Chapter Text
It all started because Ning Yingying asked Shen Qingqiu for a private audience. Some sentimental part of Shen Qingqiu could never stop thinking of her as a sweet young creature, barely more than a child, but truthfully not only was Ning Yingying nearing thirty, but she had taken on at least 50 or 60% of the Qing Jing peak administrative work that Shen Qingqiu really ought to have been doing. As it was, Ning Yingying handled the lion’s share, Ming Fan whatever else she told him to do, and Shen Qingqiu handled the remaining ten or fifteen percent while Binghe tried desperately to distract him from it.
Genuinely eager to fulfill the request (two years spent married to Binghe had transformed Shen Qingqiu, a man who would have insisted he was an introvert in his youth, into someone genuinely made lonely when his giant, clingy husband didn’t come gnaw on him verbally or literally at least every few hours), Shen Qingqiu digs out the tea set Ning Yingying had given him two New Years’ ago. It has been suspiciously pushed away to the very back of the cupboard, but Shen Qingqiu charitably decides that Binghe had probably just wanted to make room for the copious amounts of cooking equipment they now own at Binghe’s insistence -- one of Binghe’s only true indulgences with the immense amount of wealth that came with being a demon lord.
Ning Yingying is prompt, and seemingly in high spirits when she arrives. He welcomes her into the house, which is slightly less tidy than Binghe left it three days ago but still more or less fit for a guest.
“Shizun,” she says warmly. “Did you get the food I sent for you the past few nights?”
It occurs to Shen Qingqiu that he could take umbrage at either the fact that his own disciples seem to have willfully forgotten that he doesn’t need to eat, or at the fact that Binghe makes him seem so comparatively useless in the kitchen that no one believes he could prepare himself a simple meal if he wanted one. Or the fact that the food was pretty mid. But it’s Ning Yingying, and he knows she has only the best intentions, so he only stifles a sigh and lets her pour his tea. “Yes, thank you. Are you well?”
“Very well,” Ning Yingying says. She really has grown up so much, from a fluttery little sprout to a steady tree. “I have to tell you something, Shizun.”
“Mm?” Shen Qingqiu idly spoons a few crystals of lump sugar into his tea. No one else here drinks sugar sweet, of course, but Binghe had noticed that Shen Qingqiu liked to sneak some in while he wasn’t looking and consequently they kept a small supply in a covered bowl on the table. Fuck, he misses Binghe. Fuck , he misses boba.
As such, he isn’t paying full attention when Ning Yingying says, “Liu Mingyan and I are courting.”
“Eh?” Shen Qingqiu says, startled. His little Yingying? Although she’s nearly a full decade older than she was when she married Bing-ge, he supposes. “Who are you two courting?”
It’s not the worst idea, in all honesty, to enter a harem with a union already in place. Sets of sisters had sometimes done things like that in PIDW, although they nearly always ended up betraying each other in the end -- Ning Yingying and Liu Mingyan could never be manipulated into such a thing. As Bing-ge’s two sanest wives, they had never fought with each other once even in the original novel. Trust two clever girls like them to figure out a way to gain advantage in this whole bullshit fantasy patriarchy. The question is, in this timeline, what possible man besides Binghe would be powerful and hot enough to pull two of the cultivation world’s most eligible bachelorettes?
Ning Yingying blinks at him. “Each… other?” she says, as if she thinks she misheard him. “Mingyan and I are in love, Shizun.”
“What?” Shen Qingqiu says, baffled, and then realizes he had forgotten entirely about lesbians. “Oh.”
Ning Yingying is watching him curiously, at least as confused as he is. “Is it that much of a surprise, Shizun? Everyone knows Mingyan is--”
A lala ? Shen Qingqiu’s hysterical brain provides. Shit, what did lesbians even call themselves historically? And no, he hadn’t known that. Did his arrival here somehow turn Liu Mingyan gay as well as Binghe? Talk about a ripple effect, what the fuck!
