Chapter Text
The bathroom floor never seemed hard or cold until he was stuck on it.
Shen Yuan had, for a long time, believed he’d never be here again or if he ever re-visited this particular circumstance then it’d be on a different floor in a world where laminate didn’t even exist.
This was the floor he’d died on --might still be dead on, actually.
No… no. He wasn’t dead. Shen Yuan could feel his ribs expanding and contracting. He was breathing and even though it was a struggle, he could open his eyes a little bit. His limbs and back were just locked up.
It had been hard to remember the exact circumstances of his death while he was still in the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way, but like this Shen Yuan had no problems recounting the ugly particulars.
His struggles with eating -the source of many of poor Ming Fan’s trials during the years when Luo Binghe was in the Abyss- weren’t new. Shen Yuan had always been a fussy eater as a kid and there was no such thing as inedia in this world. His list of ‘safe’ foods was short -white rice, soft bread, chicken breast, fruit without skins, and a few vegetables.
Binghe’s God Level cooking was the only thing that had ever cut through his automatic instinct to reject anything else. He was able to keep the smells, tastes, and textures that triggered Shen Yuan’s gag reflex just within the safe edge of his tolerances, which Shen Yuan hadn’t even realized was possible. It probably wasn’t without the Protagonist Buff. In his original world, Shen Yuan eventually trained himself to just bolt stuff back like a shot before he could react to anything he couldn’t handle. It meant he got more nutrition in his diet, but maintaining a willful blindness about food also meant he sometimes ate things that he shouldn’t have.
The food poisoning wasn’t what killed him, not directly. It had certainly felt like it at the time and Shen Yuan didn’t remember dying exactly, but his position on the floor suggested that he’d laid down on the floor after wearing himself out despite knowing that he shouldn’t. Worse, he was on his back.
There was only one conclusion he could come to. He must have thrown up again in his sleep and drowned in it.
‘How is that an even more humiliating death than I thought it’d be?’ he wondered. By comparison, sacrificing himself to save someone from a qi deviation was miles better.
He squinted around and wondered how he’d gotten back here? Was it another System-induced nightmare? If so, then why? He hadn’t heard from it since he got married.
Fuck, if this was real then Binghe was going to take it so badly…
‘First step...’ he told himself. ‘...get up.’
His fingertips were willing to flex and if he worked at it then his wrists responded a bit. He could turn his head a little. He couldn’t see any evidence of livor mortis on the parts of his arms that had been touching the floor either so he hadn’t been -- hadn’t been laying there for long.
If the fucking System sent him back in time to before he’d met his husband after five years of marriage then he would not be held responsible for his actions...
Shen Yuan had gotten as far as being able to rotate his wrists and ankles (his knees and hips were locked up too tight to release in a hurry) when there was a crash from deeper inside the apartment followed by a voice that made something he’d been desperately ignoring unclench in the pit of Shen Yuan’s stomach.
“SHIZUN?”
Oh thank heaven. Shen Yuan could put up with a lot, but he’d gone through so much to end up where he was and he wasn’t ready to give it up.
“B-..," Shen Yuan’s voice failed him when he tried to call out. His mouth and throat were bone dry. He tried again and what came out sounded more like a creaking door than any sound a human could make. Footsteps pounded towards the bathroom anyway and the door flung open so hard that it came clean off the hinges.
His husband was dressed in his workaday black and gray. Zheng Yang hung on one hip and a re-forged Xin Mo on the other. He blinked down at Shen Yuan without recognition. “Who…?”
Fuck. He’d forgotten. He was wearing his own face.
Shen Yuan tried to talk again, but the noise he made was arguably worse than the last attempt. It did, however, alert Binghe to his distress.
“No, no!” Binghe knelt down and set his swords to the side. “Don’t talk. Don’t try to talk. Let me help.”
Right. Binghe wasn’t just a protagonist. He was a hero. If he saw a stranger struggling on the floor then of course he was going to try and help no matter what else he had going on personally.
He took one of Shen Yuan’s wrists and a tendril of spiritual energy gently probed at him. Shen Yuan was surprised that he could feel it or that Binghe could even do it in this world, but not as surprised as his husband was when he apparently recognized a familiar spiritual constitution in a very unfamiliar body.
Binghe leaned closer, searching Shen Yuan’s face. “Shizun?” he asked with the kind of hope that was painful to hear.
Shen Yuan nodded slowly and the breath left Binghe’s body in one gusty sigh. His shoulders drooped and he sagged forward, almost bending completely over Shen Yuan’s prone form. “Oh, thank you," he wheezed. “Thank you.”
Then he shook himself and frowned down at Shen Yuan’s state.
