This was a remix fic, based on a character study of Nie Huaisang and his relationship with Jin Guangyao, after Nie Mingjue's death and while Huaisang is plotting his revenge—a beautiful fic about ugly things. I knew I wanted to remix this piece, but it took me ages to find a way to do it (it was my first time writing a remix!). In the end, "the same story, but IN SPACE" grabbed my attention, based on two things from Moondal's fic that stuck with me:
- "The truth, the damning truth: you care more about destroying Jin Guangyao than letting your brother rest in peace." Would Nie Mingjue think that was so damning? Wouldn't he want to be revenged in full? I couldn't make up my mind about it, so I thought we'd all go along to ask him.
- The image of Huaisang destroying a white sheet of paper with black ink, as he overcomes his fear of Jin Guangyao. It was so evocative that I knew I had to incorporate it into my work somehow, and my mind jumped to the contrast between a physical sheet of paper that can be simply destroyed, and a digital image that is copied, cached and backed up to the point where you can never root it out completely. What might that image be of?
I wrote the initial sections very quickly: Huaisang learning about da-ge's backups; Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao coming to Qinghe to help him, but so enchanted by each other that it was cold comfort; and the flashback to the Phoenix Mountain night-hunt equivalent. Just by free-associating on those points, it felt like I'd spun a good number of threads of worldbuilding—some to be woven back in to later parts of the work, and some that could stretch out and imply a greater universe. Then life got in the way for a few weeks and I started worrying that there simply wasn't any more of this fic I could pull out of myself (and that I'd bitten off more than I could chew by equating Nie qi deviations with a degenerative illness, one that I'd made up but still ought to feel realistic).
It was in a museum café on holiday that I got back to writing it, in utterly uncharacteristic longhand on a hotel notepad. I scribbled down the whole first encounter between Huaisang and one of Mingjue's backups there, and suddenly saw how the whole rest of the fic would work thematically. It was also satisfying to realise that the backup visits were a great way to undermine Huaisang's (anyone's) natural tendency to romanticise their past relationship! The Nie bros weren't on good terms by the time Mingjue died; Mingjue was sick and might well have had good intentions in his heart, but the fan-burning scene in MDZS is straight-up abusive. That's both part of their tragedy and important for me to see acknowledged, given [~handwave~] my own past experiences.
I also wanted to capture that unmooring gap between the old self you get pulled back into being, when you go home after a long while away, and the realisation that you can't ever be that person again. Mingjue's backup laughing at the very idea of his stubborn didi's personality and values changing is one of the biggest knives in this fic, for me.
Nie Zonghui is in this fic because I needed a name for Lan Xichen to mention in the first scene, and he was an obvious choice. Then he was useful for (hopefully) avoiding info-dumping by moving it into conversation with Huaisang, and then I realised that since the Nie Clan illness is hereditary, he probably had it too... and then I spent my entire time writing this fic trying not to fridge him. Gosh, I love Nie Zonghui. I think his very different approach to handling the disease from Nie Mingjue's and Nie baba's is pretty illustrative of his personality and different position in the clan. One of the big themes of the fic is how much of your old self you can lose over the course of such a corrosive, years-long deception, and I tried to show that a bit with Zonghui as well as with da-ge's backups. Zonghui is devoted to the Nie Clan, to the point of sacrificing his own health and life, and he sees supporting Huaisang's revenge as a worthy part of that devotion. But would he still, if he knew everything Huaisang had been doing for it?
It was SO MUCH FUN coming up with all the technology and clan relations in this fic. I worked with a combination of repeatedly asking, "but what would that actually be like for the person experiencing it?" about the abstract ideas I had, and trying to gesture to bigger things happening outside of the frame of these 7500 words. What is 'rare-earth synthesis'? How do they have suanmeitang in the asteroid belt? What happened to Yunmeng in the war? There are totally definitely answers to these questions out there somewhere, don't worry about it.
(I hope this worked!)
Conversely, I worried that building a lifelike android of da-ge was nowhere near technologically advanced enough to make sense as Huaisang and Zonghui's revenge project, but it fit so well thematically that I couldn't think of anything to replace it with. Let's say that slotting a personality backup into a positronic brain is a real technological challenge, yeah?
Some things I didn't manage to include explicitly, though they may have been implied:
- Nie baba's final shuttle crash, six months before his death, was clearly caused by the Wen and kicked off his final deterioration.
- Huaisang's relationship with Mo Xuanyu is illicit, calculated from the first, and veering in an ever-less-deniably sexual direction... but he never turns on the tactile settings for their calls, just as he doesn't with da-ge's backups. There are some things he just can't bring himself to do. (This does not make a single bit of difference in how moral his conduct here is, and he knows that.)
- When Huaisang is 'drunk' at all those Jin functions, he's also taken a cocktail of other substances to keep him sober-ish and functioning. This is why calculating the effects of the sobering soup is such a pain in the arse.
- There is a whole tragic romance going on behind the scenes for xiyao here. Sorry, Xichen.
- Qin Su is truly a good person, as much as anyone can be in her position.
- What's Wei Wuxian doing in this universe? I, er, didn't manage to figure that out, sorry. I considered that the backups might be one of his innovations, but the timing didn't work out, so they're not.
- Nie Qiming's name, 启明, is the Classical Chinese name for the planet Venus in the sky before dawn.