Chapter Text
Shen Qingqiu, the Potted Plant 🪴 [Please don’t prune him!]
vs.
Hamster Man, Shang Qinghua ₍ᐢ•᷄ ᴥ •᷅ᐢ₎ྀི [Please don’t kill him, he’s smol!]
☁️ 🫳🏻
🫴🏻 🌧️
The thing to remember about this, as with all things in PIDW, is that it’s Shang Qinghua’s fault.
Really, this most undeniable of facts almost floods him with a sense of calm. Everything is right with the world if Airplane is at fault, right?
Right.
“What do you mean the original goods was a heavenly demon?”
Shang Qinghua stands in front of him, bouncing from foot to foot like he’s a six-year-old who hasn’t been allowed to go to the toilet.
Shen Qingqiu wants to hit him with his fan.
“Listen, okay,” the weaselly little man pleads, already curling in on himself. “It was only in an early draft, and I could never make it work so I just scrapped it, but it wasn’t such a bad idea, was it? Weren’t you always complaining that Shen Qingqiu was just a run-of-the-mill starter scum villain?”
Shen Qingqiu dead-eyes him. “Because he was.”
“Yeah, well he wasn’t always.” Shang Qinghua stops hand-wringing for exactly long enough to shrug like that’s a good enough defence for the crap-hole he has landed Shen Qingqiu in. “It would have made an epic finale, don’t you think? The final showdown: heavenly demon versus heavenly demon. To the winner go the spoils!”
The spoils being the entire world, and every beauty in it, of course. Nothing as satisfying as self-fulfilment or the end to a lifetime of suffering.
Watching Shang Qinghua actually smiling at him, Shen Qingqiu lets his death stare take over his whole face. As with all things that are Airplane’s fault, the promise was good, but the delivery stank the place out!
“Sure, it might have been good,” Shen Qingqiu agrees, “if it had been foreshadowed in absolutely any way at all!” Here, he gives in to the need to beat the pathetic man with his fan. “Indeed, it might have been good if you hadn’t dragged me into it!”
“Bro, bro! Bro, listen!” Shang Qinghua squeals, hands raised to protect his face, ducking out of the way with surprising agility—though, Shen Qingqiu supposes, someone used to Mobei-Jun’s particular brand of teleportation violence might just have to be agile or die.
He scurries across the room, putting his desk between the two of them, his eyes darting to the door Shen Qingqiu is blocking, and then to the window. “Wait a minute, okay, isn’t… isn’t this a good thing? You can’t be killed!”
Shen Qingqiu raises his fan in a threatening manner. “Oh? An eternity of suffering in the water prison, interspersed by bouts of dramatic limb ripping. What fun! It was one thing when I had the mushroom body to fall back on, but I can’t have the mushroom body if I can’t die, can I?”
“Well, sure, but if you can’t die, isn’t that just the same as having the mushroom body?” Shang Qinghua asks, his small hamster-like features raised in hope.
“Why don’t we ask Tianlang-Jun?” Shen Qingqiu spits, slapping his closed fan against the palm of his other hand with an impressive thwack. “He couldn’t be killed, but he’s not really living it up right now, is he?”
Shen Qingqiu takes a large step forward. His shidi takes one back, bumping up against his own wall like he thinks he’s a maiden being bullied.
Shen Qingqiu will show you bullied!
“Airplane, you don’t seem to understand,” he says. His fan makes another thwack. And another. “I can’t live like that. Like a carefully tended potted plant that has to be trimmed back when it grows too many branches.”
“Bro, please! Let’s think about this!”
Shen Qingqiu shakes his head. Thwack, thwack. Thwack! “I can’t live as a stick, Airplane! It was bad enough when I thought I had to die as one!”
Sure, he could veg out with the best of them as a young man back in the modern world. Not moving for days at a time. Too engrossed in the most recent drivel webnovel to slop its way into his lap to catch his attention. But that doesn’t mean he wants to be a potted plant, kept in the dark with nothing to do but stew in its own misery!
The thing to remember about this, as with all things in PIDW, is that it’s Shang Qinghua’s fault.
