deercountry | Shen Yuan | November Catch-All

He has no issue with being a human crutch, or even carrying Shen Yuan, but the situation for him is fraught enough and Xichen is happy to save him a little face, even if the worst he may get is a bit of a teasing from his peers.

He thanks the guard with as much a bow he can give, all things considered.

"Water and a bit of medicine should help with this."

Water is collected, and he guides Shen Yuan in the direction the other man initially pointed out, and heads into the barracks.

"Shen-gongzi has been stricken with hallucinations too," he states, sitting his friend down on his bed. "I understand they are troubling, and why he may not want to, but if he does wish to talk about it, I will listen."

It's a relief to finally reach his own, personal space, curtained off from the rest of the barracks (which are sparsely populated, anyway; only a few Sleepers actually live at the outpost, and most of the space is intended for future refugees, should an emergency ever drive them out of the city). Shen Yuan sits down heavily on his bed and accepts the cup of water Lan Xichen hands him, sipping slowly this time instead of gulping.

"I know," he grumbles. Oh, he knows. When he looks down into the cup to avoid Lan Xichen's gaze, it's not even a surprise to find his reflection floating on top of a cup full of blood. Shen Yuan sighs heavily and closes his eyes for a moment, focusing on his breathing.

"It's all fake," he finally says. "Somebody's trying to scare us, that's all."

Lan Xichen watches as Shen Yuan seems to try to calm himself down, and a worried furrow appears in his brow.

"The memories that are being drawn upon are real. They are things that make us vulnerable."

He glances around the barracks, and takes a deep breath.

"Shen-gongzi, my clan specializes in a kind of musical cultivation. If you like, I can play Cleansing for you. It has helped take much of the edge off these hallucinations for A-Yao and I."

"Lan-gongzi has been seeing memories...?" Now it is Shen Yuan's turn to struggle with that prying sense of curiosity. What is it about hearing about someone's troubles that makes humans want to hear about all the gory details?

He sighs again and drains the last of the water. "I...this one would ordinarily be honored to accept Lan-gongzi's generous offer, but I don't want to wake anyone up so late at night...they might be annoyed."

He smiles weakly. "It's fine. The things I've been seeing... perhaps they might have happened in another life, but not here, not to me. This one knows they aren't real."

"I have, yes."

His voice is barely a whisper. After all, who wouldn't be curious about what could terrify the First Jade of Lan...?

It is painful to elaborate, but he cannot ask Shen Yuan to open up to him without doing the same in turn. He doesn't believe any friendship should be transactional, but pretending that there is no give-and-take in these matters is also naïve.

"Shortly before coming here, I ...hurt someone very dear to me."

Not naming names, of course.

"...Is what you're seeing something from your life before your first transmigration?"

"You too, huh?" Shen Yuan asks, half-hysterical, before he can stop it. He didn't mean to say that, didn't mean for any of this happen, but Lan Xichen is here and talking to him, and it's either attend to him, or look at the grasping creeper vines that are growing out of the wall. Ties That Bind, the die-hard fan that still lives in Shen Yuan's brain notes. Not a local species.

"No," he says, wringing his hands in his lap. "It's a, a mix. Some things that might have happened, if I'd never left the last world I lived in. Some things that...that might happen, I suppose, if a certain person came here."

He bows his head to hide his face. "I hope he never comes here," he whispers shamefully.

Xichen's expression is pained, but he gives a small nod of affirmation.

"Yes. Me too."

Eventually he is able to meet Shen Yuan's eyes again, knuckles white as long delicate fingers twist together in his lap.

"Is this certain person you hope never comes here one in the same as the one you've hurt?"

There are little insects in his guts, gnawing away at his liver and heart. The vine creeps across the floor, reaching for his ankle. Shen Yuan nods, and then shakes his head, hard, throwing off the hallucinations like a horse throws off flies.

"The disciple I was forced to betray," he says, sick with misery and yet defiant at the same time. He knows his crimes; he doesn't need Trench to remind him. "Luo Binghe."

"You said that name before," Xichen remarks. "When we were flying."

There's a sharp drop in his gut; how can one be forced to betray someone?

He finds it hard to believe that Shen Yuan would willingly betray his own disciple; the regret writ across his face is evidence enough of his grief, so what kind of circumstances would lead to such a painful outcome?

He wants to ask, desperately understand Shen Yuan's reasoning, but the man is clearly being plagued by visions and so Xichen places a steadying hand on his shoulder.

"...The Tower is weakening and shall soon fall."

It had snapped him out of his visions with Jin Guangyao. Perhaps it will help Shen Yuan.

Oh, had he said that out loud? Shen Yuan nods reluctantly. "In my first month here," he explains, "I had to take an oath that I wouldn't run from him, if he ever did arrive. But of course the real Binghe wouldn't know that, so when the hallucination tried to use that to call me back..." He smiles again, an utterly humorless baring of teeth. "As I said, I know the visions aren't real."

