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starry-bi-sky · 6 months ago

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no context snippet for a "SY is SJ" au i thought of at 1am last night, because i am a firm believer of the "amnesia doesnt erase your trauma it just erases the context of it" agenda.

(although in SY's case he DID kinda forget that trauma.. at first. it's coming back to him. the system gave him a grace period. there that's my excuse)

crossposted on ao3 too in case anyone wants to read it there instead

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Shen Qingqiu is painting again.

He's found himself doing that a lot lately, now that he's out of seclusion and Binghe is in the bamboo house, squirreled away into the side room where the Head Disciple should be. Painting is, of course, a logical course of action for a peak lord to do! Especially one such as himself, the Peak Lord of Qing Jing, which was basically the peak of the creative arts.

But— well, he wasn't expecting to find himself liking it so much. Or doing it so often. Painting in the style of the time period is a lot easier to learn than he expected, and it gets him B-points for in-character actions! Who knew the Original Goods was such an artist of the time? He had such an evocative way with his brush, he should know — he's found some of his works!

(They were tucked away like a dirty secret in the back of his closet, locked away in a qiankun chest that Shen Qingqiu found the key to far too easily. He’ll admit to being a little disappointed in the Original Goods’ predictability — a false bottom in the vanity, really? Anyone could find that!)

This brought him to his next issue; he was getting headaches, and he thinks, perhaps, just a little, that the Original Goods' thoughts and feelings were bleeding into him. Just a tad! And he was certain it was the Original Goods too, because— because, well…

He keeps flinching. You know how you’re walking down a public but otherwise empty hallway, and turn the corner and nearly run right into someone, and your heart jumps three spaces to the left and back? Subconsciously you knew there was a chance you were going to see someone, but their sudden appearance still startles you?

Yeah, that. He keeps experiencing it with Binghe. He about jumps right out of his skin whenever Binghe emerges from the side room or the kitchen, even though he knows his disciple is there! And he knows it’s not a habit from his old world, because Shen Qingqiu lived with three other siblings in the house, and always knew to expect someone to be right around the corner.

And he knows, especially so, that it’s not a habit from his old world, because along with the mini heart attacks that come with Binghe’s presence in the bamboo house, is the discomfort. A distinct yet indistinguishably vague feeling of unease that comes with sharing a living space with someone. The kind that makes his hackles rise like a particularly disgruntled and cornered street cat.

Again, he grew up with three siblings! That could not be coming from him. It has to be an Original Goods feeling slipping in, and it was really getting in the way of things! How was he supposed to give Binghe a sense of belonging and a better upbringing if his presence in the bamboo house made him feel horribly exposed?

Some days, he just can't escape the gnawing feeling of dread in his chest when he returns to the bamboo house at the end of the day, knowing full well that it will soon be accompanied by someone else. Even if that someone was Binghe.

That feeling of a lack of privacy makes his skin crawl and his shoulders lock up to his ears with every step. It was inconvenient; annoying.

It was utterly unscientific, it was his house! And it was only Binghe, who, currently, is a harmless little white sheep! There was no darkened protagonist here, come to tear his limbs off. There was nothing to be so… tense about.

It does nothing to stop the little swooping his heart does when he opens the door to, sometimes, Binghe already there, kneeling at the table like a dutiful disciple as always.

Oh, and that's not starting on his steadily increasing dislike of physical touch. It had to be something to do with the ludicrous amount of layers he wears and the modesty standards of the time period — and, also, of course, the Original Goods' own aversion to it.

He knows he's never felt so uncomfortable in another human being's presence before! Sure, he wasn’t the most social of people in his old world, but he still remembers being able to leave the house and be among the masses with relative ease. Here, though, was an entirely different story. His personal space bubble seemingly doubled, no, tripled in size, and it was irking him quite unhandily.

The worst offenders were the Peak Lord meetings, it had to be. Navigating through the sea of disciples, cultivators, and visitors on Qiong Ding was a nightmare enough on its own — lessened only by the fact that said mountain occupants parted like the red sea when they saw him coming — but sitting in a secluded room with eleven other people, majority of whom still disliked him despite his turnaround? Awful.

The proximity between him and his martial siblings isn’t even that bad, either. He has plenty of elbow room and in fact, would need to make an effort to reach out and physically touch anyone on either side of him. But, still!! Too close!!

Shen Qingqiu made the conscious decision to sit as close to the door as his own comfort would allow, but not so close that he couldn’t see it — he tried that once. He doesn’t want to speak of the incident. The stress alone will give him heart palpitations.

