Work Text:
Ning Yingying was her shizun's favorite disciple.
She knew this because he told her so, on rare occasions: on lazy, empty days, when she'd sit at his side practicing meditation techniques. He would touch her head very gently, and say in his quietly aloof voice, that she was doing very well. The words a treat he offered her. She'd always smiled back at him as proudly as she could, beaming up at him, and he'd tsk, and tell her to return to her exercises, and she would, lips still stretched wide with joy even as she tried to hide it.
She loved him, her shizun. Her mother, before she'd given up her daughter to the life of a cultivator, had told her that she had a heart that was too big. And maybe that was true, because she loved her shizun with an intensity that was not entirely borne out of the culture he'd created, there on the peak that other disciples liked to joke was full of nervously devoted wrecks. Who could blame her? He'd taken her in, had chosen her in the way she'd never been chosen before. When he'd picked her out of the crowd of disciples, she'd been scared and happy at the same time, which was a new combination for her, but a welcome one.
Ning Yingying had been his favorite . She'd never been anyone's favorite before he'd told her that, the lesser daughter of a prestigious family that had enough heirs and spares that she could be given away and the act called an honor. It was a scary but lovely thing to be the best , the most loved. When she'd heard those words she'd clutched them to her chest and hoped she'd never prove them false.
That did not mean that she did not hate him, too. He'd always said she was smarter than the rest of his disciples for a reason.
She wasn't stupid. She'd seen what he was doing to Luo Binghe, her shidi and therefore her responsibility. By all rights he was the responsibility of their shizun, too, but instead of being a disciple it often seemed like Binghe was the punching bag of the peak, leaking tears, blood, sweat like sawdust from a wounded training dummy. It was hard for her not to feel sorry for him, but it didn't seem like that was the case for anyone else. In the early days, she'd tried to point things out and everyone else had looked at her like she was insane. She'd told Sect Master Yue that it was unfair, once, and he had averted his eyes and said something about speaking to her shizun. The day after, Binghe had been resigned to the woodshed again, and nothing had come of it.
Sometimes she thought, looking at him, that she was going quietly insane. How could anyone look away from the things they were doing to him? Weren't they supposed to be avatars of justice in this world? What kind of justice was this ?
She never said anything after that, though, out of fear of making things worse. So maybe she was just as bad as the rest of them.
It had been Ning Yingying who had brought her shidi medicine and bandages for the blood that wept from his wounds. She'd fed him soup with her own spoon when he'd been too weak from beatings to even lift the wooden utensil to his own mouth. In the darkness of the woodshed she'd stared at her shidi, broken and bleeding and so, so quiet, and she'd wondered how the shizun she loved so much, who never touched her with anything less than feather-light grace, could do this with those same hands.
Ning Yingying wondered, bitter in the dark with a hatred that surprised even herself, why he had ever taken Binghe in. Had he known he was going to hurt him, when he'd accepted him as a disciple? Was that the point of it? The very idea of it shocked her, that her shizun could be that cruel. He pushed them all maybe too far- her peak was known for it, for the ways that they flinched at even the implication of a flaw, for their neuroticisms and their frantic desire to please, for the disciples that broke under the pressure and slipped away in the night, down the long hike, leaving empty beds in the morning.
Perhaps he'd wanted Binghe to be one of those, too, but then why take him in the first place? And Binghe refused to leave. There was no world in which either of them would give up. She'd proposed the idea to him once in the dark, brushing his curls out of his face: "Why don't you run?"
He'd shaken his head- he said nothing at all, but the determination had been clear on his face. There was no changing it. So she'd vowed to keep him safe as she dabbed blood away from his face. To protect her shidi when no one else would.
After the Immortal Alliance Conference, when her shizun had come back alone, his robes had dripped red on the cracked ground beneath him. She'd kept her eyes on the hem of those green and white garments and thought: I should have seen this coming . It was an easy thought to have, but it didn't stop her stomach from dropping out from underneath her.
"He was part demon," her shizun had said, voice and face both cruel in their coldness. "Worming his way onto our peak. Stealing his secrets for his cohorts. I always suspected him of something ."
(Those words spoken with a sneer, a tightening of his fingers around his fan).
"Do not mourn him," he told her, and did not soften even at her wet eyes. The lines of his body were as hard as jade. Anger was a white flash in her throat, tightening the muscles. She hated him in that moment more than she had ever hated anything before.
