Chapter Text
If there’s anything Luo Binghe knows it’s how to win a wife. He’s managed to do so ninety-six times, often under extraordinary circumstances. A simple farm girl had wanted money to keep her household in comfort, and so Luo Binghe had rendered her entire clan wealthy merchants. A duellist had demanded that her swain outfight every opponent who entered the jianghu’s greatest tournament; a scholar had required her lover to outwit her venerable parents, the most renowned sages of their generation. Luo Binghe’s tongue and sword were equally sharp and studied. He duly prevailed, twice over.
He brought Liu Mingyan’s brother’s killer to justice and then pledged himself in poetry to meet that elegant lady’s exacting standards for courtship. For Sha Hualing’s sake, Luo Binghe deposed her father and routed the old lord’s supporters in the field. He quested after the hand of another demonic princess for the best part of a decade by securing treasures lost to history. With their aid, he restored the princess’s deposed elder sister to her throne.
Kingdoms lost, kingdoms won: involving as a game can be in the course of play, this is all a matter of course for Luo Binghe. Courtship is probably his favourite part of a marriage: a golden hour of focus and possibility, when Luo Binghe tests and finds himself equal to the challenge of winning a prospective bride’s admiration. Each such victory ensures that for a suspended moment, Luo Binghe is the glory of the world.
Luo Binghe is clever, and knows it. He is particularly good at using this to his advantage. It is not, therefore, difficult for him to discover that the intriguing ‘Shen Qingqiu’ he met in another world was in fact nothing of the kind. It proves harder, though not impossible, to travel to a world where another such ‘Shen Yuan’ has never met a man called Luo Binghe (and is thus not, as yet, meaningfully defended).
The night before the emperor departs on this fresh quest, Liu Mingyan kneels perfunctorily before his throne. She accepts the edict that names her regent in her lord’s absence, as she always does when Luo Binghe goes adventuring. She has her cabinet of influential demon princesses, strong cultivators and wise scholars whom Luo Binghe has brought into his court and entrusted with portions of the power he occasionally leaves to shore up or to expand. Mingyan will be fine; she always is. Luo Binghe himself is but one part of the elegant machine of the Demonic Emperor’s regime, and she another.
The emperor has good instincts. Over the course of more than a century, he’s learned to follow them. He wants a Shen Yuan of his own: a missing piece of his puzzle, a lovely, loving thing. Every conquest has its novelty, but when considered with perspective, there is a fundamental sameness to them all. Luo Binghe will once again play his cards right, and when he’s managed it he will earn his new, expected prize.
The Shen Yuan that Luo Binghe finds is twelve years old. Luo Binghe is ambivalent about this. Given his intended’s youth, Luo Binghe will have to ingratiate himself with the boy’s family: easily done, but tedious. He won’t immediately be able to enjoy his new spouse, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, Shen Yuan is still as tender and pliant as a young fruit tree. You can train such things up wires, in spirals—you can teach a yearling apple to walk up walls. By now, Luo Binghe is accustomed to looking at complication and seeing possibility. This was initially a survival skill, but it has translated well to dominion over the earth. Bare life and riding the whirlwind at its height have more in common with one another than either state has with a peaceable, comfortable existence.
That other ‘Luo Binghe’, pretender-king, spent years wrapping his husband around his fingers, teaching his pretender ‘Shen Qingqiu’ to see Luo Binghe’s control for the care it is. Why shouldn’t the real Luo Binghe have the same opportunity? He imagines that an extended courtship will linger like sweetness in his mouth: years of this, his favourite part.
And by—what, fourteen? fifteen?—Shen Yuan will be well-finished. Ripe for plucking: all his.
Doctor and Doctor Shen never realise that the large, struggling private hospital they take over is in fact the sole asset Junshang Medical possesses. They do note that the parent company doesn’t seem to have other holdings on the same level, flag this and raise it as a concern in their meeting with a representative from Junshang. That cool, imposing woman explains that this is exactly why Junshang is seeking a management team with the Shens’ practical experience and dedication. They’ve only just expanded into the healthcare sector. This purchase is a test run for the young equity concern. If the Shens can make something of this teetering behemoth—one of Taipei’s oldest still-operating hospitals, with everything that entails—then Junshang Medical might well consider making additional forays into the field.
The Shens consider the tempting opportunity with their typical care. With resources like Junshang’s, they can finally do something more effective than fighting fires and metaphorical triage (often literal triage, as well). Besides, the place seems to need them.
Still, it’s an intimidating prospect. Running the hospital will take the Shens away from home to a ludicrous extent; even their most sanguine projections acknowledge this as an unavoidable consequence of accepting the responsibility. Two of the Shens’ boys are starting college, but the couple still have two children at home. Can they really afford to leave their youngest son and daughter so much alone? The lady who cares for the household is, after all, getting older, and struggling more than she used to. They cannot just replace her with a younger and more vigorous housekeeper: not Grannie Wu, who’s been with the Shens since the birth of their eldest. They’d as soon kill the family cat in cold blood, or toss their A Yuan out on the street.