(He, pointedly, doesn’t want to think about the time he arrived at a Peak Lord meeting and found the Long Ning Shou Peak Lord sitting in His Chair either. Shen Qingqiu has never been particularly territorial about ‘assigned seating’ before, up until that moment. While he’s proud to say that he didn’t do anything to Chen Qingxuan for sitting in his spot, he’s mortified by how childishly petulant he felt about it for the rest of the meeting. He’s pretty sure everyone could sense his sour mood.)

Why, just a few days ago he nearly bit a poor disciple's head off during martial lessons when they accidentally tumbled into him after a series of spectacularly fumbling footing. The child had been so horrified and apologetic that Shen Qingqiu remembered to reel himself back in time and merely scold them, rather than tear their skin right off with a tongue lashing.

But— enough about such stressful things! Shen Qingqiu was painting, and when he was painting, Binghe knew not to bother him, and to not let anyone do so either. Lest they all be dealt with a moderately grumpy Shizun.

(His emotions may be as volatile as a hormonal boy lately, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t know how to keep them in check!! He still had a reputation to keep.)

His studio offered him a sense of privacy and solitary that not even his bedroom allowed him — for Binghe could knock on his bedroom door to alert him for whatever needed his attention, and while he could do the same to the studio, the fact remained; a Shizun interrupted during his precious studio time, did not, a happy Shizun make.

There were silencing talismans painted into the walls — courtesy of the Original Goods — that Shen Qingqiu really quite appreciated. It allowed him the peace of mind to do things his face could not allow him outside of it— and that is, he got to muse aloud to himself, and hum songs from his old world that he couldn't anywhere else. Some songs that he still knew the lyrics to, he was happy to half-sing under his breath.

It had to be a form of meditation, it had to be! With how much peace and grounding it brought him, it couldn't be anything but a form of meditation.

Currently, he was just letting instincts lead his brush strokes while he hummed a melody from some myth musical he stumbled across a few weeks before he died. The songs had been so catchy that he had most of them all but memorized! He's tried repeating the instrumentals on his guqin and ruan with varying degrees of success.

Painting helped kill his migraines the most. As it stands, he’s had a killer one hammering at his skull since this morning. Bad enough to the point that he nearly snapped at poor Binghe during breakfast, and the child could all but sense the sour mood radiating off his master, and in turn had been silent and subdued until he left.

Aish, that child… Shen Qingqiu hasn't quite quelled the guilt in him. Something about that awful subservience rankled him in a way he couldn’t explain, making him want to recoil and snap out at the same time. Something dark and deep in him had reared its head, wanting to reach over and shake Binghe for it.

He'd been horrified by his own thoughts, and then locked himself in his studio for the rest of the day.

Even in death — or wherever the Original Goods was — he was still making things difficult! It was only natural that Binghe would go quiet and careful at the sight of Shen Qingqiu’s bad mood, he used to beat the boy at whim for imagined slights! He’ll have to reassure Binghe better that he wasn’t going to hurt him.

Bah. He was supposed to be painting, not thinking about things that made his head pound worse or his mood dampen more! He didn't want to think about Luo Binghe right now — a surprise, even for him! — he wants to focus on the scent of ground ink and paints, and his own soft humming.

He blinks, once, twice, and focuses on the painting. It happens, like now, that he would zone out and paint entire landscapes, people, whatever, without realizing. It was always a guessing game of what he's made when he lets his mind wander. Some of things he painted were merely of Qing Jing, other times—

— a burning red fire, encased on canvas, hangs off his eyelashes. And following it, the ensuing qi deviation he'd shoved off. —

Other times aren't worth mentioning.

He's painted a boy this time, a young one, with dark skin and even darker hair, and a smile that isn't quite right. There's a beauty mark right above the corner of his lip, artfully placed, as if it had been hand-placed by an expert craftsman. The boy's upper face remains unpainted, as if he’d been born without eyes. Yet, even without them, the boy looks completely serene and non-judgemental. Mn, no, perhaps more accurately he looks passive? Peaceful?

Shen Qingqiu can feel his gaze, missing as it is, burning into him. He frowns immediately. His headache no less lessened, in fact— he thinks it's gotten worse. There’s a horrid familiarity about the boy in the painting, like a word poised on the tip of his tongue that he can’t quite place. "Don't look at me like that." He says aloud, bah, he hadn't meant to! But it’s not like there’s anyone to hear him. "Don't you know who I am?"

En, no, it’s placating. That’s what it is. The boy is placating him. How unscientific! Unneeded; ridiculous. Why would he paint a boy trying to placate him? He was a scum villain, and a grown man!

The painting says nothing, as it ought to, it was only wet ink and dry parchment. Shen Qingqiu's ears burn anyways, and his eyes drop down to the smile on the boy's face.

He finds that he deeply detests that smile on his face, it disgusts him.

