Chapter Text
Shang Qinghua looked up from where he was grading papers to find several of his homeroom students stacking chairs into something resembling a christmas tree
He sighed, and looked around to find where his TAs were. They were supposed to be keeping an eye on the kids to make sure they didn’t so stupid things like these!
Both Bin Su and Feng Bai were passed out, their heads on the same table in the corner. The two of them had been TAs at Cang Qiong middle school for a good part of the year, and got along well despite their conflicting personalities. Su Bin was bright and bubbly while Feng Bai was quiet and surly, but they made a good team when wrangling errant tweens.
Shang Qinghua sighed. He supposed he could let them rest for a little bit. After all, college was no joke! Especially when you were student teaching on top of that!
He got up from his desk, accidentally knocking over a couple of papers in the process. He could pick those up later.
“Ahem, what’s going on here?”
The entire group of eighth graders turned around to look at him with shit-eating grins that promised mischief. Really, why had he ever thought that teaching middle schoolers was a good idea?
“We’re just stacking chairs, Mr. Shang!” Fen Tao told him, rocking back on her heels. Shang Qinghua raised an eyebrow.
“Why are we stacking chairs?”
“To summon White No Face, Bai Wuxiang,” Chen Zhi said with the utmost seriousness. The other kids giggled.
“And why are we summoning the harbinger of disease and death into my poor classroom?”
“So we can all go home for the rest of the day, Mr. Shang!” Fen Tao said, and the classroom chorused in agreement.
Shang Qinghua pretended to look sad.
“Oh, well if you summon White No Face into my classroom, then I guess we can’t play a kahoot to win candy anymore…”
He watched as all of the kids' eyes went wide with terror before they all started protesting loudly and frantically started putting the chairs back away. He grinned before turning on the smartboard to start up the game.
***
Shang Qinghua hadn’t planned on becoming a middle school math teacher.
He hadn’t planned on becoming a porn author either, but it is what it is.
In fact, he had started off as a business major before he found out that it was incredibly boring and WAY too expensive for him.
In his first year of college, Shang Qinghua’s father had gotten sick. REALLY sick, actually. The kind of sick that required you to pull out loans and look at treatment plans with experimental medicines that had a 13% chance of working. That was the ‘too expensive’ bit of his business classes. He had to drop out of school for a while, actually. He worked several different odd jobs to try and scrape enough money together to pay for his father’s surgeries, medicine, and hospital bills.
This is also around where he had started to post Proud Immortal Demon Way. In his mind, he wanted it to be his magnum opus; something so filled with rich storytelling, interesting monsters, and compelling backstories that people wouldn't be able to put it down once they started reading. Soon enough, he realized that compelling backstories weren't what paid the bills, and his darling novel turned into the kind of mindless smut that sold extra chapters and merch.
And after all that, after working three different jobs and releasing 10K chapters everyday to keep up with his readers; he still didn’t have enough money to pay for the big surgery that was guaranteed to work, and his father passed away.
Losing his dad was bad enough, but his mom made it worse.
They had divorced when he was just a kid, so he hadn’t seen much of her for the last ten years of his life. She called him a week after his ad had died, claiming that she wanted to reconnect and talk. Desperate for someone to lean on, or even just talk to, he had met up with her.
It had started off well enough; they exchanged pleasantries and she paid for his coffee, talking about what he had been up to and where he had gone to college. He tried to bring up his father, and how much he missed him, but she just deflected and said that it didn’t really affect her at all. That she didn’t want to talk about it.
She ended up talking about her new family most of the time. Shang Qinghua didn’t really get a chance to get a word in between her bragging about how rich her new husband was, and how amazing his new step-siblings were. She ended up offering him a place to stay at her house, saying that they had a room that wasn’t being used and that he could come at any time.
Overall, Shang Qinghua had left the interaction feeling worse than he had before. He had hoped that his mom might be a little sympathetic at least. Maybe cry with him a little bit, or get him a sympathy card.
But rent was due next week, and he had just gotten fired from two of his three jobs for sleeping.
So he ended up taking her up on the offer for a place to crash while he was still trying to get back on his feet.
It turned out to be a really bad decision. The room he was given was, quite literally, a broom closet. Really, he was living like Harry Potter before all the cool magic! It was depressing!
And his new stepsiblings? Amazing his ass! They were little teenage shits who bullied him into giving them money! He had tried to talk to his mom about that, but she just smiled at him and said “You’re they’re older brother! You should be a little indulgent with them!”
Her new husband watched on with a sort of awkward look. They didn’t talk much, but Shang Qinghua got the feeling that he wasn’t very happy with this arrangement either.
Eventually, he had had enough. He announced a month after moving in that he was going back to college, and moved out shortly after. He managed to scrape together enough money to get a Mathematics Education degree and enter the workforce.