Ning Yingying had wept a sea of tears afterwards, shaking in the waves of grief that wracked her body and left her clinging to the sheets that smelled like the floral soaps of An Ding Peak. She went to the woodshed and traced the bloodstains that had never been scrubbed out right until she stained the wood again with her own blood as her knuckles rubbed themselves raw.
She didn't know what to believe about what was said, if he really had been part demon. There were no moments, looking over the past in her mind, where she could see it as true, where she could divine evidence. But half demons were different, wholly outside of her scope. They were unfamiliar to everyone, her included. It was not something she could dismiss out of hand, but every time she thought of accepting the explanation, Binghe's face flashed behind her eyelids and she felt nausea rise in her. The very thought felt like a betrayal.
Once she'd thought her shizun could never lie, that an immortal cultivator was above the pettiness of an untruth. Then she'd seen Binghe spit blood, had put medicine into his bruised hands, and that belief had eroded itself into bleakness.
She had nothing of the boy she'd cared for now, except for the robes he'd left behind, folded carefully and freshly laundered, and that cultivation manual that had never done him any good. She kept them anyways, hid them between her mattress and the bedframe and at night imagined he lay beside her, stroking the hair out of her face. She had loved him, maybe, or maybe they had only been shijie and shidi and nothing more than that. They had been children, barely fumbling at what they could become to each other. And in the darkness of the woodshed the kindness of a hand meant more than its intent.
A year passed, and then another, folding in on another like layers of rice paper. The grief came and it went, each time bowling Ning Yingying over with its strength. Some days she had to go practice meditation alone to prevent herself from storming over to her shizun and slitting his throat with her blade and watching the red spray out on the ground.
Other days she sat at his side and listened to the sound of the birds in the trees. Her shizun looked more and more brittle, the older they both got; the bones of his wrist protruded, always. All immortal masters had an implacability and a smoothness to their face but sometimes she thought she could see cracks in his, in the twisting of his mouth and the bite of his rebukes. Sect Master Yue visited more often, lingering outside of doorways watching her shizun with low eyes that made something in her throat rise up, unnameable. She could have called it anger. She could have called it guilt. Mostly she called it sadness, because it came closest to the way she prickled at the tips of her eyelashes.
She loved her shizun, still, even if she hated him just as feverishly. Cutting the love out wouldn't bring back her shidi; wouldn't undo the years of abuse he'd heaped on him. There was no point anymore, and Ning Yingying had never been a naturally vengeful person. Sometimes, when she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, she thought that he looked almost like Binghe; something about the way he held his wrists, the way his shoulders tensed. They held their brushes the same when they did calligraphy.
It was always a wave of horrible recognition, when it hit her, but then she'd blink and he would be her shizun again; only that. And she would put her head on his shoulder when the days grew long and hot in the summer, and recite poetry until the sun set, and keep him company every day, more than any of the other disciples. Each night she took a moment to privately mourn the things missing from her life, and cherish what she still had. It was the only thing she could possibly do.
The whispers came on the wind, in snippets and in murmurs, as the world began to almost tense around them, muscles of earth contracting beneath the soil.
Ning Yingying didn't allow it to concern her in the beginning. At first it was only rumors of changes in the demon realm; a betrothal between the demon saintess Sha Hualing, who she remembered only from the invasion she'd staged on the steps of Cang Qiong Mountain, and a new force in the demon realm. Some demon boy climbing up the ranks, perhaps; she heard he was already amassing the very beginnings of a harem with engagements and promises, as was customary among demons. But things like that, as minor as they were, didn't change much of what her job was as a disciple.
And she had other rumors to contend with, anyways. She heard tell of a new disciple rising through the ranks of Huan Hua Palace, which ultimately affected her more than any demon boy could, even if it did make her scoff. The whole of Cang Qiong Mountain despised Huan Hua Palace- they were arrogant, rude, and disrespectful, their Little Palace Mistress most of all. She'd insulted Ning Yingying at a conference, once, which had made her shizun nearly incandescent with rage, in the way his face went almost shiny in its iciness.
The cutting bite of the things he'd politely said about the confrontation, afterwards, were of the like that it almost made her think he was talking about Binghe, again, like her shidi was still at her side. It had made her laugh into her sleeve, eyes bright with tears.
It had been that, not the new disciple at Huan Hua, that she'd focused on when they went there for a conference. She was a nervous wreck about it. A woman grown, and still on this subject she found herself tripping over her own tongue, unable to speak, hiding behind her shizun's robes as he defended her, still thinking of the times that she had spoken up and it had done nothing but cause more pain. This time , she thought to herself. This time I'll be brave.