His pensive mood is destroyed, however, when Lan Xichen speaks *that damned refrain.* His eyes flash with anger he *knows* is misplaced, but cannot help but express as he snarls and says, "*No.* I don't believe that. I refuse."

Xichen is rendered momentarily speechless from the outburst.

His shock fades into confusion and concern, a furrow splitting his brow.

"My apologies - the phrase helped A-Yao and I break out of our illusions. Is there some deeper meaning to it...?"

Is there some... Shen Yuan has to laugh, because it's that or start screaming. Lan Xichen looks so lost and confused, despite his power, just like another boy Shen Yuan used to know.

"The Tower," he says evenly, "is one of the Pthumerians. And Trench is its body." He gestures at the wall of the barracks, the city beyond it. "Trench is a mess because it's sick; what do you think will happen if it dies? What do you think will happen to us? Where will we *go?*"

A young man is crying somewhere outside. A little girl giggles. "I have nothing to go back to," Shen Yuan says bleakly.

The Tower, capital T. Xichen wants to go shove his head in a bucket of ice water, for all the good it will do now that the cold never bothers him anyway.

"I had not considered it had meant the Pthumerian. Why would anyone think the destruction of an entire city is --"

He shakes his head, unable to finish that sentence.

"If there is some way to help, then we absolutely must."

He misses his Uncle, his sect, his brother and nephew. But like Shen Yuan, these are people who can live without him. Here, there is a chance to remedy his deepest regret.

"But what can we do, that we have not already?" Shen Yuan asks. He settles back down on his bed, hugging himself tightly. Someone is rattling the door, sobbing as though they've been beaten -- as though they are *being* beaten, cruelly whipped for no reason at all. "I believe that things will work out," Shen Yuan says firmly. "They *will.* Maybe the Tower isn't even really sick; maybe the Pthumerians simply like to torment us." Wait no, that sounds terrible. "I still prefer being here to bring back *there,*" he says staunchly.

He cannot hear the sobbing or the rattling. Those things are beyond him, but if he knew what was going on in Shen Yuan's head right now...

"I cannot offer you answers, Shen-gongzi."

His tone is soft, gentle. He wants to reassure, but he won't state something false just because he thinks it's something Shen Yuan would like to hear.

"But if there is a way, we must find it. Even if there is so much about this place I have yet to understand, I too have accepted this place as my new home. You are... not alone in this."

It would seem they have a lot in common, even; including a similar regret that has them planting themselves firmly in Trench for all its horrors.

"No?" Shen Yuan looks up, searching Lan Xichen's eyes. The rattling quiets and the sobbing fades out slowly, blown away on a gentle wind. "No, I guess I'm not."

He shyly extends Lan Xichen a hand, hesitating before saying, "Would you like to see him? Before everything went wrong?"

He takes Shen Yuan's offered hand in his own, cold and dry as midwinter, and nods.

"Yes. Show me."

He wants to see this disciple that Shen Yuan thought he had no choice but to kill; Luo Binghe. He wants to understand Shen Yuan's reasons for such a thing. A great deal must have gone wrong indeed.

Shen Yuan nods, and tugs Lan Xichen down to sit next to him on the bed. From the corner between his pillow and the wall he retrieves it: a little metal box, plain in every way, but he holds it like it's a holy relic.

"I received this from my patron Pthumerian last July," he whispers. "It shows my memories, like...like the recordings on the network, only they're mine. They come from me." He knows he's doing a bad job of explaining it, but he's too emotional, just now, to do better. He ducks his head, avoiding eye contact as he presses the box's sides. "I know it's foolish, but I use it sometimes to remind myself of when he was happy."

And possibly to punish himself for destroying it all, but shhh. Some truths he's not ready to face yet.

In the air above the box, the image of a desk appears. Two arms clad in dangling green sleeves lean on it; in one hand is a brush, and notes on a lesson plan are being written. A door opens somewhere and a tired voice that sounds like Shen Yuan but older and colder says, "Just leave it on the table, Ming Fan."

"This disciple journeyed through the night to see shizun," a youthful, sweet, yet masculine voice replies. "Won't he spare a single look for me?"

The brush stills, and then is dropped back into its stand. The first voice calls, "Binghe!" losing all but a hint of it's cold remoteness, and the view changes rapidly as Shen Qingqiu turns around and pushes himself to his feet.

Luo Binghe is 17 and resplendent, straight-backed as a young tree and smiling like a cat that got away with the cream. He bows his head respectfully as his shizun approaches, but quickly looks up again, losing none of his smug happiness as his teacher taps him on the head with his fan guard.

"What are you doing back, silly boy?" Shen Qingqiu asks (he sounds more like an indulgent grandfather than a martial teacher). "Don't tell me the mission was too much for you?"

Binghe shakes his head. "I missed shizun so much that I completed the mission early, so I could come back today," he says, eyes sparkling, and gestures to the low table and tea set just behind him. "Won't shizun allow me to serve him?"

"Oh, alright," Shen Qingqiu says, with a transparently false put-upon sigh. "But really Binghe, you shouldn't push yourself like that. Even you can get tired, you know..."

