<blockquote>Nie Huaisang doesn’t expect Lan Xichen to consider him still worth liking after everything he’s done.
(He also doesn't want to admit to himself how much he'd love to be proven wrong.)
Nie Huaisang had painted, in the dark of night with only the light of a dozen candles and a luminescent pearl, a vast fire-scourged plain. In the midst, offset and growing out of a rocky shelter, he’d added a single shoot of green bamboo, tall and straight despite everything. Balancing the bamboo on the other side of the scroll were two lines of poetry: The grass is burnt but not destroyed by the prairie fires / When spring winds blow they bring it back to life.
Rolled up in the painting’s scroll was a note that Nie Huaisang wrote right before committing to sending it.
The note, which was even more terrifyingly honest than the painting, read: I will do my best to become worthy once more of being considered your friend.</blockquote>
➤ more kind than many fics about the two of them! and I love the knifey fics but this vision of their future is good too