The Shens ask Grannie Wu whether she knows anyone suitable who might come in and help her. With the increased salaries attendant on their new positions, the Shens will certainly be able to afford another pair of hands around the place. Grannie Wu doesn’t know many younger folks, but she mentions having recently met a fellow while out shopping: a vigorous, bright young graduate looking for work, sticking up fliers in the grocery. Even Grannie Wu knew that was an old-fashioned way of baiting hooks, not likely to catch many fish these days. He was scrupulously clean, but nonetheless looked down-at-heel in his worn old trainers. He helped Grannie Wu with her groceries and chatted with her. He seemed sweet, and capable. Now, mightn’t a young man like that do? She had his number—he’d teased her into taking one of his fliers. Perhaps the Shens would like to meet him?
The interview is duly arranged, and Luo Binghe charms a mother and father in law who are as-yet unaware of their incipient relationship. It hadn’t been very hard to find a buyer willing and able to pay a prodigious sum for a panacea from Luo Binghe’s world. Some people get desperate when they’re near death. And after all, the substance costs Luo Binghe nothing. In fact Luo Binghe thinks of the tainted blood now running through the mogul’s veins as an extra line of insurance. Should he ever need another such fortune, all he has to do is give a little tug on the old man’s heart-strings, as it were.
The arrangements swiftly and fully repay the trouble Luo Binghe took in making them. He’s simply offered complete access to Shen Yuan: invited to live in the house so that dear old Grannie Wu can shift her attention to the exclusive care of the Shens’ baby girl. Can he cook? Oh, yes. Clean, a little? It’ll be no trouble. And as for the rest—
“Just leave A Yuan to me,” Luo Binghe says, letting his dimples show.
During this conversation, the boy in question regards the new member of his household over the rim of a tea cup. Luo Binghe darts a glance at him—an almost-conspiratorial flick of his eyes, as though he’s letting Shen Yuan in on some joke between the two of them. Shen Yuan does not immediately soften.
That’s fine. Luo Binghe didn’t really expect him to succumb so easily. The ‘Shen Qingqiu’ who Luo Binghe met had loved his husband deeply—more completely than Luo Binghe thinks he’s ever seen one person romantically love another. It had been obvious in his every tender look, and an inescapable component of the man’s memories. But those same memories had told Luo Binghe that such consummate affection had not been cheaply bought.
Luo Binghe already knows that the man Shen Yuan is likely to become is both intelligent and reserved. Even young, this fresh-faced Shen Yuan is very much himself. He’s open, but canny. Oblivious to some things, yet simultaneously sharply observant; all too self-aware, and as precocious as he is precious. Shen Yuan is an unfeathered maiden sapling, grown from the recognisable root-stock of a man who had valued even the pretender Luo Binghe’s life above his own.
Luo Binghe lets the smile he’s giving the boy deepen. Lets just a hint of the dark under his glimmer show through: a flash of the cavernous mouth behind his sharp and shining teeth. You’re going to love me to death, he thinks.
He watches Shen Yuan find him terribly interesting.
Shen Yuan’s parents are gone every day. ‘Sun-up to sun-down’ is, if anything, a conservative description of the claim the two doctors’ positions exert on them. They’re like that false ‘Shen Qingqiu’, in their way: all too willing to sacrifice themselves for their responsibilities, and for the chance of making others safe and happy. It’s commendable, and it’s useful to Luo Binghe. If he bears the Doctors Shen any grudge at all, it is only on account of their having failed to recognise that their first responsibility is to the life they themselves have created. They do not, is Luo Binghe’s estimation, realise how special Shen Yuan is. If they had done, they would hardly have passed him into strange hands simply because their own were occupied.
For his own part, Luo Binghe has stringently avoided reproducing. The people he rules over occasionally make mention of the emperor’s ‘countless descendents’, but this is as much a flattering set-phrase denoting his prosperity as their short-hand evocation of an emperor’s ‘three thousand wives’ (a quoted phrase of poetry, never meant to be understood literally). Luo Binghe tells anyone bold enough to ask that an heir is an ill-judged risk. He cites Heavenly Demons’ lifespans, which eclipse those of most mortal dynasties: he is certainly in no rush. His closer reasons for avoiding such commitments are murkier. They are partly-private, obscure even to himself.
Under Grannie Wu’s gaze, Luo Binghe behaves impeccably. Here, too, he is not in any hurry. Coming to know Shen Yuan, and to be known by him in turn, is a pleasure unto itself. Luo Binghe doesn’t like to rush his pleasures.