Shen Qingqiu rounds the desk, fan raised. Shang Qinghua squeaks, and tries to make a bolt for it. “You’re so violent, Cucumber-bro!”
All of An Ding Peak is treated to the sounds of a fan snapping, and their peak lord’s squeals as he is pursued by his most temperamental shixiong, the shout of: “I’ll show you violence!” echoing across the entire mountain.
(Somewhere, on Qiong Ding, Yue Qingyuan shivers without knowing why.)
☁️ 🫳🏻
🫴🏻 🌧️
It started with Without-a-Cure just blipping out of existence like every ailment known to the world of PIDW when brought into contact with the heavenly pillar—only… the heavenly pillar is still in the fucking abyss, thank you very much. Attached to Luo-fucking-Binghe. And so it can’t be responsible.
Shit, he hopes it’s still attached. In a purely platonic, male solidarity kind of way.
Airplane had never explicitly mentioned what would happen if it got severed, but Shen Qingqiu assumes it would just grow back like one of his arms would.
Ah, he’s honestly a little surprised that porn manufacturer extraordinaire, Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky, never used that as the excuse to have a Heavenly DildoTM. The only version of dp the stallion novel’s rabid fan base would ever allow.
Yawn!
In any case, Shen Qingqiu thinks he (and his chrysanthemum) would remember if he’d had that kind of reunion with the protagonist, and his—ahem—sword. Besides which, it’s still two precious years before his little charred bun rolls back into town with an actual sword, and a grievance wider than the Endless Abyss itself.
So, naturally, Shen Qingqiu had gone to his most annoying shidi for an explanation, and had left with a broken fan, and a fucking grudge!
Shang Qinghua, you loser! Just wait till Shen Qingqiu deals with you! You’ll wish it was Mobei-Jun beating your ass!
And Shen Qingqiu, even back when he had been Shen Yuan, had held grudges to his heart like Luo Bing-ge had held women.
There had been a troll once who’d called Luo Binghe a ‘two-dimensional Oedipus-wannabe’ to Shen Qingqiu’s actual face. Shen Qingqiu had doxxed him so hard, starting an internet campaign of hate so potent, he’d made the loser cry, and beg him to stop.
Asshole.
Don’t start shit if you’re unprepared to end it!
He lives his life by this one very simple rule, and expects others to do the same.
And the thing is, Shen Qingqiu had pushed Luo Binghe into the Endless Abyss, knowing full well that there would come a day when that shit would come back around to its natural end point. He’d done it anyway, believing he would willingly pay the toll when the time came that there was no other choice but for him to do so.
But the other thing is—
The very much important thing is… that he had believed it would end in the sweet release of death.
He’d believed it would end with him starting life anew in the mushroom body he’d schemed so hard to make a reality. Luo Binghe would have his retribution, yes, but Shen Qingqiu would also be free of the things he’d had no control over in this world.
Redemption = death.
Isn’t that the trope?
So let him fucking die already!
Why all this push-back? He’s just the starter scum villain. Shang Qinghua had said so himself. Making him more complex had never worked!
Fuck!
And as much as Shen Qingqiu is willing to end the shit that he starts, there is no part of him happy to spend an eternity as Luo Binghe’s basement-dwelling potted plant.
No. He’s going to need another plan.
In the meantime, he needs to figure out how he’s going to explain to Liu Qingge that he no longer requires his meridian-cleansing services without making it sound like Shen Qingqiu has ‘gone mad with grief’ again.
Shen Qingqiu isn’t a widow, Shidi! At worst, he would be a widower. But how can he be a widower when Luo Binghe isn’t even dead?!
And—and they’re not even married!
Utter nonsense.
Add to that that he’ll then have to explain to Mu Qingfang why he’s no longer accepting medical care. And then to Zhangmen-shixiong’s endlessly patient face. Then maybe they’d all have another meeting about him. Which may or may not result in him having to prove to his sceptical martial siblings again that he’s not trying to cause himself harm.
Ugh, throw him off a cliff right now, please!
Getting out of town to go solve a limb-rotting plague in a quarantined city sounds like a fucking holiday.
Sign him up!