Kinda wanna read/write a post-canon Bingqiu fic set years later, where during some routine, silly wife plot, Binghe somehow finds out that the soul attached to his husband’s body is not, in fact, the original soul.
Like any person, his first assumption isn’t that his husband had replaced the original SQQ. It’s that an imposter has replaced his husband.
A skilled imposter. One who knows all of his husband’s little quirks, who slipped under even Binghe’s watchful eye.
Binghe takes care to not indicate that he’s noticed. His blood parasites confirm this is still his husband’s body, and he refuses to scare them into running before he can get the imposter out.
Binghe spends weeks researching and practicing, until he’s finally certain he can tear the imposter’s soul apart without hurting his husband. Praying, desperately, that it’s a powerful possession instead of a replacement. Praying his husband is still alive in there.
Finally, he slips into the imposter’s dreamscape, clinging to threads and forcing his way as close to the soul as possible, for the surface-level dreams show him in SQQ’s body. Inside, he finds a small man, with big eyes and stick-thin arms, features far too similar to his Shizun. A cheap, pathetic mockery of Shen Qingqiu, he makes sure to tell them.
They are weak outside of Shen qingqiu’s powerful body. It is all too easy to restrain them, to rage and revile them for their crimes, to question what they’ve done, to tear them apart, limb from limb-
“How long?,”He’d snarled, furious, claws digging into the pathetic parasite’s left arm, yanking it just far enough for the strain to burn.
“Years,”The imposter says, eyes wide and wet. Crying.
Years. Years with his husband that this imposter has taken, has stolen from them. Nights spent entangled, lazy mornings spent curled into each other’s embrace, soft evenings spent watching the sunset.
Binghe yanks the arm the rest of the way out, relishing in the way the parasite screams. It will know pain for what it’s taken from him, for what it’s taken from his Shizun.
XXXX
At first, Shen Qingqiu, formerly Shen Yuan, didn’t know what was happening. He’d thought of himself as Shen Qingqiu for years now, so waking up in his original body had been confusing and disorienting.
When Binghe appeared as well, he knew immediately it was a nightmare. It couldn’t be anything but that. Binghe, his Binghe as he was now, would never look at him like this, like he was the dirt on the bottom of his shoe, the scum of the earth.
It was rare to have nightmares nowadays. Binghe was always watching his dreams too closely to let something like that slip by. But the last few weeks, he’d been absorbed in his newest little pet project, exhausted and stressed by whatever it was he refused to talk about. Shen Qingqiu didn’t blame him for having one night of sleep without constant vigilance.
“So the imposter shows himself,”Dream-Binghe said, and ah, what an odd thing to dream up! Shen Qingqiu was just as good as the original goods, and he knew it! There was no way at all he had such insecurities, and certainly not any strong enough to appear as dreams! If he’d had such dreams before, that was simply a coincidence, a trick of the mind repeating the scenario it’d already created to avoid making a new one.
But Binghe doesn’t rant and rave at him for lying, doesn’t call out his betrayal. Instead, his eyes hard and cold, his claws tight where they dig into his wrists, he questions him.
Why?
I don’t know, Shen Qingqiu has to answer. I woke up in this body.
Where is he?
I don’t know, he answers again.
How long?
Here, Shen Qingqiu bites down a cry of pain as his left arm his yanked painfully out, a loud pop as it tugs out of his socket. The pain is real, he realizes deliriously. It’s real the way the Punishment Protocol had been. The thought makes ice pool in his chest.
What had he done to deserve a punishment from the System?
The hand tightens, the bones in his wrist creaking ominously at the strength of the hold.
The look in Binghe’s eyes hurts far more, though. Shen Qingqiu doesn’t even notice the tears in his eyes until they’re spilling over, until his voice comes out as a broken warble.
“Years,”He whispers at last, aware he’s hammering the final nail into his coffin.
It’s only as his arm is yanked away, as muscle and sinew tears with a sickening squelch, that it occurs to him. The punishment protocol had worked by sharing his dreamscape with the original Bingge. It hadn’t summoned nightmares out of no where.
This wasn’t Bingge. He’d known it on sight. Had recognized it in the curlier hair, the taller build.
This wasn’t Bingge. This was his husband.
And this wasn’t a dream.
XXX
Binghe watches as the pathetic worm scrambles away from him, gasping and hiccuping through his tears. His remaining arm shakes against the jagged edge of his stump, trying to stem the flow of blood. It won’t do a damn thing. This is a dream world, and that form is just a representation of his soul.
“I’m sorry,”It begs, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Binghe forgive me- “
“Do not call me that,” He hisses. This parasite had squirmed its way in, had settled in and gotten comfortable in its place as his husband, but that spot would only ever belong to his Shizun, his rightful Shizun. Everything else… everything else had been a lie!