His own, private Shen Yuan is at once a complete person and the man he met as ‘Shen Qingqiu’, as yet half-realised. The boy is mercurial. He’s by turns earnest and excited, and then drawling and sarcastic. Even in that mood, Luo Binghe can pull him back to brightness with a word: Shen Yuan fundamentally resists growing jaded. Shen Yuan is also so clever it annoys people, which embarrasses him. The boy doesn’t yet always know what to conceal and what to reveal, how to manage himself (and thus others). It reminds Luo Binghe of his own struggles to accomplish similar ends. And the world so interests Shen Yuan that he often forgets himself entirely—he could read for days, he could listen to Luo Binghe forever.
Shen Yuan sharply questions Luo Binghe’s stories, insisting that his Bingge never did this or that unlikely thing. The stories are, of course, all true. Luo Binghe imagines that when he’s older, Shen Yuan will be quite embarrassed by having spent the better part of a day indignantly insisting that no one could ride a bird. He plans to gift his bride a broken-in blood-eagle, to remind him of it often.
Shen Yuan often falls asleep on the couch with a book in hand in a t-shirt, shorts and the white socks he wears around the house. Looking down at him, Luo Binghe feels his heart constrict as though he’s dying. Tenderness rises in him like a great wave overwhelming a city, like a wholly internal violence. Fond. Shen Yuan makes him so fond.
“Why is the congee weird today?” Shen Yuan asks one morning, his nose wrinkling with an adorable frown.
“It’s a special kind,” Luo Binghe says easily. “I’m trying out medicinal cooking. Make sure you finish all of it—it’s good for you.”
He watches Shen Yuan spoon pale, candy-pink rice porridge into his mouth. The boy winces at the taste, but he’s a good child who does as he’s told. Luo Binghe feels himself settling in Shen Yuan’s belly, hot and heavy, and pushing out through the boy’s limbs: running down his legs and pooling in his toes, pulsing out to the tips of his tiny fingers. Finished, Shen Yuan looks to his Bingge for praise. His cheeks are pink with Luo Binghe’s blood.
“Very good,” Luo Binghe says, settling a hand on the child’s shoulder and rubbing a thumb over the nape of Shen Yuan’s neck. There are days when he can feel himself counting down the years.
Reflexively, Luo Binghe tightens the net. Shen Yuan is too important to be allowed to stray far. The boy expresses interest in a martial arts class that a few other children from his school attend; Luo Binghe ‘forgets’ to fill out the permission form. Some uncle’s haphazard instruction is nothing at all to his own qigong. How could it hope to be? What is the point of learning to do a thing poorly? Besides, Shen Yuan’s system is particular. Not just any technique will suit him.
Luo Binghe says that if Shen Yuan wants to learn this kind of thing, then he can join Luo Binghe for his own morning exercises. When Shen Yuan baulks at the unexpected difficulty of these sessions (though they’re laughably gentle, compared to anything Qing Jing would have demanded of him), Luo Binghe is there to rebuke and coax the child into persisting. When he corrects Shen Yuan’s breathing, his large hand spans the bulk of the boy’s slightly-shaky back.
See, A Yuan? Luo Binghe thinks smugly. We both enjoy this far more than you’d have liked “Introductory Tai Chi with Lao Wong”.
Shen Yuan tries to explain that hanfu is coming back, which Luo Binghe finds hilarious (even as he sneers at the cheaply-made, over-priced items in the catalogue A Yuan sent away for, the arrival of which sparked the conversation). The idea of his letting Shen Yuan parade about in some half-plastic abomination! Does the boy really want to run off to some cheap costume sale? Wouldn’t he rather attend a relevant exhibition with Luo Binghe, then go to a master tailor and buy something actually worth the money?
Shen Yuan never knows that he’s left his own world—that the human tailor they commission isn’t dressed in a fine formal costume, but only in his work-clothes. They simply pass through the door of a shop, and what awaits them within takes the boy’s breath away. On an earlier visit, Luo Binghe instructed the tailor to address his emperor informally. He is to say as little as possible to the child, to avoid confusing him. Luo Binghe thus instructs the artisan to make his charge robes suitable for the New Year. When Shen Yuan’s back is turned, Luo Binghe asks the man, whose work has impressed him, to start sourcing fabric for bridal garments—enough to make robes for a young man a few years older and taller than the child currently poking around the fabric reels, who is growing his hair out because his beloved Bingge wears his own long.
The tailor nods. “He’ll be fifteen or sixteen before you know it.” In the village he was born in, that was how such things were done. If a couple had money enough to found a home, why wait?
“And fine work takes time,” Luo Binghe agrees with a regal wave of his hand towards the workbench, acknowledging his subject’s craft.
Shen Yuan wonders why he’s being asked to choose between seed pearls and beads carved from the inky horn of a black moon rhinoceros python (which, Shen Yuan scoldingly tells Luo Binghe, isn’t even a real animal).
“Later, didi,” Luo Binghe says firmly, curtailing further questions. “For now, which do you like? Hm?”
