Chapter Text
He's not too happy about his third life as he should be. Probably because his death is foolish and honorable when he told himself not to die for others. Who would have thought that one day he would die for his son junshan?
Certainly not him, not Cucumber-bro, not his king.
Not to mention Luo Binghe.
He prefers not to think about it too much, because this time he has no System, and he has no idea where he is, not knowing the language spoken by the people around him. Not Chinese or English or Japanese, which he'd like to believe he would recognize. But he's still in Asia, so not all is lost.
Would he like to say, if in his six months he couldn't reach his meridians; ah, xianxia world again.
Which one of?!
And this he does not yet remember that he is now a girl (after his one hundred and fifty years, indeed, he was not yet a girl!), and, as he can realize, from a noble and wealthy family, dressed in a luxuriously green shade; darker than Qing Jing Peak's, but lighter than Zui Xian's; he can already imagine how expensive the fabric is just by going over it with his clumsy fingers.
"Soso-a, careful with your stuff", laughed the woman, who was hardly his mother, more likely his nanny, snatching from his hands his own overly constricting clothes for a child's body for his taste; of the whole sentence he understood only his name, and the weasel particle that jumped from his usual word beginning to end.
Perhaps this was one of the xianxia where realistic attitudes towards the women of his home world, not the one he'd written, where everyone was equal (even Cucumber-bro couldn't deny that!).
Oh, he's going to have a hard time getting along here in the first few years unless he starts thinking of himself as she.
(Tang Soso — frighteningly bright child who learns to walk and talk on her own and faster than her two older brothers, and later, as they will realize, her two younger brothers.
Tang Soso has green eyes and light brown hair like all of them, but her hair is lighter, more wavy, and her eyes reflect the light strangely at sunset, the color becoming brighter, more delicate, like young grass in spring. Tang Soso has energy for ten, and she is incapable of sitting still, always and endlessly doing something, going everywhere, and surpassing her teachers, melting down with tasks and learning like it's nothing. Tang Soso has a sharp mind, even overly so, and she can't truly be forced to do anything if she doesn't want to.
The truth is, Tang Soso — is child of lies.
She lies more easily than she breathes, weaving stories together so that they become truths; she cunningly tricks and dodges with a natural grace in which it is impossible to catch her or to prove that what has happened is her doing; she pretends and plays parts so improbable before them, before the family, that they cannot but wonder when she takes her part seriously, imitating a weak and defenseless lady, when her elder brothers can swear that she has brought the merchant family to tears with their rates with mere words.
She holds their family's poisons with the interest of an important person who has found something noteworthy on her long journey, and takes to studying them, taking them internally as every member of their family does to develop tolerance, and refining them, outside the ears and eyes of the older family members who would forbid her such things.
Tang Soso — is girl whose mind works too fast and in all directions for even the head of their family, her father, to understand.
So she invents talismans that no one has ever heard of and that no one has ever taught her — her fingers are black not from poisons but from ink, her hair is more often left in a style that is too unladylike for a lady, more suited to servants, she has the most cheerful and boyish smile one can find in their house, in their whole family.
Tang Soso smiles openly and broadly when a lady of her age should not be so inappropriate, but it is impossible to look away from it when she talks passionately about the history of their state, their world, as if she finds it endlessly fascinating, picking it apart, asking so many questions that no one has ever thought of, and reasoning like someone who knows a different world order.
Tang Soso — is pure talent, if you ask anyone else.
But she has one insurmountable flaw.
She is woman.)
She finds it amusing that her family isn't yet desperate to marry her off at her twenty-three; in the past world that's hardly a number for cultivators, but in his home world in this sort of era it's a critical marker, her expiration date is up and all. Considering no one here seems to develop a golden core to immortality like he did with his again at eighteen (as if it wasn't enough for him to spend one lifetime as a perpetual near-adolescent who no one takes seriously unless he's wearing Lord Peak's robes), and considering she has one failed marriage under her belt. Sure, it's Korea, not China (that modern, magical xianxia world), but there are a striking number of similarities; it's so unfortunate that she doesn't have not just a Cucumber-bro, but at least a System (who'd have thought she might miss it) to have a little historical background. She was an economics major for goodness sake!
How do they even hope sell to give her away a second time?
She's just a suffering young widow, nothing more! There are few accidents that happen to a husband who decides that his wife is property and he can do whatever he wants to her. In her day, people called it karma.
