conceptual vocabulary for their experiences and are forced to improvise.
- Relationships that cross the streams, that are four different kinds of thing at once; people who are neither precisely dating nor precisely not; when one person is your mentor and your comrade-in-arms and your lover and your friend; when ‘what are we' is a question without an answer. (Not the same as depiction of QPRs – I don't want it to be Representation(TM).)
- Intense homoerotic best friendships
- The personal and the political being one and the same; people in situations where their personal relationships have much wider implications; image and how you're viewed and having your personal life be public. Pedestalization and interaction therewith.
- Poly webs, open relationships. In general, nonmonogamous relationships that are not the thing where you have one relationship that works the way monogamous romances conventionally work but that happens to have three people in it.
- Choices that aren't, like, GOOD per se, but there isn't a clear better choice, it's just bad options all around.
- Proxy relationships and triangulation; when two people have a relationship that's about the conspicuous absence of a third person. Conspicuous absences of a person in general but triangulation and proxy relationships tend to be where that really shines.
- Everything is about sex, except for sex; sex is about misattributing quotes to Oscar Wilde. Is sex about power? About safety? About embodiment? About gender? About loyalty? About purity? About lack of purity? About getting to want things? About getting to ask for things? About the conspicuous absence of a third party? About something else entirely?
- Non-penetrative sex; sex that doesn't follow the Standard Sex Action Flowchart
- Characterizing kinks
- Kink that is not responsibly-negotiated healthy BDSM scenes
- Characters who have sex the same way they'd have a conversation, or sex scenes that aren't mostly hot. Maybe it's cute and giggly, maybe it's tragic, maybe it's just really awkward.
- Friendly sex, playful sex, getting caught up in doing a bit, sex where they're also laughing and teasing each other
- On the other end of the spectrum, hate sex where they genuinely viciously hate each other, and not just in a "how dare he be so stupid and sexy" way
- Characters who are not solely attracted to their love interest; in general, attraction not being the same as true love
- Using sex as a tool: as a bargaining chip, as a distraction from questions you don't want to answer, as a means of communication, as a way to get things (eg: affection, reassurance) that you feel like you can't want or ask for directly.
- Complicated relationships with desire and wanting things in general
- Slightly unusual hotspots
- Experience gaps
- Masochism (specifically that; I'm not particularly into pain for its own sake but I do think it's hot for characters to be masochists)
- Hair - pulling hair, playing with hair
- One character influencing another's sexual preferences, whether that's deliberate dubcon-y frogboiling or just "I had a teenage crush and imprinted on you and now my kinks show it"
- First times, whether it's their first time with this person or their first time with this kink or their first time at all; mapping out unfamiliar territory with someone else
- Touch starvation
- Obviously good things that happen to me don't last and I have to be prepared for this to end
- Well if you think about it that was on me, I deserved that for getting complacent and thinking that good things might ever happen to me
- How dare I be sad about this when it's my fault / how dare I be angry about this when I deserve it
- Characters berating themselves for feelings they don't think they've earned in general
Prompts:
Freeforms:
Amnesia - Character takes refuge with friend they've known long enough to still remember
Rescued from dire straits by old friends character didn't think would want to speak to them again
Aftermath - Character A only feels safe when B is around
Delirious character unintentionally reveals their regard for their comforter
Bedsharing while one of the characters is injured
Character A is delirious and begs B for forgiveness for something B bears no grudge for
Prompts:
- Amnesia extra! What if Xie Lian had stayed with his friends, and Mu Qing and Feng Xin had found themselves face to face with the version of their friend they used to know - the version from before he got calloused over - except he's not a shining idealized prince he's a scared kid who thinks he was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. Who maybe never was a shining idealized prince, and was always a scared kid.
- Coffin rescue! Maybe LQQ has something in his footwork that Feng Xin recognized, or maybe he brought out one too many guoshi-isms that gave Mu Qing flashbacks, but they figured out it's Xie Lian in that coffin and they've gotten him out. The conflict that came up during the canonical fangxin guoshi arc, where Feng Xin has always hated Mu Qing for undermining Xie Lian and wanting him to be worse while Mu Qing has always hated Feng Xin for leaving Xie Lian for moral reasons. And now, not only do they have to deal with both him and the rifts between them this reopens, he's woken up to the two people in the world he least thought would ever want to see him again.