“Couldn’t you do both?” Shen Yuan says with a frown. “A pattern of them, maybe? That could look really cool.”
“It could,” Luo Binghe agrees, stroking the boy’s hair. He sends Shen Yuan through the door, back into the bright glare of Taipei at midday. (Thankfully, Shen Yuan hadn’t noticed the play of shadows in the shop: it is nearly suppertime, in Luo Binghe’s capital.)
“Present the palace with a few designs,” he tells the tailor, dropping a seal-token on the workbench so that his guards will know the man’s business is legitimate. He follows Shen Yuan out, and gives in to the boy’s whining for a bubble tea with an ostentatious roll of his eyes.
Luo Binghe has always enjoyed exploring strange new places, and so Shen Yuan’s home city becomes their playground. They travel it tirelessly and without fear, for nowhere in the world is safer than Luo Binghe’s side. Once someone does try to mug them, but Luo Binghe matter-of-factly twists his assailant’s arm. When the clean, bright crack of a snapped wrist sounds out, Shen Yuan almost manages to hide his flinch. Luo Binghe is rather proud of him for that. Afterwards, the emperor hardly remembers the incident. Only the impression of Shen Yuan’s round, round eyes lingers in his mind.
Shen Yuan is an avid reader, voracious and eager to discuss what he learns. He’s particularly apt at dissecting a bad book and discovering what its failures stem from. Together, he and his Bingge read high literature and pulp, both things exclusive to Shen Yuan’s world and shared points of reference: Gu Long and Dumas, Pu Songling and Water Margin. Luo Binghe considers sliding more provocative material onto the pile—not now, of course, but perhaps in a few years’ time.
The Shens remain easily impressed. Their son gifts them with a child’s effort at traditional calligraphy, and it charms them completely. One evening, the Shens make it home for dinner. Their youngest boy casually quotes a little Du Fu over the table, and the Shens call Luo Binghe a treasure. Even A Yuan’s asthma (common enough, in children born under Taipei’s smogs) has been better, lately—the trips to the countryside he and Luo Binghe take are really paying off! All the while, Luo Binghe’s blood makes its regular circuit of Shen Yuan’s veins, shoring up a reasonably-healthy child and making something just a little more than human of him.
When he sees his parents, Shen Yuan talks of nothing but his beloved ge: Bingge this, Bingge that, Bingge everything.
“He’s got a little crush on you, Binghe” Madam Doctor Shen says, nudging her housekeeper with her shoulder. Luo Binghe laughs the remark off politely, as though it’s a joke that Shen Yuan is in love with him.
It isn’t. It’s a satisfying consequence of Luo Binghe’s efforts, which Shen Yuan has shown the good sense to appreciate. Shen Yuan, now fourteen, has spent the last two years effectually betrothed to an emperor who lavishes attention on him, who outright dotes on him. Why wouldn’t he be thoroughly infatuated?
Luo Binghe doesn’t begrudge the time he’s spent minding a mere boy. It’s allowed him to take stock of the situation and adapt his plans accordingly. If you want a queen fit for the purpose, as Luo Binghe now understands that he does, then of course you have to rear them attentively. They’ve been happy years, during which Luo Binghe has checked in on his own interests while his charge slept. He’s managed to give Shen Yuan the peaceful, nurturing childhood he never had, and enjoyed some ghost of what happiness his own youth offered him in the process. Luo Binghe had initially expected that Shen Yuan’s relative comfort might needle him, but he finds that he is only endlessly glad of it. He’s strong enough now to wrest kindness from an uncaring world, and to yield it up to his fawn-frail darling.
Initially, Luo Binghe failed to grasp how invested he would become in the privacy and intimacy of these domestic arrangements. They say that the old demonic emperor’s sister, the Imperial Princess Xiaohan, lay with a lord of the Southern viper clan and brought forth a living child. Learned scholars claim that she could only have managed this if the lines were mixed of old. Long, long ago, the heavenly demons used brute force and blood magic to subdue the lower realms. Through unions—willing and otherwise—they entwined themselves with every figure of strength in their ever-expanding dominions. They rendered those unions productive with arts now lost.
If she hadn’t been his mother, then this woman must still have been some kin to Luo Binghe. He could only have descended from the same heavenly demonic stock, which had long ago been infused with the characteristics of all the chief demonic peoples. Luo Binghe coils around his prey like a snake, and a viperish urge to clench and smother still runs true in him. So Shen Yuan dresses to his guardian’s taste, having internalised Luo Binghe’s wishes so thoroughly that he doesn’t realise they are not natively his own. Luo Binghe makes everything Shen Yuan eats. He is closer to Shen Yuan than he’s ever been to anyone since his adoptive mother died.
And if Shen Yuan has a nightmare, it’s Luo Binghe’s bed he climbs into.