“Forgive me, but we need to share blood. Shizun is very weak now," Binghe warned him as he bit into the heel of his own palm with his fangs extended.
Given they had worked out all their past misunderstandings, Shen Yuan didn’t hesitate to lick that hand when it was held up to his mouth. He’d had three wounds since they’d married that would have been mortal if not for Binghe’s blood symbiotes patching him up on the spot and he’d lost count of the times Binghe had had to use them to track him when he got caught up in a Kidnapped Wife Plot that completing the main storyline hadn’t cancelled.
He could feel Binghe’s qi ripple through him using the blood as something like a signal booster. The tension in his joints began to ease straight away, but then his arms and legs immediately all cramped at once.
The next fifteen minutes was pure agony. The blood symbiotes were busy so Binghe had to massage Shen Yuan’s calves, thighs, and arms out by hand while Shen Yuan endeavored to not cry like a baby. He was no stranger to pain, but there was nothing quite like your body turning against you to pile helplessness on top of injury.
The good news was that the blood had lubricated the inside of his mouth and throat a bit so he could make non-horrible noises of assent and encouragement whenever his husband asked ‘is this working?’ or ‘does this hurt?’
The bad news was that Binghe had no idea what it meant when Shen Yuan pointed at the sink.
Well, he came from a very early technology background. For Binghe water came out of wells and was stored in big ceramic reservoirs. Washstands were filled either by servants, disciples, or (as in Shen Yuan’s case) territorial husbands.
Eventually he picked Shen Yuan up and carried him over then watched with wide-eyed fascination as Shen Yuan turned the tap and filled a dirty glass with water that he used to wet his mouth.
Hydration and the heroic efforts of his brand new colony of blood symbiotes brought him back to life. Shen Yuan slapped at his husband’s massive bicep until Binghe reluctantly put him down.
“B-binghe, what happened?” He finally managed to ask.
His husband cocked his head. “Shizun doesn’t remember?” he asked a little too carefully.
Shen Yuan shook his head. “I remember being in our retreat house, but not really what we were doing," he thought hard. “Were you cooking?”
Binghe’s face crumpled and he pulled Shen Yuan in for a hug. “Shizun collapsed while I was in the other room. I found you laying on the floor. I thought…” He swallowed. “...I thought you’d left again, but your body was breathing. You just weren’t in it. Elder Meng Mo found a trail that your spirit left when it departed your body and I came to fetch you. Your other body is with Mu-shishu for the moment." He leaned back to look Shen Yuan over. “Shizun looks very different.”
“It’s okay, you can say it," Shen Yuan managed a crooked smile and pushed his glasses up. “I’m shorter and fat.”
Binghe puffed up like an angry cockatiel. “Shizun isn’t fat!”
Compared to his body in Proud Immortal Demon Way, which had washboard abs and 8% bodyfat, he was. He hadn’t been ashamed of his body before he died, but he’d also just spent something like twenty years looking like a flawless immortal underwear model so coming back to a body with regular proportions and visible pores came as a bit of a blow.
Binghe blushed. “Shizun is beautiful to me like this too." He examined Shen Yuan once again and asked, more cautiously. “Do you know this body?”
“I, uh…” Shen Yuan ducked his head. The System was still dead quiet. Was it really gone? He and Binghe had had a bunch of physical contact and that was usually all it took to reinstall the damn thing. “...yeah, I do. I think I need to be sitting down for the conversation though, but not in here.”
“I saw chairs of a sort in the other room.” Binghe glanced back the way he’d come. He looped an arm behind Shen Yuan’s shoulders and one behind his knees to lift his husband in a princess carry.
Shen Yuan let himself be carried back into his own living room. He had a lot of space for living in Beijing. The only reason he managed it was because the whole building was family income property and he got the apartment plus a decent stipend in exchange for managing it in addition to a couple other things in the area; that was the benefit of having rich parents and two highly competent older brothers between you and the family business, but also a bunch of communal assets nobody wanted strangers handling. He technically worked for his family, inasmuch as he actually ‘worked.’
Binghe had knocked over and broken an armchair during what must have been an explosive arrival. Shen Yuan also recalled having an end table in the spot currently occupied by a mass of wooden shards and a broken lamp.
He put Shen Yuan down on the cleanest patch of couch and crouched down in front of him. “Shizun?”
Shen Yuan wet his lips. Might as well go for it.“This is my body, Binghe; the one I was born in.”
Binghe rocked back on his heels, looking Shen Yuan over all over again; confused, but also kind of hungry-looking in the way he got whenever Shen Yuan accidentally shared something about himself that his husband hadn’t known about, which was admittedly a lot. He hated lying to his husband, but the truth was so stupid it would sound like a lie so Shen Yuan just --didn’t talk about himself. He answered the best he could when Binghe found something to ask about, but Shen Yuan was uncomfortably aware of just how much he left out every time.