Or something else! Both my prompts here are leaning "take this premise that's usually hualian and make it xl3 instead," but I adore xianle trio and will enjoy the hell out of just about anything you do with them.
Ship likes: Feng Xin having that classic bodyguard resolution where loyalty means following Xie Lian wherever he goes, while Mu Qing doesn’t give a shit about symbolic shows of virtue, he cares about results. Their vastly different ways of showing loyalty; how little they understand each other’s loyalty. The way that whenever pre-HC Xie Lian is in danger the first thing he thinks of is I should find Feng Xin and Mu Qing. The way that the only thing that can get them to put their differences aside is Xie Lian's safety.
Brushing a character's hair as comfort
Character A is delirious and begs B for forgiveness for something B bears no grudge for
Character Mistakenly Believes Loved One(s) Hate Them
Character Mistakenly Thinks They've Lost the Respect/Affection of Those Closest to Them
Comforter helps sick/hurt character hide their illness/injury from other characters
Delirious character unintentionally reveals their regard for their comforter
Emotional hurt from pining for same-gender friend while closeted for good reason
Hurt from class differences
I mean nothing to you and pining for you is asking to be hurt (but I can't stop)
Touch-Starved Character Having Overwhelming Tender Long Foreplay First Time Sex
Prompts:
- Book 2 homoerotic teenage best friendship! I care a lot about Mu Qing and his complicated relationship with the things he wants, especially when it comes to Xie Lian; I think that could be very interesting combined with Xie Lian being known for being perfect and especially with Xie Lian being known for being an avatar of incorruptible sexual purity. Class differences and societal homophobia and propriety and wanting something you shouldn’t want and certainly can’t have, and all of them having to be so so careful with each other. The way that Xie Lian is the only person who will stand up for Mu Qing, including Mu Qing, and Mu Qing being bitter and twisted up about that even as he kind of appreciates it.
- Something with the two of them on fragile ground post-canon, trying to understand each other, still with quite a lot of unresolved baggage.
- Those three days after Xie Lian ascends but before they have a conversation in the array. He didn't have a palace at the time; he would have been sleeping outside. Was Mu Qing waiting to see what Xie Lian would say to him? I cannot imagine it occurring to Xie Lian at all that asking for help was a thing he could do, but Mu Qing doesn't know that; how did he feel about Xie Lian deciding to sleep on the street rather than accept anything from him?
- Fu Yao getting increasingly brave about having a friendship with Xie Lian. Mu Qing can only approach Xie Lian under a false name, because he knows everyone still sees him as Xie Lian's servant, because he thinks Xie Lian hates him - but under a false name, if they're both pretending Mu Qing isn’t Mu Qing, maybe they could set some of that baggage down.
Or something else! I adore these two both / and &; I will love just about anything you choose to do with them.
Ship likes: Mu Qing's hard shell of practicality and the soft underbelly practicality underneath; how he shows love not by following you but by prioritizing you. How little they understand each other; how much they have to work to understand each other. Allo gay Mu Qing whose celibacy is not and has never been effortless, demi Xie Lian who didn’t struggle much with it, and both of them feeling a way and a half about that contrast (applies whether you go for romantic mulian or not). Mu Qing having a complex about having been right when he said that Xie Lian would have to get used to it and stop acting like resource constraints don't apply to him, even as nobody's happy with how that actually shook out. Mu Qing being genuinely self-aware; knowing perfectly well what he wants even as he also knows he can't have it.
