yee friggin haw, baby

Shen Qingqiu is already in a poor mood; he’s always in a poor mood, but just that very last morning he’d failed to restrain himself from demolishing his backup stash of hard candies, despite or possibly due to being fed plenty of candy by his jiejies the evening previous, and he still feels fit to chew through the walls in the vain hope they contain sugar.

He also hates these meetings as a matter of principle— awful, stinky, miserable affairs that they are— but the craving is making the experience an exquisite level of torturous.

“Now do excuse me for the question, Shixiong,” Shang Qinghua was saying, slowly, leveling Wei Qingwei with a wide toothy smile and a pulsating vein in his forehead, “but you are aware of where ore comes from, right?”

“From the ground,” Wei Qingwei snarled through gritted teeth.

“From the ground!” Shang Qinghua spoke over him with gratingly false cheer. “But not just any ground! Nonono, it has to be a special kind of ground where some sort of cataclysm happened in ancient times! And the more special the ore, the more specific the cataclysm! Which means—“

“But if we do find Heavenly Silver River Ore, it’ll make up for far more than just the cost!” insisted Wei Qingwei, for the umpteenth time that meeting, and Shen Qingqiu was sorely tempted to actually chew his way out of the meeting chamber regardless of the wall’s sugar content.

He was being forced— forced— to sympathize with Shang Qinghua! Even with the scrunched look in Yue Fucking Qingyuan’s face! They’d managed to make him give up on mediating!

“The Heavenly Silver River is, as the name says, in heaven—“

“But droplets fall to earth! I’ve got the documentation right here, the remnants of a rain of stars cannot be so hard to find—“

Qi Qingqi was pinching the bridge of her nose. He wanted to do the same. His sinuses were downright burning, long since unable to pick apart the individual components of the chamber’s generalized funk. His ever-present headache was turning said funk into a horrendous synaesthetic experience at the back of his tongue and the inside of his ears both.

He gave up on all pretense and pinched his nose shut, ignoring Mu Qingfang’s weird looks with malicious aforethought. The insides of his mouth were immediately coated with the nauseatingly greasy scent of frustrated qianyuans.

He’d kill for half a stick of tanghulu. He’d eat it out of the floor.

“—they burn as they fall, scattering into dust and growing smaller and smaller—“

He’d also eat this fucking buzzing mosquito, wherever the hell it was. How did it even get into the meeting chamber? He’d plug that hole and then swallow it and its ill-begotten stores of blood whole and now he was craving rare meat.

“—that’s not how metal works—“

Stew? Steak? Salty stew, with steak, and also candy, and fruit, and candied fruit—

“—and even if you triangulandy exactly where the impact fruit place you stew need to dig, and let me tell you, digging is—“

What?

“Shang-shidew is completely correct about the steaks of this—“

What?

“Shen-shixiong, blah shoo stew ra-tang the papursonal?”

“Pardon?” he asked, unpinching his nose just in case the lack of air was getting to his brain.

Okay so in a past post I talked about my thoughts on how PIDW Yue Qingyuan and Shen Jiu end up in that ouroboros of fuckery, and how it's partially because Yue Qingyuan recognizes that Shen Jiu is destroying himself, right. And that no matter how much trying to stop him further degrades their relationship, Yue Qingyuan can't stop trying to protect him, as he always had, even when Shen Jiu genuinely doesn't want him to anymore for his own sake.

But where before Yue Qi the kid only had to protect Shen Jiu from the world (and also protect others from SJ which in turn ensures the first desire), Yue Qingyuan the man wants to protect Shen Jiu from himself now too. But obviously with the state of things between the pair being what they are, the situation only grows out of control until finally Shen Jiu has been arrested for all his crimes, real or imaginary.

Here, Yue Qingyuan wants to hear from Shen Jiu's own mouth that he didn't kill Liu Qingge, because as much as he truly doesn't want to believe it, as much as he wants to believe this is another instance where maybe Shen Jiu is being wronged by others or the world at large... he clearly doesn't know if even he can believe that anymore.

Huge loss compared to their first scene where Shen Jiu's saying that he wants those other kids dead, and Yue Qi is like yeah okay buddy.

Shen Jiu's pattern of barking louder than his bite + saying the opposite of what he's truly feeling is already pretty well documented, and Yue Qi seems equally aware of it even if he doesn't always interpret it correctly. So I think there was always this trust he held that, as much as Shen Jiu howled and snarled, it didn't matter because he knew deep down that there was a person in there capable of good things. At least until all of the evidence of Shen Jiu's wrongdoings come home to roost and Yue Qingyuan has to finally confront how much of it's true, how much of it is false but believable, and how much he's also responsible for because he was so lenient on him. And that's where you get Yue Qingyuan asking if he did kill their sect brother and if he feels any sort of regret about Binghe.

The loyalty? Still there of course, for both of them.

But the actual trust? I think it's all but gone at this stage, and even if they had lived it may not have been salvageable.

Okay but what about Shen Yuan/Shin Qingqiu though.