Of course, neither her father nor her older brothers believed her, not to mention the kids who are elders here (indeed, he's twice as old as some of them), but her younger brothers don't have a soul in her for some reason; maybe it's the fact that she accidentally saved them from an assassin one night? (Their sister stands in the middle of the room, a thin and low silhouette, over a still warm body, slight and unmurmuring, as if she had swatted a bug rather than a person; she has no bloodlust, she has no fear, and she has no guilt; she turns to them, smiles, wiping the blood on her light-colored sleep clothes, and asks them in a warm voice: 'are you all right?'; and they rush into her arms, unprepared, but never repulsed, always there to receive them). Anything can happen, kids are pretty impressionable.
However, she just lets her family try to fit her in somewhere, making it difficult for them to do so at every turn, merely acting a tenth of the shamelessness she might show to embarrass them and herself as if it were her calling.
"...so..."
Her family isn't bad; especially if she compares it to the first and second, and their relationship is warmer than she has with her fighting siblings in Cang Qiong (her youngest, A-Zhan, as she likes to call him, generally tells her with burning eyes that he plans to be the head of the family, even though he is the fourth child and third son; ah, a sweet boy with big dreams; but she, like a good sister, supported him and asked him not to kill their elder brothers and father on the way; she thought the child pouted at that), but they are often so appropriate to the era that she wants to stage a showdown or start a revolution. Another one. Why, in the Demon Realm, she had done something like that steadily a couple times a year in her hundred years of working there; and how many demon wars she had gone through that she didn't want to remember.
"...Soso..."
She also finds it interesting that a family of medics, a profession that values flexibility of thought, is so narrow-minded about something; Mu-shidi would probably throw a tantrum, berate everyone as best he could to shame everyone, and then give a lecture on the human body. However, her shidi would also look at her questioningly if she said that she had finally gotten a formal medical education, instead of treating herself secretly and on her own, basing her knowledge on folk methods that had nothing to do with the xianxia world. And shidi would have been absolutely right, yes.
"Tang Soso, are you listening to what you're being told?" her father asks angrily as she turns to him, frowning too pronouncedly for any woman, she's not in danger of wrinkles anyway; so, what was that about?
Ah yeah!
"I'll only marry a man younger than me", she nods, ignoring her frustrated fiancé of twenty-four years (god, how young he is), making it up as she goes along, being a spoiled little lady.
Her father closes his eyes like a migraine and she hides a smile, sipping her tea.
"Oh, and he must look like a demon!" she complements, habitually hiding a laugh, and her father actually lets out a mortified groan instead of holding back.
(He expected a lot, coming to the Tang family, the Tang Bo family, after all these years.
But what he least expected was that the head of the family, Tang Gunak, once he realized who he was, where he came from, and what he was, would walk up to him, take his hand, and ask:
"Please, marry my daughter", with the desperation of a man who has given up on the best.
The child next to him, Tang Zhan, an exact copy of Tang Bo down to the smiles, only resents him:
"Dad! Nuna said she doesn't want to get married!" the child says loudly, walking towards them as he tries to gently pull his arm out without much force, but the man holds him firmly.
"Tang Zhan, stay out of things that don't concern you", Tang Gunak utters, and the kid's eyes light up with the same fire with which Tang Bo wanted to kill someone; for real, not out of spite; and Cheong Myeong tries to realize where he's gotten himself into.)
(Later, he meets Tang Soso, truly unlike any person he's known before, and Cheong Myeong finds her extraordinary.)
Notes:
Why did Airplane die for Luo Binghe? Oh, you don't know my love for those two's relationship.
The fun part is that both Cheong Myeong and Airplane will think of each other as a child and themselves as older. This will last for a couple of years before Airplane makes a joke about it and Cheong Myeong picks up on it and they realize that they are NOT joking and that each of them is an old man.
As my friend said: Cheong Myeong and Airplane are a marriage made in heaven.
Chapter 2
Notes:
A couple of conversations between Airplane-Soso and Cheong Myeong.
It's miserably small, I know, but I couldn't help but post it.Dialogue stylization.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
"Your father begged me to marry again".
"And what did you say?"
"That it was unseemly of him to ask it of a young man under the age of marriage".
"Well, well, well, you shouldn't have turned him down right away, my father isn't so bad...I support you!"
"About our wedding, samae".
"Ah... sorry, it happens to me; my king says that's my charm. We have my support too!"
"You're lucky you're cheerful".
"So... this is your second life?"
"Yes".
"You're not a child?"
"I'm eighty-four, plus a hundred years when I was dead".
"Do you know the value of money?"
"Of course I do. I've got a whole sect of kids to feed, clothe, buy new swords".
"And you don't destroy everything in your path so we pay for the damage?"
"I do. And they're the ones paying me for it."
"Take me".
