silver-steel and snow (смешанная)

That memory—the memory of his father’s body cooling in his arms, and Huaisang’s heartbroken wails when he finally returned with a physician to see the two of them lying there covered in blood—haunted his dreams every night after that, even when Wen Chao came to take Huaisang to Qishan, and when Zonghui sent word that the Cloud Recesses was burned and Lan Xichen was missing, and even when he brought back twenty-seven of his most trusted men from the Nightless City, transformed into white-eyed, snarling puppets beyond all hope of saving.
And then he dragged himself out of his third qi deviation on the day before his twenty-eighth birthday, and opened his eyes to find his saber buried in Lan Xichen’s chest.
The memory Nie Mingjue called his worst was never the same, after that.
 
(In which Nie Mingjue loves Lan Xichen, and loves until it kills him.)