“I’m too old for this,” Shen Yuan scolds himself, shame-faced. Luo Binghe just shushes and soothes him, stroking his thin back. In truth, the problem is that Shen Yuan isn’t quite old enough for the effective comfort Luo Binghe would offer him.
The only imperfections in this world of Luo Binghe’s design are brought there by careless outsiders. Shen Yuan’s school is the least controllable vector of contagion. He is forever picking up things he ought not to, and he sometimes returns with needs that Luo Binghe finds annoyingly difficult to meet. He hadn’t been nearly so easily influenced by others at Shen Yuan’s age. He’d craved his schoolmate Ning Yingying’s kindness, of course, but he’d never fully trusted it. It had never been reliable enough for that. Ning Yingying’s agency had been limited, and though her heart was good, it wasn’t stubborn and stalwart like Luo Binghe’s or Shen Yuan’s. She’d wavered, under the first Shen Qingqiu’s influence. Sometimes, in his bleakest moments, Luo Binghe had very nearly let himself need her. And when he’d reached out his hand, she had hesitated. If she had given all for him, then he’d have given it back. He would never have looked further than his shijie for affection. Instead, her halting love had met with a halting return. Luo Binghe had looked elsewhere for some force that might finally match him.
The point was, Luo Binghe had been largely self-reliant, as a child. Why shouldn’t Shen Yuan be? Wasn’t Luo Binghe enough for him? Wasn’t he raising his boy well?
One day, Shen Yuan asks to sleep over at a friend’s house. Luo Binghe rejects the idea outright, and so Shen Yuan tries to tease his ge into a better humour. He attempts to figure out what the problem is, and to fix it. When Luo Binghe won’t let him, Shen Yuan grows increasingly irritated. Other children have told him that invitations like this are normal—that it’s strange to miss out on every outing, even as it’s strange that Shen Yuan claims he can never get permission to invite them over to his house. Is Shen Yuan their friend, or isn’t he?
Luo Binghe doesn’t try to justify his choice according to some logic that Shen Yuan would either meet fairly or attempt to worm his way around. Luo Binghe makes the matter a question of his will, and does not deign to discuss it further. The idea that he might consent to let his princeling spend the night out of his sight, unguarded, with strangers, is ridiculous. Shen Yuan himself would grow bored of the other children’s limited conversation, their poor fare. He’d tire of them in an hour, and be too polite and too proud to text Luo Binghe and ask to be extracted. Next Shen Yuan will be asking to spend his birthday with these people, just because he’s seen children’s parties on television! Luo Binghe already generously allows Shen Yuan’s family to make a cameo appearance at his birthday dinner, after the fashion of a third-day bridal visit. He’s been more than generous.
Shen Yuan hates losing. What’s more, he resents finding himself out of step with Luo Binghe. Luo Binghe does know that Shen Yuan is easy to coax and difficult to order, but really, who’s the elder, here? A parent, a husband or a sovereign ought to be able to simply say that something is out of the question, and to have their judgement respected. Is he not a little of all these things, to his A Yuan?
The evening Shen Yuan thinks he ‘ought’ to have gone to that stupid party, Luo Binghe calmly luxuriates in his triumph. He makes them hand-pulled noodles. Shen Yuan’s conversation is a little sullen, and Luo Binghe graciously allows him to sulk. After dinner, Luo Binghe turns on the tightly-plotted political drama they’ve been catching up on.
While the theme tune plays, Shen Yuan asks whether his parents will be home this weekend. Luo Binghe reminds the boy about the cardiology conference the Doctors Shen will be going head-hunting at. Shen Yuan’s jaw tightens, and Luo Binghe finds it adorable. He resists the urge to tug the boy onto his lap, given that Shen Yuan is in such a pet. What a sweet term for a fit of temper—isn’t A Yuan just?
The episode’s end theme plays before the programme flows into the next instalment of the story, and Luo Binghe forgets himself. He toys with the strands of Shen Yuan’s now longish hair, running them through his fingers. On the screen black ink spills across a white background, forming watery characters. On Luo Binghe’s palm, strands of hair pool into senseless shapes. It is the most natural thing in the world to twist the thick end of a lock between his thumb and forefinger. Easy, for Luo Binghe to bring the soft coil to his lips.
Some movement in the corner of his eye alerts Luo Binghe to the way Shen Yuan has tensed. Something is amiss. He glances over and finds Shen Yuan sitting up, his back stiff. Flinty suspicion tightens the boy’s naturally deep and sympathetic gaze. For an instant, Luo Binghe sees some flicker of fear in those familiar eyes—not quite, he thinks, a fear of him, but of Shen Yuan’s own newly-recognisable desire.
“What are you doing?” Shen Yuan asks crisply, regarding Luo Binghe very evenly.
For a moment, Luo Binghe falters. This is no farther than he’s gone before. It’s certainly no further than he intends to begin pressing, very soon.