("Please, you're not alone here, have some shame!")
"I have a plan... So, Myeong-Myeong, how cruel can you be for me?"
"And how cruel do you want me to be?"
("Can you two not flirt at least in a military meeting?!")
"What's the strangest thing that's ever happened to you?"
"Today?"
"Soso".
"In a month?"
"Soso".
"In this lifetime?"
"For all three".
"Ah... I don't even know... If you don't count the very fact of death-rebirth, and the fact that my king reciprocated me, and if you don't count the fact that Liu-shidi once admitted he was wrong, and that Cucumber-bro called me a friend, and that the demonic royal court somehow then began to fear me..."
"I get it. The weirdest thing here is your self-esteem".
"It's nice of you, A-Myeong, to think I have one".
"But you're aware that you're a wonderful person, right?"
"Okay. This is the weirdest thing that's ever happened in my life".
"A-Myeong, for the record: you're the most normal person in this place".
"Dear samae, I'm willing to bet all the money in the sect that you're the only one who thinks so".
("Yes!")
Notes:
There should be a joke here that Cheong Myeong here still has a green ribbon of Tan colors, and everyone thinks he's wearing it because of Tang Soso.
And Airplane-Tang Soso: if I were to mark it with a color, it would be yellow.
Chapter 3: Rating - E, PWP, F/M [Cheong Myeong/Airplane-Tang Soso]
Notes:
You don't have to read it.
It took me 40 mins to write this and post it, hah.
It's PWP!
It's a cross between rough sex and tender sex.
Okay, well, I gave you as much warning as I could.
I did everything I could to get you past it if you don't feel like it.
I even signed the chapter title.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He pulls her deeper onto his cock, stretching her perfectly, teasing all her sensitive points, all those soft tender walls of a woman that she, like the Airplane, had written so much about without having the slightest clue about reality. Her wrists in Cheong Myeong's left hand, and even if she tried, it was unlikely she'd get out unless he let her go (he would; that gentle fool); his right hand on her clit, which Cheong Myeong found instantly (Cucumber-bro would laugh gloatingly at her for decades if he knew that she herself, in her own body, hadn't found it immediately), rubbing her fingers against his thrusts, driving her crazy.
It feels good to be fucked by a man with experience; it feels damn good to just lie there and do nothing; great, she seems to have a new fetish.
She gasped at the overabundance of sensation.
"I'm so sorry it wasn't you who took this body's virginity", she can't help but remark, breaking into a groan, because she babbles always; her silly tongue is the only thing that has gotten her through deaths and lives.
Cheong Myeong, gods bless him, doesn't stop, only entering her with enough abruptness that they rock along with the bed, knocking the furniture against the wall (the kids should be grateful she took pity on them by putting in muffling charms; although it doesn't save them from the vibration of the bumps), her breasts also jiggle due to inertia, and her mind for some reason tosses her Cucumber-bro's comment saying that firm female breasts don't bounce like that; ha, suck it.
"Samae", and Cheong Myeong's voice sounds husky and threatening, it only tickles her nerves with a pleasant tingle; she's so close; "don't think about other men with me inside, please", his request sounds like he's ready to take up his sword to back up the danger of his words; it turns her on too much.
And he knows her so well, she recalled at least four men this night; though not in the same way.
"You know—" she gasps; oh, she seems to have forced him to be ruthless tonight, and she feels him squeeze her hands with real strength, it only makes her smile blissfully beneath him; her victory; "—that I'm a widow, right?"
Her dead husband in this life, the one her family gave her up for, isn't even worth mentioning; he was hopeless with women.
Cheong Myeong takes his hand away from her clit, which makes her whimper frankly (put it back where it belongs, A-Myeong!), his fingers, wet because of herself, grip her face, firmly but painlessly, forcing her to look into his eyes; they're beautiful, she thinks weakly and distractedly.
"When I fuck you, think of me", tell her with all the authority and power that lies within those hands; such a trite phrase, she's sure she's written it a dozen times for the original Luo Binghe, and— "of me, samae".
And he almost makes her scream.
Oh, she loves pissing off Cheong Myeong when he's in her.
Notes:
Nobody:
Nobody at all:
Airplane and his ADHD: /thinking about five things at once/
Chapter 4
Notes:
Did I once write a fic about Shang Qinghua being a smoker?
I realized that if he continued the trend in the third life as well, Cheong Myeong would have caught Vietnam flashbacks, because Plane has a typical Tang family face.Cheong Myeong/Ailplane-Soso have that established relationship here, yes; against the backdrop of the beginning of the war.
I wasn't planning on writing anything to them at all, what the hell....
