Chapter Text
It’s the same every time. Fight and shout and lash out with steel. Fly haphazardly back to Cang Qiong bearing fresh new bruises and bloodied gashes.
Don’t tell Mu-shidi unless the injuries are internal. Broken bones don’t count. They will heal. Shen Qingqiu will never wake up. No matter what that demonic traitor of a disciple says, he will never wake up.
Open wounds close over. Scars fade away, but the memories linger.
The smell of ginseng and jasmine, smile-creased eyes over a painted fabric fan.
He will never wake up.
Not once does Liu Qingge consider leaving him with the demon. It was his fault he died, and they both know it. It was Liu Qingge’s fault too. He was too slow, too weak, too…something.
Deep down he knows what they are doing isn’t productive. The fighting and the unconcealed rage boiling over both of them, but it’s for Shen Qingqiu. He wouldn’t stop even if he knew how.
So he throws himself at the one person he’s never been able to beat. Trades splintered bones and black eyes for a brick wall to bounce his frustration off of. Over and over and over. Until the months blend into years, and he’s barely ever back at Bai Zhan anymore.
It’s jarring the first time this routine is broken.
They’re fighting like always. The floorboards have split in half again, the walls are gouged through with sword slashes. There’s hatred in his heart and a displaced desolation somewhere deeper.
Liu Qingge leaves himself open for a split second. Not on purpose, never on purpose, but it always happens at some point anyway. It’s the routine. The demon—Luo Binghe takes the opportunity to throw him through the farthest wall with his usual clawing, animalistic, fury.
Liu Qingge staggers out of the wreckage, spitting blood but ready to keep going, an unfaltering grip on Cheng Luan and anger burning in his chest. He growls out a few scattered phrases. Something along the lines of Shen Qingqiu and disappointment. Something he really has no right to say, but chooses to anyway in an attempt to externalize the pain.
He isn’t even fully aware of the words rushing out of his mouth like a flash flood or a blazing fire but he levels a look of disdain at the demon and—Luo Binghe looks stricken.
Red eyes fixed helplessly at a point over Liu Qingge’s shoulder. Chest rising rapidly with exertion, tear tracks tracing over his rage reddened cheeks, and gaze glazed over with emotion. As if looking at something behind his former martial uncle.
Despite well-whittled instincts that scream at him to never turn his back on an opponent, let alone one so obviously unstable as Luo Binghe, Liu Qingge casts a quick glance towards the pulverized wall. There is nothing. He hadn’t expected anything to be there but…the look on the demon’s face is disconcerting.
Said demon glances shakily down at a clawed hand. Curls it into a fist and lets the black nails pierce through his palm, little rivulets of blood racing down his arm and dripping all over the badly beaten floorboards.
There’s a fresh look in his eyes that Liu Qingge doesn’t like. Wildly unhinged in a way that he has never appeared before. The red and radiating zuiyin on his forehead seeping a disagreeable extent of demonic energy into the air between the two of them.
Something akin to fear registers in the back of his mind for the first time since they started these fights. Since he first realized that the demon had no interest in killing him.
He raises Cheng Luan higher. A gleaming silver barrier between him and the enemy.
Luo Binghe locks eyes with him one final time, and then turns and walks away, leaving Liu Qingge more unsettled than ever before.
In the beginning the brawls were more brutal. There wasn’t a day that Liu Qingge didn’t have scratches or scars. Not a fight that he walked away from with anything less than unattractively angled fingers and lacerations along his arms. It would have been a point of pride if he didn’t keep losing.
Time after time he would show up, get thrown through walls and carved up by that damnable sword. Then when he couldn’t stand up any longer, the demon would toss him onto the steps of Huan Hua Palace. Shuttering the gilded gold doors with a humiliating finality.
Now Liu Qingge could admit that their fights had made him stronger. That there was perhaps no one else who could beat him in a battle to the death, save for the sect leader. But even if he came out of it with a few less scrapes and bruises, what did it matter if he didn’t emerge as the indisputable victor? With Shen Qingqiu’s body in his arms and a defeated Luo Binghe behind him, he would return to Cang Qiong and give his martial brother a proper burial. And then…
He didn’t like thinking about the And Then. In fact, he didn’t really like thinking about any of this at all.
That was the one thing he liked about these fights. They kept Liu Qingge from having to. Whispers about the future and all the afters it brought along with it couldn’t sneak their way in when he was focusing on the weight of a sword in his hand, the frustration churning in his veins, and the blood soaking every surface the two of them touched.