Aftermath of Torture - Character trying to hold it together is clearly low-key fraying at the edges
Character A is delirious and begs B for forgiveness for something B bears no grudge for
Character Mistakenly Thinks They've Lost the Respect/Affection of Those Closest to Them
Lingering Trauma From Friend/Lover’s Presumed Death Even After They Turned Out Alive
Loyal character loses object of their devotion; doesn't know what to do with their life now
Loyalty - character protecting their bodyguard
Physically Injured Character Comforting Emotionally Distressed Character
Sick/Hurt Character Falling Asleep As A Sign Of Trust In Comforter
Prompts:
- Book 2 and the arm-breaking incident; Xie Lian trying and failing to use his own status to protect Feng Xin; the aftermath thereof; the incredible dynamic that is "in front of my father the king, you do not kneel, you are my equal."
- Book 4, especially the period where Xie Lian is terrified of Feng Xin leaving and Feng Xin would never consider it, but also the dynamic post-chapter-190 where Xie Lian has so clearly been badly hurt and Feng Xin has no idea how he just knows his friend is different in a way that's terrifying and won't explain why.
- Book 1 and Feng Xin following Xie Lian as Nan Feng, seeing the ways that Xie Lian has changed and hating what must have happened when he wasn't there; both of them separately believing the other probably doesn't want to speak to them again.
- Feng Xin being so specifically Xie Lian's bodyguard and hating how little care book 1 Xie Lian has for himself; I think all the time about Xie Lian getting back from Ghost City and brushing off Feng Xin's concern for his injuries.
- Something about Hongjing - I think constantly about Feng Xin having Hongjing, that he went back and found the sword that Xie Lian loved, the sword that reveals a supreme, the sword that might have made Feng Xin believe him about being haunted by BWX, and that he kept it safe all those years.
Or something else! I adore these two both / and &; I will love just about anything you choose to do with them.
Hatefucking their feelings out and going perhaps a little too hard with it
Miserable sex where we're both thinking about the same absent third party
Proxyfucking while mourning the person they both loved
Rubbing salt in the wound (Figuratively)
Horrible grieving proxyfucking in the era before Xie Lian’s third ascension. I like them bitter, I like them angry, I like them blaming each other, I like them blaming themselves, I like them knowing exactly how to hurt each other with it, and I like them with the metaphorical ghost of Xie Lian between them.
Ship likes: Feng Xin, for whom loyalty means following you everywhere, hating Mu Qing for leaving and for undermining Xie Lian. Mu Qing, for whom loyalty means prioritizing you and being on your team, hating Feng Xin for giving up after the robbery; leaving for moral reasons without intent to come back. Mu Qing who is a paranoid bastard about what the heavens think of him. Feng Xin who has always, always been the fastest to believe the worst of Mu Qing. One or both of them having been in love with Xie Lian this whole time; the ways they’re still tied to him, both in other people’s eyes and in their own.
Feel free to have an unhappy ending.
DNW:
General: pregnancy, risk thereof, babies or children | noncanonical religion | therapy or psychiatry | gore or torture | chatfic | pure fluff | crack | racism including fantasy racism | real-world politics | age regression to childhood (canon-typical amnesia to when XL was a teenager is fine) | genderbends | soulmates | omegaverse, bdsm AU, cakeverse | characters talking about gender, sexuality, abuse, or mental health like they have a tumblr | crossovers, including cameos from other MXTX books | noncanonical major character permadeath
NSFW: rape/noncon between requested characters (sex they feel complicated about or are conflictedly into is fine) | underage <15 | serious bodily harm during sex | scat or piss | titles eg sir or master (dianxia/your highness is fine) | rimming or ass to mouth | tearing or prolapse | breeding kink | humiliation | tickling | weight-related kinks | daddy or mommy kink | vore | bestiality | sexual assault being the good ending, a misunderstanding with nobody involved really at fault, or for the victim's own good | traffic system or safewords other than "stop" | formal BDSM
TGCF: aspec Mu Qing | entirely asexual Xie Lian (demi is fine + encouraged) | Feng Xin and Mu Qing's animosity having been UST, pigtail pulling, or a misunderstanding without real grievances | FXMQ's dislike/distrust of Hua Cheng being silly or unreasonable | unrequested fengqing | junmei | trans headcanons other than transfem Shi Qingxuan | setting depicted as non-homophobic
General Likes
- Subtext!!
- Character studies, relationship studies. Complicated, messy relationships, conflicts that can't be resolved in one conversation.