Shen Yuan senses Luo Binghe’s hesitation, tasting his weakness in the air. If Luo Binghe has a lingering touch of the viper in him, then he has not failed to impart it to his young. Well-trained Shen Yuan slides in the knife.
“I don’t like it,” Shen Yuan says, carefully. “It’s gross. Don’t be disgusting, Binghe.”
He loads that heavy word, disgusting, like it’s cannon shot.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Luo Binghe dismisses cooly, trying to ignore the hit he can feel he’s taken. “Your own mother might have done the same.”
“But I never see my mother,” Shen Yuan interjects. “Why is that, Luo Binghe?”
His full name sounds wrong, coming from Shen Yuan’s mouth. Shen Yuan usually calls him Binghe, Bingge or ge—gege, when he really wants something. Never ‘Luo Binghe’. And what exactly is he asking?
He is clever. Luo Binghe knows that much. What Shen Yuan doesn’t yet know, he might nonetheless have a sense of. When they’re alone together, Shen Yuan has seen his caretaker’s whole posture shift. He’s watched the sweet, youthful facade drop from Luo Binghe’s face, watched it roll off Luo Binghe’s shoulders. The young man the Shens employed is real enough: Luo Binghe was that boy, once. But he hasn’t been for a century, now—and Shen Yuan has watched Luo Binghe break a man’s wrist effortlessly, with a slight smile on his face.
“You scare me,” Shen Yuan says, just watching Luo Binghe. Meticulously testing the effect of his words as tension builds in the older man, making Luo Binghe’s stomach roil and his chest clench. “I don’t,” Shen Yuan ventures, “feel safe around you.”
Luo Binghe blinks heavy eyes. Shen Yuan, holding power he’s never before realised he possesses, can’t seem to stop himself. Real anger inflects this adolescent strop. So does the fascination attendant on stabbing something again and again. Who has not felt it? Luo Binghe remembers the frantic energy of his own first kills. And now this infant predator, a boy after his own heart, leans forward. Shen Yuan’s eyes are hard, and gleaming.
“I hate you. Always telling me what to do, where to go, what to think. Why won’t you let me see my real friends? I want my real parents—why did they just leave me with you?”
If Shen Yuan finds the time Luo Binghe considers precious tedious, if Shen Yuan thinks it wasted, then that renders Luo Binghe, for all his accomplishments and glory, just a pathetic grown man chasing after a child. As though detached from himself, Luo Binghe wonders when he was last so affected—so deeply, truly hurt. It’s been years, at least, since anyone caused him pain in a way that mattered. Decades, probably. After all, Luo Binghe did everything he could to ensure that he was never meaningfully hurt again. He became a lord of lords, and slept in four-score lukewarm beds on account of it.
Now, to his entire surprise, Luo Binghe finds that his doted on little consort can gut him ruthlessly, simply by not cherishing him unconditionally. Without wanting to weigh what it meant, he’s long privately considered Shen Yuan his rising empress. Demon blood yet runs strongly in Luo Binghe. Some part of him understood what he was getting into, with Shen Yuan—what it meant to eschew concubines, and to at last take a mate.
“Shen Yuan,” Luo Binghe says.
His low tone stops the boy in his tracks. Shen Yuan’s heaving chest freezes. He looks like a rabbit suddenly paralyzed by a snare. Luo Binghe’s rigid expression seems to alarm Shen Yuan, who begins, correspondingly, to look sorry. Luo Binghe extends a hand, using it to cup Shen Yuan’s chin.
“You don’t mean that,” he promises, “and you’re going to be very sorry you said it.”
Because Shen Yuan doesn’t mean all the awful things he’s said, and the worse things he’s hinted at in saying them. Not absolutely. This is the tender nipping of a falcon worrying its jesses. It is a testing thing, a child’s lashing out. Shen Yuan is half afraid of his master and half afraid of the mastery of his own rising, invasive new desires.
But it’s also true; every word of it is. Some part of Shen Yuan hates Luo Binghe: seethes at his presence in the Shens’ home and lives. And if Shen Yuan can hold such ambivalent feelings for Luo Binghe, in and around the love they bear one another, then Shen Yuan might one day come to truly resent him. Who knows better than Luo Binghe the white-hot wrath that can burn in the heart of a wronged child?
If Luo Binghe should take advantage of his consort’s youth to reel in his prize, perhaps no ill would come of it. Perhaps, in a year, they’d still be fine. But what if that resentment should fester? What if, in a century, Shen Yuan reviled him?
The idea cracks Luo Binghe’s courage. He needs Shen Yuan’s entire, ungrudging heart. He sees now that he always will, for as long as they both shall live.
“I,” Shen Yuan begins, and when he speaks his small jaw rolls in the heart of Luo Binghe’s palm.
“Bed,” Luo Binghe whispers.