“No!,”The imposter gasped. Had Binghe spoken out loud? “No, it wasn’t! I really- I really tried to be honest, I- I-“
It gulped, face pale and wan, tears spilling over its cheeks. Its voice dropped to a whimper.
“I loved you. I thought you loved me too.”
Luo Binghe let out a harsh laugh. So that was the plan? Replace his husband and try and make him grow attached? Try to squirm into his heart, when it was already spoken for?
“I could never love a pathetic fake!,”He snarled. “I’ve been planning your death from the moment I learned!”
The imposter sucked in a sharp breath. They stopped scrambling away, simply sitting before him, shaking and curled into themselves.
It didn’t try to run again as he stepped forward. Not even as he grabbed its leg and tore it from its body. It screamed, and thrashed, but made no effort to pull itself away again.
Instead, the insolent wretch began muttering under his breath, a plea and a prayer in one. Begging for forgiveness, for the dream to end, for Binghe to wake him up. Pathetic. Had the imposter really fallen in love with him over the course of its tenure?
He dug his claws into the stump at its shoulder to stop it. The muttering broke into muffled cries, biting their lip as they struggled to hold them back. A habit he recognized from his husband. Disgusting, he thought, holding to the illusion for pity until the very last second.
“You’re just a cowardly weakling, leeching off of Shen Qingqiu. You fell in love with me? Then know this in your heart.”
Binghe dug his fingers in harder, harder, until his claws scrapped against the shattered bone of the socket and dug in. The parasite’s eyes nearly rolled back into its head as it jerked. Binghe lifted it off the ground by the bone, then held still until the worm caught its breath.
“I could never love the man before me. I would never have even looked at you twice had I known.”
Binghe expands his awareness to the dream world around him. From a greater distance, the soul of the imposter is more like a small flickering flame, a little glow between his hands, than a man.
It takes almost no effort at all, to close his fist around it and smother the flame.
XXX
Binghe wakes up in the morning, ecstatic to finally be done with this journey and desperate for love from his husband who he’s apparently not seen in years.
Shen Qingqiu doesn’t wake up with him.
Shen Qingqiu doesn’t wake up at all.
XXX
Anyway now that I’ve officially written a short version of it I want y’all to know that Shang Qinghua would be the one to tell him, after rushing over when he gets an alert that the account of User 002 was deactivated.
Binghe gets to metaphorically self-destruct, realizing everything he said and did was to his own husband and not an assumed imposter. The world shapes itself to Binghe’s wishes, and he still has access to the holy mausoleum, so he manages to bring back Shen Qingqiu. I debated having him bring back Shen Jiu instead but I love the protagonist of any book I read, and that includes Shen Yuan, so instead he brings back his husband whose heartbroken and runs off, with a new level of instinctive terror to go along with it. Binghe really does try to give him room, but that does neither of them good because Binghe drowns in his guilt and the confirmation of his husband’s fear, and Shen Yuan drowns in his heartbreak and confirmation of his husband’s rejection.
The happy ending comes after a slowburn of binghe groveling and breaking himself down(a la Lost and Found in Limitless Clarity) with a side of both being left with new insecurities to add to the existing ones post-canon.
(And if Binghe now dreams of the delicate flicker of a soul between his hands, now jolts awake to the reminder of how small it was, how easy to smother, well-
-it’s the least he deserves, isn’t it?)
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gently in the cold dark earth
scum villain's self saving system
word count: 2k
canon divergent / no system au; sy transmigrates into an empty npc role; gray lotus binghe loves his shixiong more than life and he's ready to make it everyone's problem
title borrowed from work song by hozier
read on ao3
x
The first thing Luo Binghe does when he escapes the Abyss is return to Cang Qiong Mountain.
With Xin Mo secured to his back, the way could be instant if he so chose—the journey of a thousand miles reduced to a single step—but he unsheathes the elegant jian at his hip instead.
Yong Liang sings sweetly for him, the snow white blade still shining and untainted even after years of helping Luo Binghe carve his way through hell. It has never once failed him, soulbound to the one person still on this earth who has never failed him.
“Take it,” his shixiong insisted, low and urgent. The Abyss was behind them, an even deadlier threat was ahead, and Without A Cure clogging his meridians made Luo Binghe the best choice to wield the only unshattered spirit sword they had between them. “Binghe, take it.”
He pressed until Luo Binghe’s grip curled tight around the hilt, not hesitating to put his soul in Luo Binghe’s hands even with the rosy glow of an unsealed demon mark shining on his face.
Luo Binghe flies at a pace best described as dangerously reckless, hardly smelling the fragrant spring air or feeling the sun on his face. His robes are a disgrace, his hair a tangled, matted mess, and it occurs to him that he could stop somewhere and clean himself up, make himself presentable, but it’s a brief, fleeting thought.