“--averse to the company of men,” Ning Yingying finishes, which, granted, is true, but it’s true of nearly every young lady on Xian Shu, right? Shen Qingqiu’s head spins. Sure, Liu Mingyan was famously the only wife that Bing-ge never banged, but that was just because he respected her so much. And yes, some of her fight scenes with Sha Hualing did border on the… homoerotic, but Shen Qingqiu could have sworn it was a male gaze thing!!! Although conceptually, he supposes that women can be gay outside of fanservice.
“Ah, yes,” Shen Qingqiu says, covering the lower half of his face with his fan. “But I thought that you, and perhaps Ming Fan…?”
Ning Yingying crinkles her nose. “We went on one date six years ago and we agreed it was too weird. He’s like my brother, Shizun.” Okay, so Ning Yingying must be a little bit straight still, or at least she was then. She worries her lip between her teeth, an old habit from when she was a teenager. “Do you… do you disapprove, Shizun?”
“Disapprove?” Shen Qingqiu echoes. It occurs to him that seeking his approval was probably the entire point of this meeting. “No, of course not. That is, I do approve, this master was merely surprised.” A terrible thought occurs to him. “You aren’t moving to Xian Shu, are you?”
Ning Yingying lets out a breath and smiles. “No, of course not,” she says. “With Shizun’s permission, I was hoping we could petition to get our own plot of land halfway up the mountain and fly up to our respective peaks to complete our duties.”
What a relief. “I will ask Zhangmen-shixiong on your behalf,” Shen Qingqiu promises her. Ah, young love, he thinks, getting more used to the idea. Although if they’re going to be living together, he hopes Liu Mingyan is better at running a household than Ning Yingying is; there was a reason he never asked her to do chores around the bamboo cottage even before Binghe moved in. Although -- who even does the chores, when it’s two women?
You idiot , his brain tells him. Binghe does the chores, even though neither of you are ladies. But that wasn’t a gender thing, that was a ‘Binghe’s control issues’ thing.
Ning Yingying grins at him, freed of her concern, and bows as deeply as she can while sitting down at the table. “Many, many thanks, Shizun. We’re planning to have a long engagement, but as soon as we set a date for the wedding, I hope you’ll be amenable to coming.” Her eyes flick to the empty seat on Shen Qingqiu’s side of the table. “A-Luo too, but only if he absolutely promises not to fight with Liu-ge.”
“Your shishu lets you call him that?” Shen Qingqiu asks mildly. Just how long had he overlooked this?
A laugh bubbles out of Ning Yingying. “Well, the alternative is Ge-ge (歌哥), isn’t that worse?” she points out through giggles. “He didn’t say anything about it, but he didn’t stab me for asking for his approval to propose to Mingyan, so I think I’m allowed.”
Ning Yingying was the one who proposed. Shen Qingqiu tries to understand why the thought is so strange in his brain. Sure, it was a little gauche to go up to a gay couple and ask who was the man and who was the woman in the relationship, but it’s not like people didn’t think it anyway, Shen Qingqiu included. And if he put his mind to it, between the two of them, Liu Mingyan is clearly the man, right? She’s taller, a renowned swordswoman, she always wears her hair up in a practical ponytail rather than Ning Yingying’s braids and ribbons. Those are all Manly Things, right? So how did Ning Yingying decide to propose, instead of waiting for Liu Mingyan to do it? Shen Qingqiu had waited for Binghe (or at least, it hadn’t occurred to him to ask first), and everyone knew who was the man in their relationship too.
Although… Binghe has been acting like Shen Qingqiu’s little wifey more and more as their life settled down in the past few years. Not for lack of Shen Qingqiu trying to stop him, obviously, although it was nice and fairly miraculous to come back from a peak lord meeting to a home with everything neatly in place, dinner steaming on the stove, and Binghe looking up eagerly when the door slid open, the picture of an obedient, docile little bride (ha! as if!). It made Shen Qingqiu feel like a businessman with a stay at home wife, which felt even slippier and stranger to him now than it usually did. It just wasn’t right. Binghe was so masculine, he had a dick the size of Shen Qingqiu’s forearm, and he was taller, so how could he possibly be the woman in their relationship?
Shen Qingqiu’s temple throbs. All of this is beyond him. He fans himself a little faster than strictly proper. “Congratulations,” he tells Ning Yingying. “Of course I will attend.”