It disgusts him in the way only sheer incompetence can, a burn of irritation that bubbles up every time he saw an objectively wrong take in the PIDW comment section. As if he can't believe someone would look at him, a scum villain such as himself, and still be able to smile like that.

More than that, it's not right. That smile. It's— there's something wrong with it. Which can't be right, Shen Qingqiu hardly makes a mistake when he makes these trance-made paintings. But there is, he’s looking at it right here. He hates it. That awful smile. It's so— so… insincere. If you're going to smile at him, at least mean it, eh? Doesn't he deserve that much?

Long, slender fingers dip into the small wooden paint bowl beside him and lift back up, dripping wet ink onto the side table, and then onto the floor, across the last two layers of his robes that he always strips down to in here.

He reaches for the canvas to— to what? Smear that stupid smile off that boy's face? Mould it into his own image, back into place like the way it should be, paintbrush be damned? That wretched child, smiling at him like that. That smile is too straight, too perfect. It's mocking him.

Where is the tilt? The slant in it? That boy always smiled with an off-kilter turn of his lips, crooked, that made him real the same way blood in the mouth did, and now he's not, and it's wrong. He will wipe that smile off the boy's face himself if he must, if only to get him to wear anything else—

There is a knock on the door, gentle, hesitant. Only his cultivator hearing is what allows him to pick up on it. Shen Qingqiu's head pounds terribly at the sound. It makes a screeching sound go off in the back of his skull, like an abrupt kick to the teeth. His jaw clacks together on pure adrenaline as he regains the sense to not snarl wordlessly.

Didn't he say not to interrupt—?

His ink-stained fingers snap back, a gunshot recoil that sends splatters of ink flying and splatting coldly against his face. His nails dig painfully into the soft flesh of his palm, and Shen Qingqiu gathers himself back into his lofty cultivator persona with a single breath and a ramrod straightening of his spine. His ears ring horribly. "What." He calls, perhaps a little too coldly.

"Shizun?" Binghe says softly, and the sound of that child's voice is like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head. Recognition hits him, and the guilt crawls back in at his earlier irritation. "Forgive this one for interrupting, but Yue-shibo is here."

Shen Qingqiu is still staring at his painting, but the boy’s smile burns behind his eyelids like a fire. It takes half a beat for him to respond; "…Alright," he says, and stands up, "prepare some tea, Binghe. And use the ginger root this master owns, he has a terrible headache."

He walks around the stool, fingers still dripping black, and plucks his robes up from the chair he draped them over. His head still hurts, and there’s a peculiar ache in his heart. He takes his time putting his layers back on, vindictively tying each button and knot leisurely.

Surely Yue Qingyuan has the patience to wait for this one after he so rudely arrived unannounced, hm?

#svsss #svsss au #shen yuan and shen jiu are the same person #aa yes my favorite au. the obscure niche one hardly anyone really cares about #scum villian self saving system #scum villain au #shen yuan #shen qingqiu #yue qingyuan #dw SQQ more of your trauma will start coming through but at least you're not beating children!#this ficlet is brought to you by 'the challenge' from epic's ithaca saga + 'when the chips are down' from hadestown #is this ooc for shen yuan? probably but he's also not just shen yuan. this was also written on discord when i wasnt in full writer mode #if anyone is curious SQQ was humming penelope's 'waiting waiting' melody #not pictured: sqq giving yqy the iciest cold shoulder since he first 'transmigrated' and yqy secretly delighting in it and wallowing in it #also not pictured: sqq staring at yqy's mouth for a solid ten minutes and frowning because its wrong and awful and he hates it. actually #do i think this is kinda garbage writing on my end? yeah. am i still posting it? ...yeah #this wasnt technically going to leave my dms however. ✨validation✨ i went and edited it before posting though

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more-than-a-princess · 4 months ago

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Continued from here for @fallesto!

The peace of the kingdom, but at whose expense? Sonia rather wished the chatter, laughter, and cheers had continued: the soldiers had been welcomed home with beer and wine, and the added feast was, she'd hoped, enough to distract them from their exhaustion: physical, from the battle they'd just endured. Emotional, from the prevailing threat of the Witch Cult that hovered over Novoselic like a stubborn cloud. It was enough that for the first time in her nation's history, they'd needed to consult with outsiders who knew of magic and of witches: two things Novoselic was devoid of. It had always been that way and, if her family had it their way, always would.

