peel an orange open...

Still, she rallies admirably. “Y-yes! It was that thug Liu Qingge again, wasn’t it? How dare he! Our Huan Hua Palace is no training ground for him to ransack—” Luo Binghe makes the right faces and the right sounds, injured and outraged in turn. No, Zhou-shimei, Disciple Ma probably already knows about his barrier array having been broken. Yes, Zhou-shimei, it would be appreciated if you informed Hallmaster Xia of the latest incursion anyway. No, Zhou-shimei, this shixiong is in no need of the medical wing’s services. Truth be told, this wasn’t a particularly interesting fight, despite what the rubble might otherwise suggest. Rote as any fight to the death could be, even.

It’s strange, how unreal he feels while talking to what should be his fellow cultivators. Their worries and troubles seem so removed from his own that they seem like mere dreams. Luo Binghe floats through the interaction and then blinks to find the yellow flutter of Zhou Wenhui’s robes already disappearing around a corner, the impression of a lingering gaze prickling at him. He thinks she asked him if he needed anything more from her. Help, maybe. What a thought—who in this hollow palace of gilt could give Luo Binghe what he needs?

He still can taste blood in his mouth.

A blink, and Luo Binghe is back inside the palace proper, striding down halls that are garish in their opulence and which may as well be empty, for how disciples, servants, and demons alike duck away as he passes. He doesn’t care that he can hear whispers as he goes. The shifting masses of jaundiced robes conspire to make the scene sickly, and he already feels ill.

Another blink, and Luo Binghe is in the pavilion he has claimed as his own. He hates it. He hates its winter chill. He hates that any one of the delicate, filigreed baubles scattered around it like fallen autumn leaves is valuable enough that it could have changed his mother’s life—could have saved it. He hates the golden drapes that shroud Shen Qingqiu’s body and lend sallowness to his slack face. He hates how small his shizun looks, laid out in bone-white inner robes upon a platform big enough for five.

(Xin Mo laughs.)

“Shizun,” he says, laying a hand against a wan cheek. “Your Binghe is here.” His voice creaks even though it was smooth for that disciple he’s already forgotten the face of, even though he just wetted his throat with blood. Unacceptable. He clears his throat and tries again. “Shizun, your disciple has defended you again against that addled bloodhound, Liu Qingge. Rest assured this disciple punished him for his vulgarity rather than allow his uncouthness to disturb you from sleep.”

The words scald on their way out. Luo Binghe decides silence will be his virtue, tonight.

He fusses for a while over Shen Qingqiu’s hair. It’s already been brushed, and it of course lays perfectly against the sheets, just as Luo Binghe had arranged it in the morning. But for all the qi Luo Binghe has poured into Shen Qingqiu’s body, for all the transgressions he has committed to clean and maintain it, neither its silken sheen nor the luxurious softness he remembers from when he’d had license to fix it just so as a disciple have ever returned to its obsidian weight. It’s that, more than his chill skin, that makes him look like not a sleeping soul but a corpse to Luo Binghe.

Luo Binghe had never dared trespass in his master’s dreamscape, no matter how much he wished to. He knew the risk (and even if he was reckless enough to let his fool heart overcome his reason, Meng Mo would have shouted him deaf before he could breach so much as the first layer of Shen Qingqiu’s dream realm.)

But now he wishes, with all his black, rotten, broken, fool’s heart, that he had committed that trespass. Even if it would only ever be its memory which he could return to, to even once have been ensconced in what surely were the mint-sweet and green layers of his shizun’s mind would have been an unimaginable comfort. An irreplaceable treasure, even if it was ill-gotten. Even if its winning would prove the monstrousness of his desires.

Now, when Luo Binghe curls like a child beside the still and cool body of his shizun, the lack of a dreaming presence is like a sucking void in the space where his spirit should lie. He brushes his hand again under Shen Qingqiu’s eye, imagining those long lashes fluttering at the intrusion, and only finds that the warmth of his previous touch has already dissipated.

Luo Binghe closes his eyes and imagines himself shedding his cumbersome robes of black, leaving this tawdry palace behind, and fleeing for the clean, cold air of Qing Jing, where he can stand by his shizun’s side and partake of his voice, of innocent touches to his gleaming hair, and of his beloved eyes, creasing at Luo Binghe as if invitation to laugh at a joke only Shen Qingqiu knows.