Ning Yingying beams, so hard that a tear escapes and rolls down her cheek. “Thank you, Shizun,” she says, and Shen Qingqiu’s confusion melts away into genuine happiness and pride as she wipes the tear from her face and pours him more tea.
Still, the whole affair leaves him feeling strange. Mostly because he hasn’t seen Binghe in four days now, which is longer than they’ve been apart for the entire last year. That alone has left him feeling antsy, going to bed too early out of boredom some nights and too late on others because his husband isn’t there to coax him away from his scrolls. But the conversation with Ning Yingying lingers too.
Shen Qingqiu is only a man, and he was once a young heterosexual lad with the entire internet at his fingertips. He’s obviously seen lesbian porn. But only out of curiosity!!! Generally speaking he found it as overproduced and unerotic as every other kind of porn one could find, and thinking back he grimaces at the long nails that some of the women had -- there’s a reason Binghe keeps two claws filed down to the skin for him and he imagines the same principle applies with any… hole. But just like any porn, it’s probably nothing like the real thing, right? He isn’t thinking about Ning Yingying and Liu Mingyan like that -- gross, they’re like nieces to him -- but conceptually, with two women it’s probably… softer, right? Logically, the sex he has with Binghe is rougher because they’re both men, so there’s a lot of testosterone.
Shen Qingqiu also struggles to wrap his head around the idea that Liu Mingyan might never have been attracted to Binghe in the first place. With Ning Yingying, it seems plausible that she could grow out of a childhood crush, but what if the reason Liu Mingyan never even slept with Bing-ge in PIDW is that she wasn’t attracted to men at all? How could that be possible? Although -- maybe it makes sense, in a strange way, that if she really wasn’t attracted to men even a little bit, that at least that would kind of explain why she didn’t fall at Bing-ge’s feet like all the other wives. She probably wished he was a woman instead, right? Because obviously, if Binghe was a woman, he would be the most beautiful woman in the entire world. No lesbian would be able to resist Bing-jie, that’s for sure.
He keeps coming back to concerns about emasculating Binghe. Not that Binghe would care, but that’s exactly why Shen Qingqiu has to take responsibility. Maybe it’s because he’s older than Binghe -- not
much
older, and not nearly as much older as Binghe probably thinks -- but Binghe makes himself… cuter for him, for lack of a better word. Not girlish, exactly, nothing like Ning Yingying and her hair ribbons and giggles, but definitely a sort of feminine
something.
Not exactly befitting a stallion protagonist, right?
Shen Qingqiu needs to move when he’s mulling something over, and after an hour of pacing around the cottage, he throws on an outer robe and flies down to the market for lack of anything better to do. It won’t be as fun without Binghe at his side, haggling endlessly even though they could afford to buy every single good and service the market provides every single day for the rest of their immortal lives. But the day is lovely, a damp spring morning that leaves mist curling around the tips of the pine trees as Shen Qingqiu passes over them, and at least it will distract him from the empty house and his own thoughts.
The merchants in the town below rarely identified Shen Qingqiu as anything more specific than “one of those fancy cultivators” before these past few years. Now, whenever they spend a season in the bamboo cottage, Binghe insists on going to shop nearly every day, and Shen Qingqiu accompanies him more often than not. So now, when he lands just outside town and strolls into the marketplace, about four different aunties and grannies spot him immediately and start calling out greetings.
“Master Shen, welcome back!”
“Master Shen! Where have you been?”
“Where’s your husband, Master Shen?”
“Yeah, where is he? I know he’ll want to look at this fish -- caught only an hour ago!”
Binghe knows all their names. Put on the spot, Shen Qingqiu can’t remember even one. “Ah, he’s returning soon,” he tells them. “He had to go away on important business a few days ago.”
“I know he’ll hurry back,” says the fishmonger granny. “You must be getting lonely, right?”
Shen Qingqiu needs to change the subject, so he buys the fish, even though the closest he’s ever gotten to cooking fish before is reheating fish fingers in the microwave. Or does shrimp ramen count? He pays her double, just to make up for all the times Binghe has tried to shortchange her with his haggling.