It takes Shen Yuan a moment to realise that he’s being sent to his room. When he catches on, he swallows and stands. He leaves without a backward glance.
The television plays on, unheeded. Figures dance across the screen, playing their scripted roles just as real people live out their fates. Alone, Luo Binghe contemplates what he ought to do.
Luo Binghe isn’t a good man. He’s known that since he was seventeen. He’d been falling and falling, and the only thought in his head had been, I’ll kill Shizun, I will fucking kill him. I don’t care what it costs, what it takes: I will make him pay. In the intervening years, this knowledge has not greatly troubled Luo Binghe. He is a highly competent ruler who does right by those who do right by him. And after all, the world had seldom rewarded Luo Binghe’s early efforts at goodness. But is Luo Binghe a monster, outright? He’s always tried not to be.
Shen Qingqiu—Luo Binghe’s first, real Shen Qingqiu—had been a creature of realised threats and active cruelty. But he’d also been capable of making Ning Yingying deeply uncomfortable in softer, more nebulous ways. Of saying things that, whatever their intention might have been, had made his shijie’s skin crawl. She’d been the one to suggest, shame-faced and confused, that their shizun might have propositioned her. To confess that the suggestive, inappropriate comments Shen Qingqiu had made in her youth had disturbed her, despite having been phrased as warnings, and had left their lingering traces in her mind. Luo Binghe lacks frames of reference and language for such forms of violation, but has some notion of their existence.
This realm isn’t Luo Binghe’s own. By fourteen, Luo Binghe had long since been thrust upon the world to seek his fortune—to live or die by chance. At fifteen, he’d thought himself a man because everyone had expected him to act and to support himself as one. But adulthood, in this place, means such different things. In a year Shen Yuan will be fifteen, and everyone but Luo Binghe will still see him as something like an infant. Luo Binghe has been looking out for the young man his consort is on the cusp of becoming. In so doing, he has wilfully ignored the boy still before him.
Luo Binghe grinds his teeth, despising the conclusion he’s inexorably coming to and the course of action it will necessitate taking. Can such concerns really matter, when Luo Binghe has been so carefully good to Shen Yuan? He’s taken care of his betrothed for two years. How can he be expected to just let go of him now? He’d be able to keep a bare watch on the boy’s condition from afar, but it isn’t the same as being here with him. They are made for one another: oughtn’t that to mean something?
He could just take him; maybe he should. He could solve this problem with sex, as he’s solved so many others. He could make Shen Yuan like it. And it would work, for now. But the other side of Shen Yuan’s being full young—being delicate, and malleable—is that he’s still liable to be wounded in ways Luo Binghe can’t predict the long term consequences of. If Luo Binghe tries something, he might find himself unable to walk it back. Shen Yuan is too important to risk in such a way, for the prospect of short term gain. It doesn’t matter how much Luo Binghe currently craves physical assurance from Shen Yuan—that he aches to shove his tongue into his small mate’s mouth, and for the boy to suck at it until he falls asleep. The very idea of trying to fuck obedience into Shen Yuan and then using Xin Mo to find himself another soulmate if it doesn’t work out strikes Luo Binghe as sacrilegious. This Shen Yuan, the one he’s raised, is precious, and his; Luo Binghe will never relinquish him.
But sometimes in the course of war, even Luo Binghe has to make a strategic retreat.
In the morning, Shen Yuan finds Grannie Wu in the kitchen speaking to Luo Binghe’s replacement. The man himself has been called back to the countryside by a family emergency. He’s arranged for this flat, sensible woman to fill in for him. The Shens are put out at losing Luo Binghe for an indefinite period, but accept the substitution with reasonable grace. They eventually accept Luo Binghe’s permanent departure in much the same spirit. Auntie Lu is capable and plain, and she proves an efficient if uninspiring woman. Only Shen Yuan politely, silently despises her.
The last time Shen Yuan saw Luo Binghe, the older man was cupping Shen Yuan’s chin. He was looking down into Shen Yuan’s face, and for once he was regarding Shen Yuan without a comfortable, condescending hint of a smile on his face. Shen Yuan had been almost surprised to find Luo Binghe capable of discarding that habitual expression.
He thinks a great deal about Luo Binghe, long after the man himself has left. As months roll into years, and those years march on towards a decade, and his Bingge never does come back. Shen Yuan feels like a boy forgotten while playing hide and seek—as if he’s waiting, crouched in a corner, to be found by a playmate who’s long gone home. Like a naughty child sent to bed without supper and never actually summoned back, or someone locked in a wardrobe as a punishment and forgotten there.