Just a couple words at most.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Tang Soso sits on his bed as he quietly returns from an ungodly early training session, in no hurry to go anywhere, wearing only his outerwear from the cult's internal white kit; her hair is loose and the visible patches of pale skin give no room for imagination, revealing to the world reddened bite marks and hickeys; she's already found an early morning job, of course, with scrolls and papers in her lap and any available space next to the bed, but... there's something new.
A smoking pipe in her hand.
The smell of tobacco, heavy and pervasive, something he wouldn't be rid of until the next night.
Her fingers are nimble and thin, like someone with experience, he almost expects to see black fingernails; someone used to holding a pipe when he can watch her bring it to her mouth, slowly and thoughtfully taking a breath without taking his eyes off the map of the eastern lands; he can see from here how far away her mind is, if she still hasn't noticed him.
Cheong Myeong can't move.
Can't take a breath.
He can't.
Tang Soso notices him, and more than ever he wishes he had asked her real, her first name; her hair is light and loose, light brown in the dawn sun that he almost expects to find by looking at it a plum-colored hairpin in her hair that isn't there; her eyes are green, dark from the shadows and warm from the way she notices him; he knows that dazzling smile — knew it long before he was in this place, in this era, with this strange-weird, but incredible, man whose face sometimes makes his heart recoil in pain.
He almost expects to hear: daos-hyoung.
Instead, he hears:
"Sahyoung", cooing and cheerful, just like Tang Bo; Cheong Myeong takes a breath, and the smell of burnt tobacco hits him from the inside; he doesn't move. "...are you okay?" ask him, because somehow Soso is able to read him better than anyone else; maybe it's something that comes to them with age.
He looks at her again, almost undressed, in his white instead of her green or black, with the same eyes, the same face as his, but always distinguished by something so intangible that even he can't understand it. Something that sets her apart from everyone he knows. Something that he, after a time, trusts unconditionally.
He breathes through the smoke, and it hurts.
"Do you need a hug?" asks Tang Soso in a calm voice; gods, this woman is so straightforward sometimes, treating him like a child. "You look like you need a hug".
Cheong Myeong thinks about it; he feels like he just traded one Tang for another.
He wants to refuse out of stubbornness.
He thinks of Tang Bo's bright smile when they met casually in the world.
Hyoung-nim.
His lungs are full of smoke.
"Yes", he replies, and Tang Soso sets aside what are likely very important scrolls as if they were nothing, lightly extinguishing the tobacco with his thumb using qi and tucking it away to the side, saluting with his arms spread apart.
He moves, ineptly and slowly; his feet seem heavy.
Cheong Myeong falls on top of her, wrapping his arms entirely around her waist, resting his face against her open chest, closing his eyes; she falls on her back with him, her hands on his head, soft and soothingly gentle, comforting and understanding.
"Better now?" she asks; he listens to the sound of her heart, steady and continuous.
Her skin smells of tobacco.
"Not really", he answers honestly, falling asleep, though he has many things to do.
He knows that Tang Soso will help him catch up on them.
Notes:
If you see Cheong Myeong/Tang Bo in the past - you're not imagining it.
By the way, in my head for this story, the first, very first, name of the Airplane is Shang HUA, and it's now in HUAshan.
Shang Hua. Huashan.
Just look at those words.And I wanted to write that Cheong Myeong was like: I have a lot of work to do... I'll do it later, I have someone to rely on. (Sorry, that's my sore subject in canon.)
P.s. Airplane was a woman in a very-very chauvinistic family, as you and I know. For the first time in his three lives, he had to smoke in secret, and use perfume as well, because he's a woman now, and not get caught with four brothers and a bunch of other relatives everywhere (and it's weirdly infuriating that he's a grown man who wants to smoke, he'll smoke!)... for some reason, it only encouraged him to smoke, like Cheong Myeong encouraged him to drink alcohol in secret under the sahyoung's nose.
Honestly, they look so much alike.
Chapter Text
"What's your dream?"
And she gets such a misunderstanding and surprised look from the pink-red eyes at her question that she just wants to go and knock on his kids' heads; seriously, no one has ever asked? Not that she'd be any better off asking it a year later, but still! Damn stupid brats, Myeong-Myeong spoils them too much if they let themselves do that.
"Dreaming...?" repeats Cheong Myeong after her, as if it's a foreign unfamiliar word, and her heart cracks a little at the seams; oh, Myeong-Myeong.
Tang Soso rolls over from her back to her stomach on his bed (or is it their bed? she's practically in her third month of living in the men's dormitory), rising up on her elbows, not expressing a single bit of her concern on her face; that's not what Cheong Myeong needs.