For lack of anything better to do, he wanders down the lane, passing by stalls selling tanghulu, fried dough, steamed buns -- all things that would have tempted him before Binghe started cooking for him and completely ruined him for any other food. The fish in his bag is so fresh he thinks that he might actually be able to feel it twitching still. He’ll have to put it on ice if Binghe doesn’t get home tonight.
“Master Shen!” another voice calls, and Shen Qingqiu looks over instinctively. To his surprise, he actually recognizes the face of the man calling him, because this particular tailor had helped him surprise Binghe with a few new sets of robes for their anniversary last year. Shen Qingqiu never did more than dabble in cosplay, and certainly never for PIDW, but a part of him still finds a giddy kind of joy at the gorgeous detail of a well made hanfu. “I have several new pieces available, do you want to be the first to look?”
Shen Qingqiu has never been very good at keeping money in his pocket. “I could be tempted,” he says, following the tailor through the entrance. A luscious mix of finished outfits and raw fabric hang on the walls, and Shen Qingqiu eyes a skein of particularly rich plum red silk for Binghe for a long moment before deciding it’s too close to purple and might clash with his brighter reds.
“Master Shen came to my mind when this fabric arrived,” the tailor says, showing him a square of delicate seafoam green with a subtle wave pattern sewn in.
“You know my taste well,” Shen Qingqiu admits. He’s telling the truth; he really has grown fond of the whole Qing Jing pale green and white color scheme during his time in this world. He has many cruel insults saved up for if he ever runs into the original goods, but barbs about his stylistic choices would not be among them. “My measurements are the same. How soon could you finish an outer robe for me? And perhaps a white inner robe with lapel and collar details of this same fabric?”
“Excellent idea,” the tailor says. He’s laying it on a little thick; Shen Qingqiu obviously was going to buy new clothes anyway the second he walked through the door. “I could have them finished and sent up the mountain in less than a month, Master Shen.”
“Perfect,” Shen Qingqiu says, already pulling out his coin purse.
While the tailor scrambles to mark down the details of his new commission, Shen Qingqiu casts his eyes around the stall again and his eyes catch on one of the finished pieces. It’s actually a little scandalous to see a robe so translucent in a respectable shop like this, although he supposes there would be nothing inappropriate about wearing such a lacy creation with opaque robes on top. Perhaps it’s meant for someone with sensitive skin, so the layer closest to their skin will be only the softest and finest silk money can buy.
Without thinking, Shen Qingqiu reaches out to touch it, and the fabric slips through his fingers in a cool, slick waterfall, almost like running his fingers through the mist clinging to the trees this morning.
“Is Master Shen interested in that robe?”
Shen Qingqiu has to stop himself from visibly jumping. The tailor is watching him touch the fabric with a salesman’s keen eye. “The, ah, fabric is very high quality,” he observes aloud.
“It is indeed,” the tailor agrees. “That piece in particular was originally made as part of a set for a cultivator like yourself, but he decided to leave the innermost robe. I believe he thought it was too feminine.”
Men, Shen Qingqiu thinks, mentally tutting. Always denying themselves the finest things in life. He wonders distantly if it was Liu Qingge who refused to take this lovely thing home, but another thought is already growing in his mind, impossible to ignore.
Even by xianxia standards, where every man has at least two feet of hair and doesn’t wear pants aside from maybe the trouser kind of underwear, the robe is kind of girly, even if it was originally made for a man. Delicate embroidery lines the collar and sleeves, and Shen Qingqiu can already tell from the texture of the fabric that it would cling to a person’s figure, leaving nothing to the imagination. “How close is this to my size?” he asks.
“In its present state, it might be a little broad on your shoulders,” the tailor says analytically. “That could easily be adjusted, if you wish.”
Honestly, there’s no need. Binghe’s probably going to rip this thing off Shen Qingqiu ten seconds after he sees him in it, so a few centimeters extra in the shoulder won’t make a difference. “I’ll buy it as-is,” he decides, determinedly ignoring the hot flush of humiliation in his cheeks and willing the tailor to ignore it as well. The tailor doesn’t know it’s a sex thing. But maybe if Shen Qingqiu takes a little initiative, it will help Binghe remember that there’s no reason for him to fall on his sword and be the wife for Shen Qingqiu’s sake.