Which brought her to her point as she set her helmet down on one of the tables, jostling the set plate and cutlery askew. Her crossbow followed suit as she gave Reinhard van Astrea a frown. She'd use his title aloud but in her mind, he hadn't earned it. Not when he was so reluctant to work as a team as opposed to a solitary knight. "And you think your sacrifice will uphold peace here in Novoselic?" She countered, unbuckling the gauntlets of her armor and removing her leather gloves. Most of the room, barring the serving staff that dashed to and from the kitchens, was dressed similarly, but Sonia was distinctive for two reasons: One, she was a woman and two, she was the Princess of Novoselic, two types of people no one expected nor wanted to don armor, take up weapons, and be the plan B of winning a battle against witches. She couldn't lead the Novosonian soldiers into battle so publicly, but then again, no one had expected the princess to keep to the shadows, stepping in only when needed either.

"Understand, Sir Reinhard," Sonia curled and flexed her fingers, pleased to be free of their confinements before rounding on him, the armor clanking with her movements, to cross her arms over her chest the best she could in spite of the shoulderplates and breastplate she wore. "That if you lost your life at the expense of defending my country? It would launch Novoselic into a war with your homeland that I doubt would benefit either of our nations. Especially with the Witch Cult still determined to bring Novoselic to its knees. Though it makes little logical sense: there is no magic here, thus why we asked for aid. Yours, and your cohorts'."

Goodness, was he amused by all of this? Was he smiling at the prospect of relying on someone else, working with others, as if it was a quaint fluke? "The greater good is our countries working together to stop the Witch Cult from infiltrating every nation on the planet and not insisting that a single person is responsible for that task. We do not need a hero or a martyr: we need a united front if we are ever going to put a stop to this deranged appetite for power and greed."

The last words spoken with disgust, Sonia's brows furrowing as she sat at the end of a long bench with no interest in the food or drink before her as she continued to divest herself of the other trinkets she'd carried on her: several vials of poison, a handful of explosives, and a dagger attached to a belt, careful to set them well away from the feast. Despite her years of mandatory military training, she'd never quite taken to swords. She much preferred things that shot, things that exploded, things that no one suspected a beautiful princess might slip into their drinks. It had been the latter that had freed Reinhard: even witches were susceptible to her smile, it seemed.

"Your Royal Highness!"

A smile she needed to utilize again, this time on her own servants: three maids and her father's personal butler had come dashing through the center of the Great Hall, horror written all over their faces: Princess Sonia of Novoselic, sweaty and still in her armor, one of the many looped braids she'd worn to keep her long hair hidden beneath her helmet succumbing to gravity as the pin used to secure it followed.

Hardly presentable for a feast.

"Please, Your Highness, we must leave the Great Hall immediately with you looking like this!" The man urged, two of the maids already pulling Sonia back up to her feet. "Your parents insist you must be cleaned up if you are to face the soldiers!"

"And if today I am one of them?" Sonia asked with a quizzical brow. "I will not have our citizens believe their royal family will not fight with and for them, sending my father is too risky, and my cousins are not yet ready. Why train your princess in modern warfare and military strategy if I am not to utilize it? Any prince would."

The word that made the butler flinch as she stared the man down. If she was a man, there would be no issue at hand. But it had been centuries since Novoselic had a female monarch, and with Princess Sonia unmarried and with little interest to change that in the near future, she had the expectation of both the heir to the throne and a woman in the aristocracy: lead a country and embody nothing that made her unsuitable for marriage and motherhood.

Blowing up one of the witches' safehouses upon their escape likely qualified for the 'unsuitable for marriage' category.

"Please, Your Highness," The bravest of the three maids coughed. Beyond the complaints regarding the patriarchy, the women eyed the returning soldiers and knights warily. Not all of them were particularly respectful towards women, especially those in service positions they deemed beneath them. "If not to get you clean and properly attired, we will need to examine you for any injuries and we cannot do so in the presence of gentlemen."

Sonia sighed, her expression softening as she looked at them. They simply wanted to help, to do their jobs, as safely as possible. She couldn't blame them for that. "Very well, let us be off then," She agreed, getting to her feet as the third maid rushed forward to gather Sonia's things: the armor she'd discarded and her weapons. Several soldiers looked on in remorse: if she'd left them behind and they weren't precious to the Royal Family, they could be distributed to the rest of them. And anything they could use to defend Novoselic was valuable indeed.

"Do enjoy the feast," She advised Reinhard before she was ushered out of the hall. "The drinks will keep flowing long after the meal, and I doubt the entertainment is far behind."

#fallesto #Non-Despair AU: The Princess of Novoselic #(This technically belongs in a new AU but I'm not sure what yet)#(Medieval? Medieval fantasy? idk)#(I'm very inexperienced writing magic and anything older than the Tudor era so please bear with me)#(My first challenge has been giving Sonia armor and translating her modern warfare skills to something more appropriate for this verse)#(She wishes there were guns)

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