He always felt small whenever Binghe got that look; hungry, eager, and like he thought he might be stealing something.
It wasn’t so weird to want to know about your spouse and their history before you came along and Shen Yuan knew everything about Binghe, but he still had to maintain a balancing act when it came to ‘pretending to plausibly be Shen Qingqiu.’ Even around his own husband.
He swallowed and nodded. Might as well rip the bandage off.
“Shen Qingqiu died when you were fourteen," he confessed. “I woke up in his body.”
He watched his husband’s face go through a series of contortions and emotions that Shen Yuan couldn’t begin to put a name to. “When in the year that I was fourteen?” he asked at last as an ominous stillness settled over him.
“Not really sure.” Shen Yuan rubbed the back of his neck. “It was in the late Spring or early Summer, but it was a while before I had a concrete sense of what the proper date was. This world uses a different calendar now. I do know that you’d been beaten and locked in the woodshed. I…” He felt an ugly rush of heat as he frequently did when reminded of the Original Goods’ past behavior. He didn’t mind apologizing for Shen Qingqiu’s past behavior, but he was also very aware that couldn’t exactly explain it either if someone ever demanded his reasons. “...don’t really know what that was for.”
The tension trickled out of his husband’s frame in increments. “I remember it.” Binghe was staring at Shen Yuan’s knees, lost in his thoughts. “It was because someone left the door to a storage house open and many of the practice instruments warped. Da-shixiong’s little goons blamed me and I had no alibi.”
“Oh.” It hadn’t sounded like they’d had any proof either, but the Original Goods wouldn’t have cared about that.
“It was the last time any disciple on the Peak was punished with anything worse than running laps, copying, or self-reflection in the mountain shrine, so it was a significant event to me.” Binghe shrugged one shoulder as if dismissing the thought. He peered into Shen Yuan’s eyes. “Shizun started acting really strangely after that; asking questions he should know the answers to, fainting at random, and Da-shixiong caught you trying to sneak out of your house once with a travel bag. Everyone was very worried.”
“Aaah!” Shen Yuan covered his face with both hands. He’d been acting like a crazy person and, worse, they’d noticed. “Don’t remind me!”
Large, sword-calloused hands pried his fingers away from his eyes and Binghe’s unfathomable expression had melted into a kind of helpless fondness when their eyes met once more. “Shizun must have been very frightened.”
“You don’t know the half of it," Shen Yuan muttered and looked away. “I must ask my husband’s forgiveness for lying to him for so many years.”
Binghe took one of Shen Yuan’s hands and took his time examining it. Shen Qingqiu had long-fingered scholarly hands, but he was also a swordsman so they were only delicate in appearance. If you touched his palms, the skin was tough and leathery with the calluses of a veteran warrior. Shen Yuan had the soft hands of someone who’d never done anything more strenuous in his life than a compulsory gym class. Binghe seemed fascinated by the difference. Then he pressed his cheek into Shen Yuan’s open palm, followed by his mouth.
“This husband prefers that Shizun kept your silence until now.” Binghe closed his eyes and dropped formality once more. “If the other Peak Lords learned of it, if Shizun had been exorcised --I don’t know what I would have done. If this had happened even a year ago then I wouldn’t have known how to find you. Elder Mo and I only recently started exploring the liminal edges where our realm meets the void between worlds.”
Shen Yuan had his suspicions about how such a reveal would have gone down depending on when his sect siblings learned of his transmigration. Most of the possibilities ended in fire and blood. Didn’t he know better than anyone else the lengths they were willing to go to in order to lay their fallen martial brother to rest?
“How did it happen?” Binghe asked. “Why did you become my Shizun?”
“I wasn’t asked. It just happened after I…” Shen Yuan’s voice cracked. Wow, he did not want to talk about this. “...died." He looked back in the direction of the bathroom before thinking better of it.
Binghe’s reaction was everything Shen Yuan feared most. His eyes flashed red. The seal on his forehead burned hot. A pulse of demonic qi flooded the room making the shadows grow darker and every hair on Shen Yuan’s body lift up in terror.
Wow, that was deeply unpleasant in a mortal body. It wasn’t great in his immortal body either, but something in his hindbrain became convinced his husband was about to eat him.
Shen Yuan’s face must have done something because Binghe’s qi vanished in the next second.
“No!” Binghe reached for him. “No, no, no. Please don’t be scared. I was only frightened!”