Shen Yuan would be furious to find out that Luo Binghe wasted even a single second returning to his side.
——
He passes through the ancient wards effortlessly, feeling them fall away from him like water. It’s a simple thing to tamp down on his demonic qi, to disguise the parts of him that those so-called righteous cultivators would scorn. He ghosts through the familiar grounds as eagerly as a starving animal bolting down a fresh game trail, but one by one, all of their familiar haunts come up empty, without even a lingering trace of Shen Yuan’s spiritual energy left behind.
The head disciple’s room is dusted and undisturbed, as if its occupant might walk through the door at any moment, but the lack of clutter and the empty book shelf makes it very clear to Luo Binghe what the truth must be.
If Shen Yuan returned to the peak after the Conference, he didn’t stay.
All at once, images crowd the front of his mind—his shixiong grieving, pulling away, turning his back on those responsible for his heartache.
Yue Qingyuan, always only a step behind wherever his precious Xiu Ya sword went, promised that no one wanted to hurt them. They only wanted to help.
He looked so solemn and righteous that Shen Yuan reluctantly allowed himself to be convinced. Luo Binghe, who had gone to the man for help after a bloody whipping when he was a child, only to be given a walnut cake and turned away at the door, knew better.
He wasn’t surprised when Shen Yuan was wrenched away from him, and shizun sent him staggering off the cliff with a spiritual dagger buried to the hilt in his chest, all of it happening within a matter of seconds—but it still hurt.
Shen Yuan’s scream followed him all the way down.
I’m alive, Luo Binghe thinks, with no one there to tell it to. I came back to you. Let me come back to you.
——
Including time spent in the abyss, it’s three years before they meet again.
Luo Binghe’s revenge is his second priority at best, but he is nothing if not efficient and knows how to kill two birds with the same stone. Huan Hua affords him ample resources and opportunities to scour the world for his missing shixiong while playing the role of earnest and diligent new disciple. He snatches up each mission that comes along as though eager to prove his worth to the sect that so graciously took him in, but he takes every excuse to wander, to search, to make conversation with vendors and innkeepers and passing strangers.
Have you seen my heart? It lives outside of me in the form of a beautiful young man and tends to wander. Very contrary, likes to fuss over people, could argue the stripes off a lushu just for fun. You’d know it if you met it. You’d never forget.
The days blur together, meaningless and gray, but he doesn’t stop looking. Shen Yuan still exists somewhere in this world, because otherwise Luo Binghe wouldn’t. It’s the only thing that makes sense. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
And then, finally—an afternoon in Jinlan City, when Luo Binghe arrives in a throng of incompetent gold-clad Huan Hua disciples, to investigate a plague of all things—
He’s there.
In dark, neutral colors and plain clothes, a traveling cloak with its hood resting down around his shoulders, as if his beauty could possibly be lessened by cheap, shapeless fabrics rather than effortlessly enhanced. His hair falls from its half-tail in glorious waves—he never did have the patience for anything elaborate, only wearing braids when one of his sticky shidimei cajoled and convinced him. Traveling alone, who could he possibly have to roll his eyes at and complain about and sit patiently still for?
A pale green ribbon is all that decorates his hair. Luo Binghe recognizes it instantly.
“You should spend your allowance on yourself, Binghe,” Shen Yuan scolded him, not for the first time and certainly not for the last.
“But I did,” Luo Binghe protested, widening his eyes and clasping his hands earnestly, the way he knew worked best. “I wanted it! And now that I have it, I want to give it to you.”
Shen Yuan was too clever by half to be truly fooled by the innocent act, but he always folded like paper anyway. He spoiled all of his shidimei but Luo Binghe most of all. Anyone on Qing Jing Peak would be hard-pressed to think of a single example of Shen Yuan telling Luo Binghe ‘no.’
Sure enough, after a second spent visibly wrestling with himself, he blurted, “Oh, fine! Hand it over.”
He wore it every day since. He’s wearing it now. The wind catches the ends of it, sending it streaming behind him like the tails of a paradise flycatcher. Lovely.
For a brief moment, Luo Binghe is frozen where he stands, finally faced with the very thing that he’s been missing for years, that he’s been living a miserable half-life without.
And then he remembers himself and lurches forward. His voice is a tangle in his throat but he manages to choke out, “Shixiong!”
A strike of lightning couldn’t have jolted Shen Yuan into more perfect stillness. He stops mid-step, every inch of him as good as carved from precious jade. He doesn’t turn his head, and the sliver of his face visible from where Luo Binghe stands is very pale.
Luo Binghe wonders suddenly if this has happened to him before—if Shen Yuan has heard a voice on the road or in the market that was almost familiar, that was almost the one he was hoping for, only to be disappointed when he turned to follow it and found a stranger.
Luo Binghe shortens the distance between them with a few anxious steps and tries again.