- Bittersweet endings, hopeful endings, open endings, complicated endings, "and then the rest of canon happened and we know how that went" endings (that last applies whether it makes a sad ending hopeful or a happy ending bleak – I'll be delighted either way).
- Missing scenes and canon compliance
- Snapshots in time, one scene in a larger-scale story; open ambiguous endings where things don't get resolved.
- Characters who aren't meeting for the first time (especially in small-wordcount exchanges!)
- Dramatic irony, fluff with ominous foreshadowing.
- Unreliable narrators; not just ones who lie to the audience on purpose but also ones who are wrong about what's going on outside their vision or in other people's heads, who make guesses and assumptions and whose assumptions aren't always right. Tight POVs that narrate the character's experience rather than the full truth of what's going on.
- Gender; characters with issues and complexes about gender performance. Setting-typical attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and queerness. Closeted characters – not necessarily self-closeted (and if they are self-closeted I'd like it to feel like they have good reason to be and aren't just stupid).
- Complicated relationships with desire, wanting things you know aren't what you're supposed to want; these things being tangled up in one another. Characters who don't know what they want, who don't admit to what they want, who want contradictory things.
- Hermaneutic injustice; characters who don't have a conceptual vocabulary for their experiences and are forced to improvise.
- Relationships that cross the streams, that are four different kinds of thing at once; people who are neither precisely dating nor precisely not; when one person is your mentor and your comrade-in-arms and your lover and your friend; when ‘what are we' is a question without an answer. (Not the same as depiction of QPRs – I don't want it to be Representation(TM).)
- Intense homoerotic best friendships
- The personal and the political being one and the same; people in situations where their personal relationships have much wider implications; image and how you're viewed and having your personal life be public. Pedestalization and interaction therewith.
- Poly webs, open relationships. In general, nonmonogamous relationships that are not the thing where you have one relationship that works the way monogamous romances conventionally work but that happens to have three people in it.
- Choices that aren't, like, GOOD per se, but there isn't a clear better choice, it's just bad options all around.
- Proxy relationships and triangulation; when two people have a relationship that's about the conspicuous absence of a third person. Conspicuous absences of a person in general but triangulation and proxy relationships tend to be where that really shines.
NSFW Likes
- Everything is about sex, except for sex; sex is about misattributing quotes to Oscar Wilde. Is sex about power? About safety? About embodiment? About gender? About loyalty? About purity? About lack of purity? About getting to want things? About getting to ask for things? About the conspicuous absence of a third party? About something else entirely?
- Non-penetrative sex; sex that doesn't follow the Standard Sex Action Flowchart
- Characterizing kinks
- Kink that is not responsibly-negotiated healthy BDSM scenes
- Characters who have sex the same way they'd have a conversation, or sex scenes that aren't mostly hot. Maybe it's cute and giggly, maybe it's tragic, maybe it's just really awkward.
- Friendly sex, playful sex, getting caught up in doing a bit, sex where they're also laughing and teasing each other
- On the other end of the spectrum, hate sex where they genuinely viciously hate each other, and not just in a "how dare he be so stupid and sexy" way
- Characters who are not solely attracted to their love interest; in general, attraction not being the same as true love
- Using sex as a tool: as a bargaining chip, as a distraction from questions you don't want to answer, as a means of communication, as a way to get things (eg: affection, reassurance) that you feel like you can't want or ask for directly.