“I’m not a cultivator here," Shen Yuan wheezed, but patted his husband’s arm in what he hoped was a soothing gesture, for all that Shen Yuan was shaking like a dry leaf. “Binghe’s qi just felt different is all and I was surprised. I know you would never harm me.”
The word ‘again’ hung heavy between them and Shen Yuan pushed it away by wiggling forward until Binghe had to let him get into his lap. He couldn’t really do this as Shen Qingqiu. He was too tall and bony, but he’d taken note in the bathroom that he came up to maybe Binghe’s chest like this. Now that he was past being freaked out about his own sexuality (most days) he wasn’t about to pass up a chance to indulge in his minor (hardly noticeable) height difference kink.
Binghe fell backwards, landing on his butt, but hauled Shen Yuan in with enthusiasm once he realized what was going on. After a moment of that his arms tightened.
“Shizun… died.” Binghe drew in a breath. “How?”
“I ate something bad.” Shen Yuan was not about to get into the details. His sticky gray lotus did not need any more concrete details about ‘ways my husband has died’ beyond the plenitude he already had. “I think I got sick in my sleep.”
Binghe squeezed him tighter. His voice only shook a little bit when he said, “I will remember that the next time Shizun says you’re capable of feeding yourself.”
“Mmm.” Shen Yuan pressed his face into Binghe’s shoulder. “How did Binghe follow me here? Can… can we go back?”
He was surprised to realize how badly he wanted to. For a bullshit universe that was wall-to-wall fuck or die plants and histrionic Jianghu-style mob rule, he’d come to think of it as home despite the lack of modern conveniences. He wanted to see his family if he could and maybe arrange for his body to be found a little easier this time, but he--he really wanted to go home. It was home now. Even if he wasn’t truly Shen Qingqiu it’d be okay if Binghe knew that and still wanted him anyway.
Much to his relief, his husband nodded. Shen Yuan felt it more than saw it.
“It may be some time before we can return," Binghe admitted, letting up on his death grip. “Shizun must promise not to be angry.”
Oh no. Nothing good ever came of THAT statement.
Shen Yuan pushed away to look his husband right in his guilty little face. “What did you do!?” he demanded.
“This husband had to make a deal in exchange for the ability to move between realities and bring people with me," Binghe admitted, going right back into formal language as he frequently did when he was in the doghouse and planned to try and get out of it by being cute. “There’s something he has to do in this world; a mission I must complete.”
It was worse than he’d thought.
Shen Yuan took his husband’s face in both hands and asked in a deathly quiet hush, “Binghe, answer me as best you can if you can. Do important things need to be said three times?”
The way his husband’s eyes flew wide was all the answer Shen Yuan needed.
“H-how do…?” Binghe’s cheeks went red and his gaze went distant for a second before blazing. Had Shen Yuan looked like that when he was talking to the System? “Shizun already knows about the System.”
Shen Yuan nodded. “It’s what put me into Shen Qingqiu’s body. I had a mission to complete.” His heart was pounding. His husband was at the mercy of the System. He’d never considered the possibility that it might ever sink its wires into Binghe given the way it seemed determined to cater to his story -Abyss plot aside- but it had.
Sure, okay, fine. It had saved them both from death that one time, but he wasn’t about to forget everything it put them through first!
He hadn’t realized that he’d pulled Binghe’s head into a crushing, protective hug until his husband tapped lightly on his arm. Shen Yuan lurched backwards and would have fallen off Binghe’s lap completely except his husband caught him and put him right back into place.
“Shizun is overwrought," Binghe observed and slid one of his hands up underneath the back of Shen Yuan’s shirt. He frowned. “And cold. It’s not cold in here. Why?”
Shen Yuan coughed. “I… it happened in the room where you found me. I probably cooled down before the System put me back in.”
His husband’s jaw worked and this time it was Shen Yuan being crushed into a hug.
“Binghe…” He squirmed. “...Binghe, listen. This is important!”
“Shizun is trying to distract me.” Binghe squeezed tighter.
“No --I mean, maybe, but it’s still important.” Shen Yuan was relieved when Binghe let them look each other in the eyes again. “Don’t trust it. It has an agenda. It always has an agenda. It doesn’t lie, exactly, but it’ll manipulate you however it can. It’ll obfuscate the truth, change the rules, and add new variables to its game whenever it wants. It'll give you the illusion of choices, but only let you make the one it wants. Sometimes it’ll even control what you’re allowed to say. Has it told you what the consequences are if you fail this ‘mission’?”
Binghe’s look darkened. “If that happens then I will be sent back without my husband and lose the ability to transverse worlds." He reached out to cup Shen Yuan’s cheek, “Shizun, did all of that happen to you?”