“Shixiong.”
The older boy whirls around abruptly, as if to get it over with. He’s bracing himself, but Luo Binghe barely has a second to absorb Shen Yuan’s painful-looking anticipation before it bleeds out of his face in favor of something else entirely.
He looks like the earth has fallen out from beneath his feet, like he hardly dares to believe his eyes. Zheng Yang gleams golden at Shen Yuan’s hip, reforged and whole again.
“Binghe?”
“It’s me,” Luo Binghe says softly.
There’s a tableau he’s afraid to break, as if they’re in a delicate dreamscape and a move too sudden or loud might dissolve it. He wants to say I’ve missed you the way lungs miss air, immediately and needfully, I haven’t breathed at all since we’ve been apart. He wants to say you’re my light in the dark, I can only stand in front of you now because I love you too much to ever truly leave you.
Instead, he tells his dearest friend, “This one made you wait. But your Binghe is here.”
Shen Yuan sprints the rest of the way to meet him, almost before he’s even finished talking, and they collide in a solid embrace that knocks the air from them both.
His arms wind around Luo Binghe’s waist like steel bands, fingers digging into the back of his robes, precious face pressed into the crook of his neck and shoulder. Luo Binghe doesn’t hesitate to gather him up close, holding him as tightly and securely as he knows how, burying his nose in his shixiong’s hair and breathing in the familiar, beloved smell of him.
Shen Yuan is a few inches shorter than he remembers. All the better to tuck him beneath Luo Binghe’s chin, to cover and surround him so completely that not even the heavens above can get a decent eyeful.
He wants to grab and bite and pin Shen Yuan beneath him and never let go. His jaw aches with wanting it.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Luo Binghe says, eyes wet. “I went home first.” Unsaid goes the obvious but you weren’t there.
“How could I stay?” Shen Yuan bites out, managing to sound all at once strangled and bewildered and—charmingly—offended. He shakes his head without lifting it, an aggressive nuzzle against Binghe’s shoulder. “After what they did to you, I’d rather die than represent their stupid sect another minute.”
“Step away from it, Shen Yuan,” shizun said coldly. “I’ll put that beast back where it belongs.”
“No,” shixiong said in a voice that was smaller than usual, one that shook. He was frightened, clearly overwhelmed, but he didn’t budge from where he was plastered in front of Luo Binghe like a breathing shield.
“Now.”
“No, shizun.”
“Shizhi,” Yue Qingyuan said gently, offering his hand. “Come here. It will be alright.”
Shen Yuan said, “No. You can’t hurt Binghe. He’s not bad just because of who his parents are. He’s as good as he was yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. He’s hardworking and loyal and a sweetheart to anybody who gives him half a chance. He’s so good.”
Liu Qingge was behind the sect leader, sword drawn. Shen Qingqiu was quickly losing what little patience he had, face twisted into a sneer, dark eyes stabbing hatefully at Luo Binghe from over his head disciple’s shoulder. There were more figures rapidly drawing closer, the other peak lords following the flare of Yue Qingyuan’s qi. The standoff was becoming more and more untenable, and Shen Yuan was too smart not to see that, shrinking back against Luo Binghe as much as he could without crowding him closer to the edge.
“You can’t hurt him,” he said again, the closest Luo Binghe had ever heard him come to tears, “he’s my shidi.”
Luo Binghe is unsurprised by his shixiong’s loyalty, because it’s already been proven to him over and over. It’s unremarkable at this point, which is an absolutely remarkable thing in itself. It makes him feel warm with gratitude and affection and ownership.
Shen Yuan is clever and quick on his feet and always three steps ahead, more knowledgeable about flora and fauna than anyone else Binghe has ever known combined, and probably a force to be reckoned with as a rogue cultivator, where the only rules of conduct he has to adhere to are his own.
But Luo Binghe hates to think of him on the road alone, without the little martial siblings who follow him like ducklings, without his Binghe there to make sure he remembers to eat all his meals and comb out his hair before bed. He’s a creature of comfort, made for airy rooms with too many cushions and an abundance of sweets and books to read.
Luo Binghe has fantasized more than once about building a home for Shen Yuan to lounge prettily in. It was, in fact, his favorite flavor of daydream since he was about thirteen.
If Shen Yuan wants to rogue cultivate, then that’s what they’ll do. But Luo Binghe thinks, if he constructs a palace that’s as comfortable as it is grand, and fills it with trashy romance novels and obscure beasts and his own hand-made meals, he can convince his friend to live in it with him.
Shen Yuan needs to be taken care of. Luo Binghe needs to be the one taking care of him. They’re together now and they’ll never be apart again and those needs can both be met.
That possessive, proprietary feeling coils dark and deep inside him, undulating lazily like a serpent who’s fed enough for days, reminding him over and over what he already knows:
Mine.
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