- Complicated relationships with desire and wanting things in general
- Slightly unusual hotspots
- Experience gaps
- Masochism (specifically that; I'm not particularly into pain for its own sake but I do think it's hot for characters to be masochists)
- Hair - pulling hair, playing with hair
- One character influencing another's sexual preferences, whether that's deliberate dubcon-y frogboiling or just "I had a teenage crush and imprinted on you and now my kinks show it"
- First times, whether it's their first time with this person or their first time with this kink or their first time at all; mapping out unfamiliar territory with someone else
- Touch starvation
Hurt/Comfort Likes
- Obviously good things that happen to me don't last and I have to be prepared for this to end
- Well if you think about it that was on me, I deserved that for getting complacent and thinking that good things might ever happen to me
- How dare I be sad about this when it's my fault / how dare I be angry about this when I deserve it
- Characters berating themselves for feelings they don't think they've earned in general
Prompts:
Xianle trio, cherryduo (hurt Xie Lian)
Freeforms:
Amnesia - Character takes refuge with friend they've known long enough to still remember
Rescued from dire straits by old friends character didn't think would want to speak to them again
Aftermath - Character A only feels safe when B is around
Delirious character unintentionally reveals their regard for their comforter
Bedsharing while one of the characters is injured
Character A is delirious and begs B for forgiveness for something B bears no grudge for
Prompts:
- Amnesia extra! What if Xie Lian had stayed with his friends, and Mu Qing and Feng Xin had found themselves face to face with the version of their friend they used to know - the version from before he got calloused over - except he's not a shining idealized prince he's a scared kid who thinks he was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. Who maybe never was a shining idealized prince, and was always a scared kid.
- Coffin rescue! Maybe LQQ has something in his footwork that Feng Xin recognized, or maybe he brought out one too many guoshi-isms that gave Mu Qing flashbacks, but they figured out it's Xie Lian in that coffin and they've gotten him out. The conflict that came up during the canonical fangxin guoshi arc, where Feng Xin has always hated Mu Qing for undermining Xie Lian and wanting him to be worse while Mu Qing has always hated Feng Xin for leaving Xie Lian for moral reasons. And now, not only do they have to deal with both him and the rifts between them this reopens, he's woken up to the two people in the world he least thought would ever want to see him again.
Or something else! Both my prompts here are leaning "take this premise that's usually hualian and make it xl3 instead," but I adore xianle trio and will enjoy the hell out of just about anything you do with them.
Ship likes: Feng Xin having that classic bodyguard resolution where loyalty means following Xie Lian wherever he goes, while Mu Qing doesn’t give a shit about symbolic shows of virtue, he cares about results. Their vastly different ways of showing loyalty; how little they understand each other’s loyalty. The way that whenever pre-HC Xie Lian is in danger the first thing he thinks of is I should find Feng Xin and Mu Qing. The way that the only thing that can get them to put their differences aside is Xie Lian's safety.
Mulian, cherryduo (both hurt, hurt Mu Qing)
Brushing a character's hair as comfort
Character A is delirious and begs B for forgiveness for something B bears no grudge for
Character Mistakenly Believes Loved One(s) Hate Them
Character Mistakenly Thinks They've Lost the Respect/Affection of Those Closest to Them
Comforter helps sick/hurt character hide their illness/injury from other characters
Delirious character unintentionally reveals their regard for their comforter
Emotional hurt from pining for same-gender friend while closeted for good reason
Hurt from class differences
I mean nothing to you and pining for you is asking to be hurt (but I can't stop)
Touch-Starved Character Having Overwhelming Tender Long Foreplay First Time Sex
Prompts:
- Book 2 homoerotic teenage best friendship! I care a lot about Mu Qing and his complicated relationship with the things he wants, especially when it comes to Xie Lian; I think that could be very interesting combined with Xie Lian being known for being perfect and especially with Xie Lian being known for being an avatar of incorruptible sexual purity. Class differences and societal homophobia and propriety and wanting something you shouldn’t want and certainly can’t have, and all of them having to be so so careful with each other. The way that Xie Lian is the only person who will stand up for Mu Qing, including Mu Qing, and Mu Qing being bitter and twisted up about that even as he kind of appreciates it.
- Something with the two of them on fragile ground post-canon, trying to understand each other, still with quite a lot of unresolved baggage.
- Those three days after Xie Lian ascends but before they have a conversation in the array. He didn't have a palace at the time; he would have been sleeping outside. Was Mu Qing waiting to see what Xie Lian would say to him? I cannot imagine it occurring to Xie Lian at all that asking for help was a thing he could do, but Mu Qing doesn't know that; how did he feel about Xie Lian deciding to sleep on the street rather than accept anything from him?