The Little Palace Mistress, whose actual name she ardently refused to learn, accosted her soon after they arrived. It happened in the hallway- Ning Yingying had been intent on finding Liu Mingyan from Bai Zhan, who was one of her closest friends outside her own peak. The ensuing conversation-slash-argument had made her flush all the way up to her hairline, and when she'd finally extracted herself she'd done so feeling that she'd lost, yet again.
"It's so frustrating ," she ranted, later in the courtyard with Liu Mingyan at her side, sweating after they'd run through drills for an hour. "I can never manage to- stand up to her! Ever!"
"Mm," Liu Mingyan said, tilting her head consideringly. The wind whipped at her veil a little bit, sending the hem fluttering, and Ning Yingying averted her gaze from the glimpse of her chin- an expanse of smooth skin, with a single mole she'd never seen before. She wanted to bite at it, maybe, just a little. Perhaps she was still nursing the quietest, most embarrassing crush on Liu Mingyan, one that only got worse every time she saw her. It was something Ning Yingying was desperately trying to get over, a task at which she was failing miserably.
"Oh, but don't mind me, please," she said, smoothing down her robes and forcibly rerouting her thoughts back on track. "You seem quieter than usual! Is there anything on your mind?"
Liu Mingyan's eyes tensed at the corners. She looked toward the entrance of the courtyard- they were relatively alone, and she seemed to weigh the possibility of saying something against it being overheard. Ning Yingying leaned forward, tense, waiting for an answer, before Liu Mingyan finally shook her head.
"Not here," she said, touching one hand to Ning Yingying's. "You will see soon enough, I think. When you meet the new first disciple of Huan Hua Palace."
Ning Yingying's first thought, when hearing that, was that Liu Mingyan had been promised to the new first disciple that she'd heard both so much and so little about. Even the thought made her stomach drop into her feet- first with an ugly jealousy that surprised even herself, and then with something that curdled into concern. It wasn't uncommon for marriages to happen between sects. Ning Yingying had watched her own sect siblings leave for marriage, just as she'd seen new ones be married in. But Liu Mingyan didn't look particularly happy about it, and the only person with any authority to arrange her marriage would have been her brother.
Liu Qingge had been dead for years, now, and there was a furrow in the brow of the sister he'd left behind.
None of it made any sense. Ning Yingying- always unable to find words, even when the situation necessitated it so dearly- slipped her hand into Liu Mingyan's, and hoped she was wrong.
So naturally she went to the grand banquet of the sects, scheduled for later in the week. The talk in the hallways said that the new first disciple would be announced at the banquet- a prestigious affair, naturally, befitting his new status. Ning Yingying thought it sounded stupid, but it was also an opportunity to gather new information.
She sat at a table away from her shizun- he was seated with the other Peak Lords, although he never actually ate much at banquets, preferring instead to pick at his food while eyeing the rest of them. Across the room she kept looking at Liu Mingyan, wondering what her friend was thinking- if she was okay. Something in the very back of her brain was running through options for what to do to get Liu Mingyan out of a marriage-
Eventually the Old Palace Master stood for a toast. His robes were ostentatious, covered in carefully embroidered threads- even from here Ning Yingying could see the care and detail that had been put into each stitch. He truly was the Little Mistress's father, and Ning Yingying did not like him at all.
"Greetings, honored guests," he began, and that was the point at which she began to tune out. Something something thank you for attending. Something something peace between the sects. Something something a new era- which made her perk up a little bit, actually. When she turned to look at her shizun, she could see his hands clenched on the table, the fingers flexing. There was a tightness around his mouth.
"Given all that, it is my pleasure to introduce our first disciple," he said, finally, and gestured toward the hallway. Something in Ning Yingying's chest was beating far too fast.
The doors creaked open, hinges dragging, and there he was.
He looked older- obviously he was older. It had been five years, but she could still recognize him by the dimple of his smile. His hair was curlier, the childhood fluffiness turned into sleek curls that came down his back in waves, shiny and full. And he was taller, too- he'd been only an inch taller than her at most the last time she'd seen him, but now he had at least half a foot of height on her, if not more. At his belt he wore a sword that made her eyes hurt to look at it for reasons she didn't understand. It was not Zheng Yang, she knew that for certain. That had been shattered years ago. He was clad in black and red robes, his eyes glowed even across the room, and he was- he was grinning, almost, in a way she'd never seen him smile before, not in the years they'd spent together on that peak.
