schneefink

Nirvana in Fire fans, go read this fic and then come talk to me about it:

Birthright, by ancient_moonshine
15k, LS/JY, AU
Summary: Consort Jing watches and waits, Xuanji plots, and Jingyan struggles under the weight of a legacy.
Why I love it: Holy shit. Like. You know the kind of stories that you read and it makes you look at canon differently and gives you so many emotions that you flail around and the sounds in your head are all jumbled because you're so full of feelings? Yeah. This is a fic like that. (Also the emotions are mostly pain and angst, because this is NiF.)

This is the Hua!Jingyan AU I never knew I wanted and it's so, so good. When I first watched NiF and got to the Hua storyline and its background, where the Hua kingdom allied with the Emperor but he broke his promise and destroyed it and that's why the surviving Hua princess plotted against Da Liang, my reaction was along the lines of "huh – their rage is completely understandable, the Emperor is even more of an evil asshole than I thought." But by that point the heroes of the tale were firmly established – MCS and Jingyan, who had not been involved back then – and so were the villains, Prince Yu supported by Qin Banruo and Xia Jiang (who was allied with Princess Xuanji.) I don't remember if we learned of the background before or after the storyline with Tong Lu and Fourth Sister, who loved her family but also the man she had seduced and who was tortured because of her, and in the end she set him free and betrayed her family, and her people, who she maybe hadn't ever known as anything other than refugees.

And here we have Consort Jing who is a Hua princess and who passed the secret on to her son. Jingyan, who has never seen the Hua kingdom, never known their culture except in secret, but is their prince and has a responsibility…
( Spoilers below the cut )

To sum up, this fic is painful and wonderful and I love it.