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Shen Qingqiu does not make a habit of thinking too deeply about his own feelings.
To be fair, he’s often preoccupied with other things—trying to ensure everything goes more-or-less smoothly in regards to plot, attempting not to lose his mind, cultivating good relations with both the common people and with his fellow peak lords, occasionally heading down the mountain or checking in on all of his disciples’ progress—but even when he is not, he vastly prefers to tire his brain with reading, calligraphy, music.
Still, at times he finds himself kneeling vacantly in front of the sword mound at the back of the mountain, just stopping himself from tracing again and again the few characters painted over the mound’s wooden marker.
He easily loses track of time there, afternoons becoming evenings in the blink of an eye, if even that, the temperature dropping at a moment’s notice. Of course, what with his middle-stage core formation, the cold is not an issue; even with the effects of Without A Cure, he would be a sad excuse of an immortal cultivator if he were to catch cold from just a little chilly weather.
He does, however, use the creeping frost to excuse the tremors in his fingers.
Liu Qingge finds him there sometimes, when he misses their appointments. Shen Qingqiu likes to think that this doesn’t happen often, but the number of times Liu Qingge has come stomping around the bamboo house with an ill-tempered scowl, Cheng Luan threateningly in hand, has risen unbidden so that he can no longer truthfully make the claim. Each time, though, he pulls his outer layers tighter around himself to ward off any gooseflesh, flicks open his fan with an elegant, practiced flick of the wrist, and smiles. “This shixiong has troubled Liu-shidi again,” he says.
“Just stop wasting my time,” Liu Qingge always responds. “I don’t have the time to come to your peak so often just because you don’t know how to keep your appointments.” But there’s something disingenuous about the harsh set of his brow, and he never stops coming.
There is a feeling that Shen Qingqiu cannot shake.
He tries to justify the way things turned out to himself. The System wouldn’t have let things turn out any other way—after all, it threatened to deduct tens of thousands of points, points that he didn’t have, he tells himself. Luo Binghe had to descend into the Abyss—how else would he find the sword and power he needed, he tells himself. He tries to convince himself into feeling satisfied, attributing any ill feelings to resentment at having his new point totals set at zero, because things turned out exactly as they were supposed to.
But no matter how much he thinks he can fool himself, he cannot lie for years and years about things that he knows better than anyone else.
The thing that Shen Qingqiu feels is guilt.
Shen Qingqiu is guilty, guilty of having to shove the boy he raised into the condemnation of that Endless Abyss when that boy believed so fully that his teacher would protect him no matter what. He recalls the words he said, the way he blamed his own cruelty on the fact that Binghe was of Heavenly Demon blood, but he knows—or does he—that in this case, at least, there really was no choice. He cannot explain himself using the System; he can only lay the responsibility of those words upon himself. And yet doing that feels almost self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, like owning up to something horrible—but shouldn’t he do that? It was him who decided on his own actions, after all.
And it is for that reason that he cannot bring himself to apologize, to admit his regret, to try and justify anything that he has done, even as the words rise to his lips when he faces the empty space at the back of Qing Jing peak.
There is something that he owes to Luo Binghe now, and the thought leaves a sour taste on his tongue, not because he resents it but because he knows it is something that he could never repay just with words, or with pacifying actions. It is something larger and heavier than that, and it is something that he can’t bring himself to acknowledge for fear of the change that it will bring, but someday he will have to face it, and someday he will understand just how deep the trust he betrayed was, and someday he will understand the weight that it held when it existed in a bright-eyed, fresh-faced, sticky disciple.
“Luo Binghe,” Shen Qingqiu says one evening, kneeling once more in front of Zheng Yang’s sword mound. He touches the marker again, his fingers having long memorized the grooves in the wood and the way the grain runs through the material. His words are quiet, as though he is trying to hide them from the world, although there would be no one around the bamboo house to hear them. “The next time we meet, you will hate this teacher, hm?”
And of course, he would have good reason to. Shen Qingqiu would not be able to bring himself to blame him.
After all these years, he still knows the gentle tone that he used to use to speak to his most treasured disciple. It is that tone that he uses now, words mellow, voice caring, even as he watches that same disciple’s brow furrow in an agony that he has only read, but never known. He doesn’t know if Luo Binghe can hear him, but he speaks anyway. “Don’t let it suppress your heart.” (He misses the way Binghe’s eyes widen just so before they clench shut again, the flickering of his expression as he takes in the words.)
Standing on the roof of highest building of the city, eyes blurred in the light, the sun casting everything in molten gold, he steps forward, takes a deep breath, and pulls Luo Binghe forward just a half-step into his arms. One hand finds its way to rest softly on the crown of his head, the other on his back, and for a single moment he can almost pretend that they are back on Qing Jing peak, that Luo Binghe has just stumbled into him again after a misstep in his lessons, that he will draw his fan and gently smack him on the forehead before setting him straight again.
Then, Shen Qingqiu self-destructs.
The pain that floods through his meridians is deep and hollowing, like all of his spiritual energy is being carved out of his body. But with its absence, he feels a wrenching relief, a release that finally, finally, he can make it—everything—up to the disciple he once pushed into hell, the disciple he doomed to years of suffering alone, only his thoughts and his unholy sword for company—finally, he can do what he once promised he would, before he went back on his word.
He stumbles backward, to the edge of the roof, one step at a time.
“Everything that’s happened in the past… I’ll repay it all to you today.”
He falls.