It was Luo Binghe. She knew it the moment she saw him, and something in her chest chipped apart and fell to pieces. Oh, A-Luo, she thought, something soft and sad rising in her throat and choking breath from her. My shidi. What happened to you?
Across the room, then, the shattering of porcelain broke the silence. Her shizun had crushed a teacup in his hand. Half the room was looking at him, and Ning Yingying knew in that moment, dawning horrible like goosebumps on her arms, that none of this was going to end well.
There was an uproar, of course. Her shizun stormed out in the commotion, and there were accusations flung back and forth, but Ning Yingying didn't even think about any of that. Her only eyes were for her shidi, watching him move gracefully around the room like some graceful predator, a wolf in the midst of soft lambs. His hand was always, always, near his belt- near the sword on it that made her skin shiver.
The Little Palace Mistress kept nodding fiercely along to what he said, clinging to his arm at certain points, and Ning Yingying despised her with a fury that shook down her spine, each bone crackling with rage. How dare this woman act as if she would have held any affection for him when he was a boy? The boy that Luo Binghe had been, once, soft in the way that only children were, who had put his head in her lap and napped there in stolen moments. None of them had known him- had cared for him. None of the disciples of Huan Hua Palace who crowded around him now would ever have cared for him, have done anything like what Ning Yingying had done for Luo Binghe.
Except she hadn't saved him, either. Maybe they'd found him, taken him in- after- whatever happened, during that conference. Kept him safe and a secret. Maybe in the end they'd been better martial siblings to him than she'd ever managed to be to him. After all, she'd never been enough to protect him in a way that mattered.
Most of the disciples were instructed to return to their quarters, eventually. Ming Fan sprang from his seat the moment the direction was given, his hand wrapping around Ning Yingying's wrist. "A-Ying, let's get out of here," he said, practically pleading. His fingers pressed against the bones of her wrist, voice cracking with anger and fear.
She turned. He was right, probably, that staying was a bad idea- hadn't she thought, the moment that she saw Luo Binghe, that this wasn't going to end well? But she couldn't help herself, she couldn't stop herself from looking, craning her neck one last time to just- get one last look at him-
He turned as she pulled herself to her tiptoes to look, and their eyes met across the room. She saw it, then as his eyes lingered on her face, as something softened the barest bit around his mouth- almost shocked, almost surprised. His mouth formed around each syllable, Yingying , and she must have worn her emotions on her face, because he almost started to smile. She could see the beginnings of it on him, the way his eyes lifted and his lips twitched. It was all still so familiar that for a moment she could almost see the boy he'd been in the man he was now.
Then his eyes dropped to the hand around her wrist, and his face shuttered so quickly it was if that softness had never been there in the first place. The sword at his belt almost- it couldn't have twitched, but it looked like it did, for the barest moment. Her face was pink with heat, Ming Fan's hand squeezing tighter around her arm. What was he thinking? Of those fingers, wrapped around her wrist? What did it look like to him?
"Let's go ," Ming Fan hissed, and Ning Yingying tore her eyes from his face and nodded, silent, as she allowed him to drag her out into the hallway, still tracing her long-lost shidi's expression in her mind.
That night, Ning Yingying found herself in one of the rooms allotted for visiting disciples. She hated Huan Hua, but one of the things it had going for it was the sheer amount of space- the sprawl of its grounds meant that there was enough room for some disciples to get their own room, and as her shizun's favorite, she was one of them. It gave her ample opportunity to think, without worrying about what anyone else would have to say about it.
She should sleep. A good sleep schedule was good for one's cultivation, after all- but she couldn't. She kept getting up, pacing the floors, walking back and forth and thinking about her Binghe, about the way he'd looked at her when he'd seen her for the first time back in years.
What had happened to him?
She'd thought- for so many years she'd thought he was dead. That her shizun had murdered him in cold blood. His body left to rot, not given even the honor of a burial. She'd burned paper money for him, wept over the memories of him. She'd hoped that however it had happened, it had been quick.
And all this time he'd been alive. Alive , and not here, not with her, not even sending a message, or a note, or some sort of sign. It was stupid for Ning Yingying to resent him for that- he might very well have had a good reason. Maybe he couldn't have told her, or maybe it hadn't been safe. But Liu Mingyan had known , she realized, her heart constricting in her chest. And she hadn't. He'd told Liu Mingyan- a woman that he'd barely known in comparison- and not her. Not his shijie.