First off, I believe that Shen Qingqiu's "memory loss" and subsequent "personality change" is no doubt upsetting to Yue Qingyuan. But I think it also quickly begins to take some strain off of him too in his self-appointed position of both protector and keeper of Shen Jiu's life.

We know from the extra that he worried a lot about Shen Jiu's place in the sect. He was going to Qing Jing peak to make sure he wasn't being bullied, he was presuming that Shen Jiu slept off the mountain because he'd been kicked out of the dorm, and he flips out when he finds him at the brothel because of both his cultivation getting damaged and of his reputation. All of this on top of being a head disciple and being groomed to be the future sect leader!

How much of his time was dedicated to checking in on Shen Jiu, I wonder, or in smoothing over fights and tempers from flaring? My guess is uhhhh a lot, lol.

But now? Now Shen Qingqiu's getting along with his peers. He's stopped abusing his disciples. He's talking to Yue Qingyuan for hours. For the first time in over a decade, even if he's still fretting and worried, he doesn't have to constantly be on alert.

(Though I don't think this alertness ever entirely goes away. The "spirit stones gambling" bit comes to mind:

Shen Qingqiu presumes he's worried about the sect looking bad -- but tbh I think he saw tension between Shen Qingqiu and two peak lords and immediately went into Xiao-Jiu's Going To Argue With Someone Oh Dear mode despite it being harmless lol)

I'm getting off track.

The point is that he got to relax. Even with all his mixed feelings about SQQ's changes, I have to imagine that the relief of knowing that Luo Binghe wasn't strung up in a shed or that Liu Qingge wasn't hearing "I'm going to kill you!" on a regular basis was a balm. It's clearly something he wanted, having once thought that maybe Shen Jiu and Liu Qingge could be friends!

But also! I think that he also gets something that he thought he'd never get again: for that concern to be visibly and vocally reciprocated.

(Hope you don't mind me snagging pics from your other posts lol)

This is never to say that Shen Jiu didn't care about Yue Qingyuan, now matter how much he may have said as much. The fakerrrrrrr. But obviously the relationship was Not Exactly Ideal to put it gently by the time this year would've rolled around in PIDW.

But a big note here for me is that Shen Qingqiu reassures Yue Qingyuan that this is not his fault.

I can't imagine what it must've been like to have willingly born the presumed hate of someone you loved so much, someone whose hate you 100% think you deserve...

...only to have them turn around one day and say things like "hey, you shouldn't hold yourself responsible for things you couldn't control"?

Anyway, this goes on for a while until Shen Qingqiu gets his own version of the water prison scene. But now Yue Qingyuan says with his full chest:

Obviously we have no clue what Shen Jiu's arrest looked like because it happened at a different year and circumstances, and we don't get any writing of it directly. Yue Qingyuan may not even have been present for it, for all we know? So we can't say he wouldn't have responded the same way either.

Buuuut...

PIDW-Yue Qingyuan was having to pull strings to visit Shen Jiu in prison before begging him to admit to even one of the accusations against him.

SVSSS-Yue Qingyuan is about to flatten Jin Lan City.

Lacking a lot of context for PIDW, there's no way to say for certain how it'd differ -- but as presented in text, it feels like quite a contrast in where they're at emotionally.

Fast forward quite a bit to Maigu Ridge and AO3's Favorite Tag! Xuan Su Reveal.

Would this have happened if, somehow, they were in the same situation but it was Shen Jiu instead of Shen Yuan? I mean, possibly! He's clearly affected by the telling of the truth of Su Xiyan's end to Tianlang-Jun, maybe he still would have been inspired to tell his own truths, being so close to death. But also... I could just as easily see Yue Qingyuan still taking his secret to the grave, because even if it's something Shen Jiu desperately needed to know for so many reasons, because he could have expected Shen Jiu's reaction to be one of intense anger/hurt/etc, something he'd likely want to avoid consciously for Shen Jiu's emotions, subconsciously for his own, and either way create a lot of the familiar cycle of guilt and self-blame.

But Shen Qingqiu isn't like that, not anymore.

I think the Xuan Su reveal gets to happen, not just because of but at least partially because of the trust and affection that Shen Qingqiu has demonstrated for Yue Qingyuan, and because of that Yue Qingyuan finally gets to open up about his biggest trauma and regret that's haunted him for so long.

And then of course, the finale where Yue Qingyuan sees him off, to be happy with Luo Binghe.

Listen. It's deliciously angsty to focus on Yue Qingyuan not knowing that Shen Jiu is gone and that he's been left on the mountain alone. I eat that shit up too, cause it's great!! But at the same time, the sweet to the bitter is that Shen Yuan really did change Yue Qingyuan's fate.

Not just the literal death of thousands of arrows, but from an end where he'd who's lost trust in his most important connection, bore the guilt for deaths/abuse of his martial family, and ultimately was only recognizable as a broken sword.

Now, he's not just alive, but in a place of being where he can see off Shen Qingqiu, trusting that he's safe and happy. He's content knowing he can stay behind and make sure the sect is a home his shidi can always come back to. He can live his own life now too.