He ignored the looks the other peak lords gave him. Disregarded the distant desolate pain in Zhangmen-shixiong’s eyes every time they met his. And refused to think about the delicately folded, dust-coated fan lying untouched on a shelf in a neglected house on Bai Zhan Peak.
At night, when Liu Qingge was stuck reaching out for sleep that wouldn’t come, he often revisited those fights. Scrutinizing every wrong move he made, each faulty twist of a foot, all those times he was too slow to get back up before a particularly bone-breaking blow landed and it all ended in the denigrating pain of abject failure.
In the daylight hours, during the few spare moments when he wasn’t back at the demon’s lair, Liu Qingge sought other outlets of aggression. Ostensibly performing the procrastinated duties of an ever absent peak lord, he hunted monsters that crept too close to mortal settlements and pursued demons and fugitive cultivators alike.
It’s while he’s embroiled in one of these missions, chasing a wayward demonic cultivator around the outskirts of the Borderlands, that he makes the mistake that sets everything into motion.
Liu Qingge loathes the petty tricks that demonic cultivators so often love to employ, but that often isn’t enough to stop him from falling for them. Shen Qingqiu used to scold him for rushing head first into things without stopping to consider whether his opponent might have something up their sleeve.
There is no Shen Qingqiu to scold him when the slippery woman in front of him tosses something onto the dirt. Not when a cloud of green smoke obstructs his vision and fills his lungs—and not when he lurches to the ground, legs stalled in what feels to be a living approximation of rigor mortis.
The peak lord’s body seizes up. Muscles contract and lock in place. He’s frozen face down in the dirt, nails feebly clawing at nothing as all feeling escapes him. Cheng Luan clatters to the ground somewhere, distantly hollow. The attempt he makes at a grunt of pain is silenced by his unresponsive vocal chords.
Peals of unrestrained laughter come from the woman he’d been chasing. Delighted and coming from a direction that once meant up, and now only means danger.
His limbs are like lead. Liu Qingge fights with all his might to get up and only manages to move a single finger.
Above him, the demonic cultivator finally calms herself enough to speak.
“Look at you!” she crows. There’s a teasing tone to her voice that’s distinctly aggravating. “What has the mighty Peak Lord of Bai Zhan been reduced to now?”
She crouches a few feet away from where Liu Qingge lay—as if she isn’t afraid of him at all, as if he wouldn’t have captured her in an instant without her employ of fiendish tricks—trailing sleeves dragged uncaringly through the dirt.
When she speaks again it’s in a conversational sort of way, as though they’d just sat down to tea together. “That concoction of mine was actually a long shot you know. I only started working on it just last week, you’re lucky there weren’t any unsavory side effects.”
As if paralyzation isn’t enough of one already. Liu Qingge forces his head to turn to face her, grimacing at the tingling feeling that overtakes his nerves at what should be a simple action.
Piercing purple eyes lance through him consideringly. Undoubtedly those are a side effect of her own dealings with dark practices. Liu Qingge had done just enough research to ascertain that this woman was definitely human before tracking her down, but evidently not enough to learn that she was skilled in the creation of paralyzing powders. Begrudged as he is to admit it, that information would have been helpful ahead of time.
The woman places a lacquered nail underneath his chin and grins wickedly. “It’s really such a shame for a pretty face like that to be wasted on a war god, don’t you think? I know a few skinner demons that would empty their pockets for the chance to look like you.”
He does his best to glare at her with all the acidity that Shen Qingqiu used to wield against him during their disciple days, harshly suppressing the creeping feeling of fear skittering around in the back of his brain.
“Or…” Her gaze flicks down to his slackened wrist, where the distinctive print of foreign fingers lays outlined in muddled bruises of purple and black. “I could hand you over to someone else.”
…Liu Qingge can’t help but wish she’d chosen to skin him instead.
The demonic cultivator seems to sense his intense aversion to the idea and nods decisively, eyes creasing with a mirth he does not feel. “No need to fear little peak lord, the demonic emperor takes great care of his guests.”
For a brief incredulous moment, Liu Qingge wonders if they are even thinking of the same person. By taking great care of his guests does she mean throwing them through walls?
Then he doesn’t have the wherewithal to wonder about anything anymore because she is blowing another powder—this one wreathed in a cerulean haze—into his face and his vision is blurring at the edges like a heat-warped mirage in the desert.
The last thing he sees is the woman stooping over Cheng Luan, a contemplative expression on her face. She curls her fingers around the hilt. Liu Qingge feels a rush of anger, and then darkness drapes itself across him, and he feels nothing else at all.