She turned around in her pacing to look out the window and then shrieked, because it was open. Luo Binghe was perched on the edge of the windowsill, his feet dangling against the wall, smiling at her.
"Shijie," he said, softly enough that it caught her question right out of her chest before she could say it. "You look different."
Ning Yingying couldn't help herself from flushing. He looked different too, to be frank. All grown-up and handsome, broad-shouldered and curly haired, having finally grown into his features so that he no longer looked like a beatific-if-beaten-down sheeplike young disciple and instead looked like a- well. Like a man. And he was looking at her like she was something special , the way he used to when she was his only kindness. It was sharper on his face now than it had been, before. She didn't know why.
She didn't say any of that to him, of course. Instead she said, "and you've gotten taller."
The statement took both of them by surprise, Binghe's eyes widening at her even as he hid his laughter in the drape of his sleeve. "I am, aren't I," he said once he'd stopped chuckling. "Ning-shijie is very observant."
"Forget that," she hissed, suddenly overtaken by a burst of rage. "What are you doing here? How are you alive? What even happened ?"
She had so many questions. Too many for him to answer, ones that might as well have ripped her bare of her skin to ask of him. Why didn't you come to me? What did your- our - shizun do to you? Are you really a demon, or was that too another lie he told you? Were you safe, when you were gone? Where were you? Where were you?
These were not fair questions, but they prickled on her tongue like tastebuds anyways, bittersweet savored between each molar, rolling against her tonsils and down her throat as she swallowed them. It was not fair to ask him such things. It wasn't fair that she was thinking them at all.
"Please forgive your shidi," he said, tilting his head and taking a step closer. "This one is afraid he cannot regale you with the tales of his adventures in his absence yet, as much as I know Ning-shijie must long for them."
It didn't answer any of the questions Ning Yingying had asked, let alone any of the ones she hadn't, and it must have shown in her eyes. Something in her kept saying, he told Liu Mingyan. He told her before me . The jealousy was childish and inescapable and it licked up her spine and made home in her cheekbones, shining bright red.
She had never had a good poker face, and it hadn't improved in his absence. The sharp edge of his mouth turned gentle as he put one hand on her cheek, one on her shoulder. This close she could see the mole underneath his lip, the whites of his eyes. His breath was warm on her face, and she turned from it, into his cold palm, squeezing her eyes closed.
"Yingying," he said, a little frantic, and the vulnerability in his voice made her knees buckle a little, tears swelling beneath her eyelids even as she tried to suppress them. He'd only ever called her that a handful of times, when he was sobbing in the woodshed and she hadn't been able to bear to tell him about how he should respect seniority and not dishonor their status as disciples. There had been no honor, in the woodshed. "I can't tell you. I'm sorry. You'll understand soon."
"A-Luo," she whispered, stifling a sob. "I missed you so much."
He shuddered, when she said that, as if she'd touched him deeply somewhere, or wounded him unexpectedly. It was an old nickname, affectionate, the syllables worn down by love. She hadn't said it out loud for years. "I missed you too."
Ning Yingying couldn't stop herself from crying at that, falling into him like he was the only support she could cling to. She slipped her bare hands up inside the sleeves of his robes, feeling for the burning warmth of his wrists. Every part of her was acid where he touched her, so far beyond sour in her mouth that it turned sweet again.
They stayed that way for a long time, before he pulled himself away from her, something like regret curdling his mouth. "A-Ying. It'll make sense soon," he promised again, but she didn't even care.
He was alive. It hadn't really hit her until he'd held her. He was alive . And he'd promised her answers soon. Jealousy was still eating up at bits of her, but she found that it was now endurable.
Soon. The word had never seemed so far away.
Two days later, her shizun was formally accused of murder.
There were other charges- mistreatment of disciples, which she knew for a fact was true. Arson, and destruction of property, which did seem entirely unlike him. And- unseemly behavior with women, a phrase loaded with enough meaning that she couldn't discern what was meant by it.
When she'd first heard the murder charge, though, she'd stood frozen in the hall pressing Ming Fan's hand to her wrist, thinking, has he done it this time ?