- Fu Yao getting increasingly brave about having a friendship with Xie Lian. Mu Qing can only approach Xie Lian under a false name, because he knows everyone still sees him as Xie Lian's servant, because he thinks Xie Lian hates him - but under a false name, if they're both pretending Mu Qing isn’t Mu Qing, maybe they could set some of that baggage down.
Or something else! I adore these two both / and &; I will love just about anything you choose to do with them.
Ship likes: Mu Qing's hard shell of practicality and the soft underbelly practicality underneath; how he shows love not by following you but by prioritizing you. How little they understand each other; how much they have to work to understand each other. Allo gay Mu Qing whose celibacy is not and has never been effortless, demi Xie Lian who didn’t struggle much with it, and both of them feeling a way and a half about that contrast (applies whether you go for romantic mulian or not). Mu Qing having a complex about having been right when he said that Xie Lian would have to get used to it and stop acting like resource constraints don't apply to him, even as nobody's happy with how that actually shook out. Mu Qing being genuinely self-aware; knowing perfectly well what he wants even as he also knows he can't have it.
Fenglian, hongjingduo (both hurt, hurt Feng Xin, hurt Xie Lian)
Aftermath of Torture - Character trying to hold it together is clearly low-key fraying at the edges
Character A is delirious and begs B for forgiveness for something B bears no grudge for
Character Mistakenly Thinks They've Lost the Respect/Affection of Those Closest to Them
Lingering Trauma From Friend/Lover’s Presumed Death Even After They Turned Out Alive
Loyal character loses object of their devotion; doesn't know what to do with their life now
Loyalty - character protecting their bodyguard
Physically Injured Character Comforting Emotionally Distressed Character
Sick/Hurt Character Falling Asleep As A Sign Of Trust In Comforter
Prompts:
- Book 2 and the arm-breaking incident; Xie Lian trying and failing to use his own status to protect Feng Xin; the aftermath thereof; the incredible dynamic that is "in front of my father the king, you do not kneel, you are my equal."
- Book 4, especially the period where Xie Lian is terrified of Feng Xin leaving and Feng Xin would never consider it, but also the dynamic post-chapter-190 where Xie Lian has so clearly been badly hurt and Feng Xin has no idea how he just knows his friend is different in a way that's terrifying and won't explain why.
- Book 1 and Feng Xin following Xie Lian as Nan Feng, seeing the ways that Xie Lian has changed and hating what must have happened when he wasn't there; both of them separately believing the other probably doesn't want to speak to them again.
- Feng Xin being so specifically Xie Lian's bodyguard and hating how little care book 1 Xie Lian has for himself; I think all the time about Xie Lian getting back from Ghost City and brushing off Feng Xin's concern for his injuries.
- Something about Hongjing - I think constantly about Feng Xin having Hongjing, that he went back and found the sword that Xie Lian loved, the sword that reveals a supreme, the sword that might have made Feng Xin believe him about being haunted by BWX, and that he kept it safe all those years.
Or something else! I adore these two both / and &; I will love just about anything you choose to do with them.
Fengqing (both hurt)
Hatefucking their feelings out and going perhaps a little too hard with it
Miserable sex where we're both thinking about the same absent third party
Proxyfucking while mourning the person they both loved
Rubbing salt in the wound (Figuratively)
Horrible grieving proxyfucking in the era before Xie Lian’s third ascension. I like them bitter, I like them angry, I like them blaming each other, I like them blaming themselves, I like them knowing exactly how to hurt each other with it, and I like them with the metaphorical ghost of Xie Lian between them.
Ship likes: Feng Xin, for whom loyalty means following you everywhere, hating Mu Qing for leaving and for undermining Xie Lian. Mu Qing, for whom loyalty means prioritizing you and being on your team, hating Feng Xin for giving up after the robbery; leaving for moral reasons without intent to come back. Mu Qing who is a paranoid bastard about what the heavens think of him. Feng Xin who has always, always been the fastest to believe the worst of Mu Qing. One or both of them having been in love with Xie Lian this whole time; the ways they’re still tied to him, both in other people’s eyes and in their own.
Feel free to have an unhappy ending.
