Chapter Text
After the mockery of an induction ceremony he conducted for Luo Binghe, Shen Qingqiu decides to fetch himself an early luncheon from the refectory.
A light meal would do him good, for he ate little that morning: but before he has advanced more than a zhang from the safety of his front door, a tall figure clad in white comes storming towards the bamboo house before planting itself directly in Shen Qingqiu's path.
“I did not expect to see you so early in the day, furen,” Shen Qingqiu says flatly, closing the door behind him. "Have you come with a message from the girls' hallmaster again? Such things are beneath you, are they not?"
“I heard that you took on a new disciple,” says the woman before him. "Is it true?"
Qiu Haitang does not meet his eyes. She has not looked him in the eye for the better part of twenty years—not since that first murder on the road, when she came to bring him a basket of food and found Shen Qingqiu and Wu Yanzi looming over a corpse with blood still dripping from their hands—but even so, her avoidance of him has never grown easier to bear.
“I did,” Shen Qingqiu replies. “What of it?”
“I told you not to,” Qiu Haitang says, her hands curling into fists. “That—Li Haoran was to be the last. You promised me you would never take another one.”
“Ning Yingying wanted a shidi.” This at least is true enough; for though Shen Qingqiu demanded Luo Binghe to deny Liu Qingge the satisfaction of doing so himself, he might not have attended the selection at all if Yingying had not begged him to accept a new junior disciple.
“I don’t give a damn what Ning Yingying wanted,” she says sharply. “Have you no shame? You swore you would never take in another boy.”
Silence.
“If I go into the house,” Qiu Haitang continues, her voice deceptively calm, “tell me, Shen Jiu—what will I find?”
At this, Ming Fan steps out of the shelter of Shen Qingqiu's shadow and stretches out his hands towards Haitang in supplication. “Shiniang—”
“Be silent,” she snaps. “Your shifu is a lost cause, and that can’t be helped; but if Disciple Ming cannot learn from his mistakes, then you don’t need to speak in front of me. Did you even think of coming to fetch me when you saw that he had picked up another little shidi to bully?”
Ming Fan lowers his head, shamed; and in answer, Qiu Haitang snorts and sweeps past him into the bamboo house, where Luo Binghe is still kneeling in the middle of the front room with tea trickling down his tearstained cheeks.
“There, don’t cry,” Shen Qingqiu hears her whisper. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Can you look up so that jiejie can dry your face?”
“Shizun—shizun told me to kneel,” the little wretch in the house replies, half-sobbing as Haitang draws him into her arms. “It’s this lowly one’s fault. I offended him, so of course this disciple should stay here and reflect.”
“You didn’t offend anyone,” Qiu Haitang says gently. “He has a terrible temper, and he never learned how to control it. It’s not your fault.”
“But—!”
Qiu Haitang hushes Luo Binghe again, after which Shen Qingqiu hears nothing further: for at that moment, his wife seemed to have recalled the existence of the bamboo house’s privacy wards—but later that evening, she returns to the house with a sheaf of papers and flings them down on Shen Qingqiu’s desk.
“Sign these,” she tells him, before fixing him with a look of loathing that would have made a lesser man quail in his seat. "There's no need for you to read them; I've gone through them already."
Shen Qingqiu glances at the first page in bemusement. “What are they?”
“Dissolution papers for Luo Binghe’s discipleship. What else?” Qiu Haitang’s lip curls. “From now on, I’ll be his Shizun instead.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Did Yue Qingyuan give you these? He approved when I asked for that little beast, you know.”
“He must have thought you’d wait at least a week before doing something to the child,” Haitang says coldly. “I told him that he could either give Binghe to me or send him to Bai Zhan so that Liu-shidi could take charge of him; and I suppose Yue-shixiong was determined to save face for you, so he chose me.”
And then, when Shen Qingqiu does not reply:
“Sign them, Shen Jiu. You don’t want to know what I’ll do to you otherwise.”
At this, Shen Qingqiu picks up a brush and signs his name at the bottom of the dissolution form: for the last time he and Qiu Haitang fought in earnest, she fed him a cursed tonic that had him babbling in tongues before a hundred-odd dignitaries at Huan Hua.
“Thank you,” she bites out: and with that, she turns on her heel and blows out of the bamboo house like a gust of chill wind.
Shen Qingqiu stares after her, his hair all awry from the ferocity of her departure; and not for the first time, he finds himself wishing that he had left Haitang behind at the Qiu estate when he fled from the place with Wu Yanzi. But Haitang's father and brother were dead, and she believed that she was betrothed to him; and when he saw her great brown eyes staring at him through the flames of her home, some power beyond Shen Qingqiu’s own had prevented him from turning his back on her.
She was not meant to accept when I offered to take responsibility for her, he thinks dully, watching through the open window as his wife strides towards the women’s compound on the other side of the mountain. She hated me then, and she hates me now—so what was it all for?
Shen Qingqiu has pondered upon that question night and day since he and Qiu Haitang first bowed to one another, not long after his instatement as Qing Jing’s head disciple; and he is no nearer to the answer by the morning he is widowed, nearly a decade after his foiled attempt to take Luo Binghe as his disciple.
What point was there in saving her? he wonders, as a grown Luo Binghe weeps in the streets of Hua Yue with Qiu Haitang’s still body cradled to his breast. Would it not have been better for her to die after the first betrayal, rather than live to be betrayed twice?
“Why are you all just standing there?” he hears Ming Fan roar. “That’s our Shiniang! What are you afraid of? At most, that white-eyed wolf she raised will just beat us all to death!”
“Leave it.”
Ming Fan stares at Shen Qingqiu in dismay, his eyes so swollen with tears that he scarcely seems able to see through them. “What is Shizun saying? What do you mean, leave her? She’s our only Shiniang—she’s your wife!”
Shen Qingqiu gazes at the cooling corpse in Luo Binghe’s arms for a little while longer; and then, at length, he turns away.
“Your Shiniang’s end was of her own making, Ming Fan,” Shen Qingqiu says, already starting towards the group of screeching cultivators trapped behind the wards at the other end of the street.
“Shen-furen has made her bed. Let her lie in it.”