The very concept of it- of A-Luo being robbed from her- days after he'd returned- it made her sick and queasy to the pit of her stomach. It had only lasted for a moment, though, before it was announced that the charges were being brought by the head disciple of Huan Hua Palace- Luo Binghe. Then the relief had hit her, and she'd squeezed Ming Fan's hand to her wrist so tightly he looked askance at her.
"Shizun will be okay," he said, later. His voice was confident but his shoulders were trembling. "It's all a misunderstanding. It will be put to rights."
Ning Yingying didn't tell him that it hadn't been Shizun she'd been worried about. She kept those unfilial thoughts to herself. Later, she thought- charges of murder .
Not attempted murder- that was on the list as well. But murder charges, and several of them. She didn't know the names of the victims. Were they other disciples, like Luo Binghe had been? He'd never done to any other disciple anything quite like what he'd done to her shidi, not even in the years when they'd both thought him dead. But she had not always been his disciple. Had there been others, then, before her? Was Binghe's survival by chance alone?
She did not know.
What bothered her almost as much was the charge of- unseemly behavior with women. It could have meant so many things, but it made Ning Yingying think of how her shizun would occasionally go down the mountain at night to a brothel and reappear in the morning. It had been a rumor which she had not wholly believed, not until she'd seen him leaving its doors on a morning she'd been sent to retrieve items from the market.
On some nights, even, he'd ask her to sleep in the bamboo cottage with him, and she'd fallen asleep to the sound of his voice as she'd lain on the floor. It hadn't seemed 'unseemly', then, though Binghe had sometimes looked askance at her when she emerged from the doors of that house. She'd never thought much of it- she hadn't even cared, her shizun had needed her, she thought it was normal. She'd never thought- she didn't think-
She was abruptly sick to her stomach.
The trial couldn't come soon enough, she decided, laying in bed that night.
The trial lasted a little less than a week, and Ning Yingying spent most of it in a state of shock.
She'd never known where her shizun had come from, whether he'd been from a noble family like some of the other Lords and Ladies of the peaks- like Qi Qingqi, who'd also wanted her for her sect- or if he'd been more like Shang Qinghua, son of a merchant family who'd worked his way up to his position and who always seemed shifty about the topic, laughing low under his breath when it was brought up. But she'd never have been able to guess any of this, in any case. How could she have possibly guessed that her shizun had been anyone's fiancé, once upon a time?
How could she possibly have guessed that he'd repaid their hospitality with murder?
She couldn't picture it, couldn't even begin to imagine her shizun as a child. Every time she tried to lay out the scene in her head it broke into pieces, shattered in her hands. He felt untouchable, even now, even with his head held high as the Old Palace Master of Huan Hua hurled accusations at him that he did nothing to refute. None of them, not even-
Not even-
Ning Yingying hadn't thought, when they talked about unseemly behavior with women, that her name would ever have been brought up. She'd never felt disrespected by Shizun by virtue of her gender. He'd always been kind to her, if slightly more at ease than he was with the other disciples. She'd never even considered that sleeping in his bamboo house was inappropriate. But maybe it had been strange. She'd heard- she knew that men could say things to women and even mean them, could be kind, and still hurt them.
She'd been asleep, after all. Anything could do anything to you, while you slept.
The thought made her violently nauseous in the balcony, and she closed her eyes. Below her, she could hear Luo Binghe spit vitriol at the man who had raised the both of them.
Her head was spinning. She wanted Ming Fan. She wanted his hand on her arm, telling her it was going to be okay, the reassurance that she wasn't tainted by the possibility of- something having happened to her. Telling her that she was wrong, that Shizun would never have done this to her, that he would have known . It was something she'd quietly resented him for for years- his inexhaustible belief in the man, his willingness to follow him anywhere- but now, unable to trust herself, she wanted it more than ever. The reassurance of a rock beneath her.
But they'd taken Ming Fan away because he'd started shouting at the accusations leveled at their shizun within an hour, and then she'd been all alone, shaking quietly and avoiding the gazes of those who recognized her and looked up at her.
Ning Yingying didn't want to be here. But she couldn't bring herself to leave.
They sentenced her shizun to indefinite custody in Huan Hua Palace, to be remanded and watched over by the Huan Hua Palace's first disciple. It was better than death, Ning Yingying thought, and deliberately ignored the glint of cruelty in Binghe's eyes.
He came to her room the next night.