***
Cang Qiong middle school was the first place to hire an inexperienced math teacher and give him decent pay, and he had been working there for the better part of three years. It wasn’t a bad school! He even had some decent friends!
Well, one decent friend. Shen Yuan was definitely Shang Qinghua’s friend, even if the english teacher only read his crappy webnovel to complain about it.
They went out drinking every other weekend, and texted each other whenever a student did something especially stupid. They cracked jokes at each other and were there for each other when something crappy was going on in the other's life. Shang Qinghua never had many friends, but he was pretty sure that he and Shen Yuan were pretty good ones.
At the moment, Shang Qinhua was sort of questioning whether or not that friendship went as deep as he thought.
“I’m not saying that I want to marry him! I’m just stating a perfectly logical fact,” Shen Yuan exclaimed
“Bro, you were just waxing poetic about Luo Binghe’s tiddies. That level of commentary from the ever hard-to-please Shen Yuan means that something is going on.”
“He's just attractive! You can agree that he's attractive, right!”
Shang Qinghua shook his head in mock dismay.
“I can't believe that you abandoning our friendship for the guy that you tutored during college,”
“Well I'm not tutoring him anymore!”
“I should hope not, I might have be a mandatory reporter if that's the case,”
They were interrupted when their orders were put in front of them. They both thanked the owner of the noodle bar that they were currently at and proceeded to eat with ferocity previously unseen from members of society who worked in childcare.
When they had slowed down to a reasonable pace of eating on their second round, Shen Yuan cleared his throat.
“So, has your family contacted you yet this month?” He shifted his eyes away.
Shang Qinghua sighed.
Shen Yuan knew about his family situation. Of course he did, the two of them were as thick as thieves! The problem with that was Shen Yuan tended to worry, and when he worried he wanted to talk.
“Not yet,” Shang Qinghua said, “I think that I'll get a call from mom soon though,”
Despite the hard feelings Shang Qinghua had toward his mother, he could never cut ties with her. She was his only family left.
Unfortunately, this meant that she was free to manipulate him.
“How much do you think she'll ask for this month?”
Shang Qinghua laughed humorlessly.
“Probably more than I can afford,”
Shang Qinghua's Mom had been asking him to send money ever since he had moved in with her that one time.
First it was little things. Lunch money for his siblings, or the occasional meal when his mother ‘accidentally’ forgot her wallet. Eventually, paying for things for his mother and her new family became normal.
He didn’t know when the amount of money she asked for turned from an extra twenty in his wallet to thousands of dollars in loans to pay for her son's college, but it was the reality in which he found himself.
Shen Yuan’s face made it very clear that he didn’t appreciate that answers. However, they had had this conversation so many times that he knew not to push Shang Qinghua.
“Y’know, I can always help you out when money’s tight-” Shang Qinghua cut him off like he always did when Shen Yuan went down that path.
“No way!” he laughed, trying to lighten the mood, “I know that you have plenty of money to spare, but some of us have our pride cucumber-bro! How could I live with myself if I just ran to you for every little money-related problem? It's a slight against my dignity!”
Shen Yuan let out long suffering sigh and Shang Qinghua grinned.
The two of them have had this conversation many times. Shen Yuan was, much to Shang Qinghua’s dismay, very rich. He didn't look it, with the way he wore his coats to tatters and refused to buy new tea sets, but it was always apparent when he was offering or giving gifts. Shang Qinghua had already pawned off one too many watches from Shen Yuan than he was comfortable with.
Shang Qinghua knows that Shen Yuan would help him out of the situation he had with his mother if he was allowed to. He was a good bro like that.
But he kept refusing for the same reason that he didn't just cut ties with his mother and be done with her.
He didn't want to lose the only family connection he had. He supposed that it had become a habit, familiar. It would take courage to change things now.
And Shang Qinghua had always been a coward.
The two of them spent the rest of the night going from bar to bar and getting drunk out of their minds. It was a bit of a tradition for the two of them at this point really. Shen Yuan laughed at Shang Qinghua’s story about his students summoning Bai Wuxiang, and at some point they managed to call taxis and go to their respective homes.
Shang Qinghua passes out almost immediately.
***
The next morning finds Shang Qinghua with a massive hangover.
His own fault, really. He knew that it was Friday night and decided that he wasn’t going to get another chance like this for a long while to get this drunk with cucumber-bro. Especially after he started to see Luo Binghe more often. No matter what Shen Yuan said, those two definitely had something going on. So Shang Qinghua was most likely going to be alone on Friday night for the foreseeable future.
He groaned as he got up from bed, narrowly avoiding the stack of redbull cans on the ground and staggering his way into the kitchen.
Eventually he can coordinate his hands enough to get the water in the glass, and sets down the glass of water in liu of getting the Advil from his cupboard. He pops the lid off and shakes the bottle, only to find it completely empty.
He groaned.
It looked like a trip to the grocery store was in order.