Rationally, Shen Yuan knows that Luo Binghe was only a man. He knows that he must have imagined the flicker of Luo Binghe’s eyes in the dark of his bedroom at night. If those eyes had sometimes shone with a peculiar carmine glint, or if Luo Binghe had sometimes seemed to move faster than anyone should have been able to, then such things might have been tricks of the light. Memory is unreliable, and it distorts with handling. The casual way Luo Binghe would speak of how unrealistic the stabbings and strangulations were on television had just been a joke; it had to have been. Shen Yuan does know that he once saw Luo Binghe break a sizable branch off a tree, bare-handed, for firewood when they’d been camping. It had burned well enough, though, so the branch must have been dry, and thus very brittle. Everything is explicable, if you want it to be.
Nevertheless, Shen Yuan avoids blood tests (aided in this effort by how rarely he needs medical attention). When he cuts himself, he’s seen his blood moving. He’s seen how it wriggles when detached from his body, as though there’s something in it. He’s watched it surge back towards him after it spills, and then slurp back into his fast-healing cuts. Shen Yuan knows that blood isn’t actually supposed to do any of these things. There seems nothing for it but to conceal this—to hide the truth of what’s been done to him.
Much has been done to him—and yet really, nothing at all. What harm can Shen Yuan reasonably lay claim to? A man once worked for his parents; one day, that man left. Luo Binghe had done nothing truly untoward, but then, he hadn’t needed to. Even wilfully-blind Shen Yuan can hardly avoid knowing how much he misses his close companion. Luo Binghe had been Shen Yuan’s only friend and guardian for two years; Luo Binghe had ensured as much. Neither can Shen Yuan avoid understanding the texture of the man’s absence in his life. This, too, Luo Binghe made sure of.
In secondary school, Shen Yuan fools around a fair amount. He tries to, at least. He knows, if not what he wants, that he wants something badly. He’d do a lot to still the restless ache that crawls through him. He wants to ease his frustration, to displace his pointless fixation—to recapture the feeling of the focused attention he’d once assumed was his by right, and always would be. Initially, Shen Yuan feels an odd, guilty shiver when he acts out like this. He knows that Luo Binghe would be furious. He’s almost afraid that Luo Binghe will find out. But Luo Binghe isn’t coming back, and so Luo Binghe won’t be anything, ever again.
High on spite, Shen Yuan starts things he can’t finish. A fair number of the boys in his social set in high school—the ones who are that way inclined—think the engaging but distant boy something of a tease. Shen Yuan gamely follows through with awkward hand-jobs, but when it comes to it he doesn’t want to be touched himself. He handles people clinically, all the while seeming to think about something else. He frowns down at the average, neatly circumcised members of his peers as though they aren’t quite what he was expecting: as though this is all something of a disappointment.
If anyone presses the issue, they discover that Shen Yuan has been taught to deter people whose attentions he doesn’t appreciate—people with ordinary abilities, at least. Shen Yuan does it casually, without seeming to take the thing seriously. Once a much bigger boy tries to insist on going further. He gets a grip on Shen Yuan’s long, neat ponytail and tries to force his head down towards his crotch. Shen Yuan just digs his nails into an artery in the boy’s wrist. He smiles placidly all the while, and he never mentions the incident again.
Such behaviour peters off when it proves unsatisfying. Everyone forgets that the third Shen boy once had a slight reputation. Shen Yuan goes on a few dull dates, picking at the food, and then drops that as well. There isn’t much point in hating people for not being something they simply aren’t, and never can be. Shen Yuan wonders whether even the flesh and blood Luo Binghe (if he really had been a man of flesh and blood) could compare to the idea of him: to the figure who looms over Shen Yuan’s adolescence like a striding colossus. By the time Shen Yuan attends university, everyone who comes to know him in Beijing assumes he’s too studious for that kind of thing.
Shen Yuan’s parents make a point of clearing their schedules to come to his graduation. Their third son smiles for his mother and sister’s phones, and for his father’s old-fashioned camera. He drifts through the celebration held in honour of his cohort feeling vague. Feeling aimless.
And then feeling large hands dragging him into the corner of the room. One curls proprietarily around his waist from behind, hooking Shen Yuan’s hip. There is an uncanny strength in the grip. A warm, solid chest lies at his back.
“Congratulations, A Yuan,” someone rumbles against his ear.
Shen Yuan closes his eyes. He hardly needs them, now. He knows what the man at his back looks like, and he knows that the last decade won’t have altered him an iota. It suddenly seems ridiculous to cling to the idea that his former caretaker was ever anything normal. That the heat and strength of the hands now grasping him are ordinary, and explicable—that the other man might simply run warm.
Luo Binghe knows that a good man would have taken the years they’ve spent apart to seize control over himself. A truly righteous man would leave young Shen Yuan alone and let him enjoy the full, normal life he’s entitled to: everything he’s earned in Luo Binghe’s absence. And Luo Binghe is not, ultimately, quite a monster. But he isn’t a good man, either, and he doesn’t waste time lying to himself about it.
“Gege,” Shen Yuan breathes.
Luo Binghe tucks a real and blinding smile into the crook of his lover’s neck.