"Yeah, you know, dreams, cherished desires. I know you want Huashan to prosper, but that's the goal, and the idea is a bit... communist? Uh, I mean, collective? For the good of all?" she tries to find a more era-appropriate analogy. "But I'm talking about what you want. And only you. I, for one, dream of many things", she chuckles, "I'm a very greedy person".
She dreams of the internet, of her first world, of her cute little An Ding students, of her tsundere-bro, of her king.
Cheong Myeong stares at her, his hands frozen on his own belt as if his body forgot he wanted to change for sleep; he looks lost.
Broken.
She doesn't like that.
"If you'd asked me ten years ago", he covers his eyes, it's not exactly a peaceful gesture, he's looking somewhere toward the window, through it, farther than his eyes can see, "or rather, a century ago, I would have answered that I dream of traveling".
This is unexpected. She doesn't exaggerate her surprise; she didn't think Cheong Myeong was that type of person; the kind of person who never stops and goes farther and farther, exploring the world and enjoying it like no one else.
A man who should never be constrained by anything, not even love, no matter for one person or a group of people.
A man made for freedom.
Oh, Myeong-Myeong, gentle old fool, you chained yourself voluntarily, didn't you?
"There was a man who promised to go with me", and Cheong Myeong looks at her longer, through her, at the man who looks like her; Tang Soso hasn't asked much about that friend who Cheong Myeong promised to take care of Tang's family, but she recognizes the grief of loss when she encounters him; the North Sea nearly makes her sob with longing. "Right now... I don't think I have time to daydream".
Oh hell no, not on her fucking shift.
"Of course there is! Who told you this nonsense that there's no time for dreaming? I watched a whole pirate epic about dreams, and I remember it a hundred and fifty years later!" she gets up and nearly falls over as she tries to get out of bed, which hardly reinforces what she's saying, but stupidity has never stopped her yet. She shoves the blanket off her leg like it's her worst enemy, preventing her from getting up, and habitually Cheong Myeong catches her awkward ass by the waist as she nearly falls on top of him. "We'll find you a dream, Myeong-Myeong, if you don't want the old one", the clumsiness doesn't stop her from saying it with all the authority and seriousness she had as the Demon Emperor's advisor as Lord of the Peak. "I promise you, we will find you a dream and make it come true".
She knows she has no right to make such promises, not with their old second-third lives, not with the way Cheong Myeong breathes only for Huashan.
But she'd happily lie for the world a few more times if it made Cheong Myeong smile faintly but sincerely, like he does now.
"Thank you", he whispers for her, and she wishes she could just hide him from everything, if only for a few minutes.
Instead, she wraps her arms around him and hides herself.
It's too sad for her.
Notes:
I just keep posting stuff here because I need someone to ask Cheong Myeong the right questions!
Heck, I don't remember if his kids asked him what he wished for because I don't think they did.
So I decided to remind everyone and myself that once upon a time, Cheong Myeong dreamed of traveling freely with Tang Bo (and before Tang Bo, he offered it to Cheong Mun), and where is he now?
Honestly, it was a surprise to me that Cheong Myeong dreamed of traveling with someone.... that desire says a lot about a person if you think about it.So that you don't feel sad, think about it like this:
Cheong Myeong: Stop.... Are you a hundred and seventy years old?
Airplane-Soso: one hundred and seventy-four... Or six. I don't remember. /shrugs/ I told you I'm older than you, didn't I?
Cheong Myeong: /shocked/
Airplane-Soso: /strokes her head and pinches her cheeks fondly/.
(Airplane-Soso, after a second: put Myeong-Myeong in his crib? So.... stop... I didn't mean it in a dirty way! Although... what am I... now I am in a dirty way!
Cheong Myeong, sighing softly: never change).Plus, I believe Cheong Myeong has a fetish for liking people older than him (blame it on Cheon Moon; his upbringing). And before Airplane Soso, he was literally surrounded by children. If you think about it that way, Hyung's generation wasn't even 70 years old when Cheong Myeong came, so purely in theory, they were old enough to be his children (if you remember that you could be a parent at 14-16 in general, yes). So, yes, the Airplane with his considerable age is very far from a child.
And as you can tell from Saint Sword, Cheong Myeong likes to be spoiled by his elders.
(Airplane-Soso when he finds out about it: I could carry you in my arms! I'm still Lord An Ding, trust me, you're nothing compared to those damn boxes. And those arms were carrying many little brisk disciples.
Cheong Myeong, blushing slightly: don't!
Airplane: /now waiting for the right moment to pick him up/).