Beside Lan Xichen, Shen Yuan is starting to sniffle and trying to hide it. "He was such a good, sweet boy," he whispers, as he mutes the recording of Binghe serving tea and taking his half-hearted scolding with a smile.

Xichen sits close to Shen Yuan, watching the scene play out. It's charming and idyllic, and it's rather clear the boy is utterly smitten with his shizun.

Xichen has had that happen a number of times, teenagers are going to teenager after all, and it's a delicate wire to walk by making sure the boundary between master and disciple is clear without cutting some poor youth too deeply over having a harmless precocious crush.

As far as he can tell, Shen Yuan is utterly ignorant to the boy's feelings and genuinely concerned for his well-being, treating him more how Xichen treats Huaisang than anything else.

"There is clearly a bond here," he says diplomatically. "But why break it?"

"The System," Shen Yuan says with a miserable snarl. He turns off the memory box, but continues to hold it in his hands, rotating it and tapping the sides as he says, "Binghe existed in my native world as a character in a book. The protagonist. It was the last thing I read before I died." He grimaces again. "Actually I technically died cursing the author out for giving him such a shitty ending...I was really sick at the time, in my defense."

"But then I died," he continues, "and I woke up in what I can only call the world of the book, in the body of one of the characters, and a voice in my head calling itself the System told me I had to pretend to *be* that character, or I'd be sent back to my original world. You know, where I was dead. I had to help Binghe pass certain plot milestones, or I'd be sent back to my original world, where I was dead. I had to," he chokes up again, voice cracking, but rallies and says, "I had to betray that sweet child, and throw him into the Endless Abyss, or I'd be sent back to my original world, where I was dead."

Switching to holding the box in one hand, he bunches up his sleeve with the other and uses it to scrub the falling tears from his face. "I know it's terrible," he mumbles into his sleeve. "You're going to say I should have let the System kill me rather than betray a disciple, right? That's what a real shizun would have done."

"We don't always make the best decisions faced with impossible choices."

Wasn't that how it was for Jin Guangyao? he thinks ruefully, and tries to shake the thought from his head.

It's such a non-answer, and Xichen hates it. Hates that part of him that wants to keep the peace still, even if there is no great political blowback to speaking his mind.

Taking a deep breath, he decides to give being a bit more open a try.

"Whether or not you should have died in his stead is irrelevant now. But the regret you feel shows the depth you cared for him, and that matters. You have a right to grieve, even if you think otherwise."

Edited 2022-11-12 22:30 (UTC)

"I do," Shen Yuan agrees, his voice hitching and cracking. "I regret it so much, I- I have to force myself not to think about it, because otherwise I'll do nothing *but* regret..."

And it's only because he got so drunk that he's showing his weakness like this, cracking open the mask and proving once and for all that he's not fine, that he carries that weight on his back like a prison of his own making. And then he really does begin to cry, and through his sobs he says,

"I still don't want him here!" he declares. "I'd do anything, give anything, to make him stay *there* while I stay *here.* If he comes here he'll hurt me, just like he hurt the original Shen Qingqiu in the book. And I know I d-d-deserve it," he sobs, "but I don't want to live through that, I don't, I don't..."

Perhaps realizing he's said too much, or just that he's gotten too loud for the late hour, he stuffs one of his hanging sleeves in his mouth, his shoulders convulsing with the strength of his sobs.

...Otherwise I'll do nothing but regret...

He is sharply reminded of his didi and his time in seclusion, how he intended to go into seclusion himself after everything.

An arm wraps gently around Shen Yuan's shoulder, gentle but firm, offering a physical support that words are inadequate to convey. He lets Shen Yuan shed his tears, lets him feel his heartache and fear and release it, instead of bottling it up.

Maybe the Gusu Lan Sect had a few things backwards...

"If he comes here, if he wakes on those shores, I will not let him hurt you. A-Yao will not stand for such a thing either. Shen-gongzi is not alone."

Shen Yuan sniffles hard, leaning his face into Lan Xichen's chest and, fuck it, throwing an arm around his waist. He's drunk and terrified and miserable, and he's been those last two things for literally years. Now somebody knows the worst of it and they're hugging him about it, so fuck dignity. He'll take this for as long as he can have it.

But he's also still Shen Yuan, and he can't stop himself from overthinking. "W-why?" he finally asks, looking up at Lan Xichen with soaked, bloodshot eyes. "Why do you care? Because we're c-cultivators, or..."

"No."

The answer is firm and assured. There is none of his hesitance and uncertainty that has plagued him since coming here.

No, longer than that. Though not much.

"I know what it is to take the life of someone you care about. I know what it is like to look upon lives lost, and wonder if there was, perhaps, some other way. I know very well what it is to have that pain and regret tear you apart from the inside out."

And he knew what needed to be done about it, what his Sect would demand of him, and he knew it was wrong. He would languish in isolation as the wounds bore deeper into him evermore until grief was all he knew.

That would not happen to his friend.

"I would be a poor friend if I let you deteriorate in such a way."

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CW: reference to child abuse

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