"I'm so mad at you," she told him, sitting on the bed as he stood, shifting from foot to foot, looking for all the world like the little sheep disciple he could pretend to be on occasion, when others came to the peak. "You never- you didn't ask me for help, and I thought-"
"Was Ning-shijie worried about this one?" he drawled, a smirk flickering at the edge of his mouth as if he couldn't help himself. She hit him with a glare so fierce he quieted immediately, contrite.
"I wish you'd told me," she said, finally. "And that you hadn't… said those things about him."
"He deserved it," Binghe snapped, something red flickering in his eyes. "You know he did. You saw . What he did to me- to us -"
"He didn't do anything to me, A-Luo," Ning Yingying said, very softly, so quiet that she wasn't sure he'd even heard her. And her voice trembled when she said it, with uncertainty- so maybe it was a good thing, if he hadn't.
There wasn't anything she could do about it now. So many charges, and he said nothing at all to any of them. Even if they'd all been wrong about her , which she still- she couldn't know. No one but her shizun could know that- and she couldn't trust him anymore. Not really.
"It doesn't matter anyways," he said at last when his anger had cooled and he'd stopped gritting his teeth. When he sat next to her on the bed, he pulled her wrist close and touched the pulse point, softly. "There are… more important things. I said I would explain things…"
He turned to her, then. That's when she realized that when his eyes flickered red, earlier, she hadn't been imagining it.
"A-Luo, are you…" she breathed, slow, reaching one hand out toward him. Binghe let her touch his cheek, body still and tense. She remembered, then, her shizun coming back from the conference where her shidi's death had been reported.
He was part demon .
On Binghe's forehead, there it was: a red mark. A Heavenly Demon's mark.
"I think you had better explain then, A-Luo," she whispered.
Ning Yingying had thought that she'd known the worst thing that her shizun could do to a child. Listening to Binghe tell her the truth about what had happened in the Immortal Alliance Conference, she realized that she'd been wrong.
It could always get worse.
She exhausted herself as he told the story, sobbing against his robe over what they'd done to him- the things he'd suffered- the life he'd lived in their mutual absence. She could barely imagine it- barely imagine him in the darkness of the Abyss. Something in her told her that he wasn't even telling her the full story- the way he avoided her eyes at parts, picking at a thread on his robes as if trying to pull the seams loose. It made her heart burn to think that he'd been so alone down there.
Afterwards, Binghe told her what the plan was now- to take over Huan Hua Palace as a Heavenly Demon. He showed her Xin Mo, told her just how powerful it was. It seemed, almost, as if he had an answer for her every question.
"I have other allies," he said, avoiding her eyes. "Shijie… shijie asked earlier why Liu Mingyan knew. I needed her help, and she wanted justice for her brother… but I always wanted to tell shijie that I was still alive first. I wanted to tell her she didn't have to mourn me."
That made her cry all over again.
Honestly, the prospect of it all frightened her. But she couldn't begrudge him for what he was going to do. He was right when he said he wasn't safe, half-Heavenly Demon, half enemy of the cultivation world and half part of it. They'd find out eventually, and then she'd lose him again.
"This is the only way," he'd said, and she believed him. There wasn't much else they could do, aside from A-Luo leaving the cultivation world entirely- and she wasn't willing to accept that. The idea of it smarted- that he should have to leave, give up the world they'd walked in together as adolescents, because of the hatred of others. In his plan he'd be safe, and he'd be hers, and she would be safe too. The way he'd talked about the cultivation sects- she couldn't help but believe him when he said that he doubted she'd be able to stay, either, in the event that his secret got out.
He was different now. Less innocent. It was something to mourn, that they'd taken that from him- but she still trusted him, down to the bone of him, the marrow. He was still her A-Luo.
This was the closest she was ever going to get to going back to before, Ning Yingying thought that night, after he'd left. The whole world felt raw and tender, teetering on the balance of a before and an after. She'd almost kissed him there, in the dark, shivering in his arms before he left. Something had stopped her, and she wasn't sure what it was.
Soon, she thought. Soon.
She sat next to Liu Mingyan when Luo Binghe revealed himself to the major sects. Her heart beat faster in the crowd. Mingyan's fingers in hers, squeezed tight even as the cultivators threw themselves into an uproar. She crushed them in her own when the crowd began to slam bodies against bodies and they pulled themselves out of there, slipping out through the exit. Ning Yingying couldn't help but look behind her as she went, searching for one last glimpse of him.
He was glowing, her boy, a dark jewel, smiling even as they rushed at him. He pushed them back, Xin Mo glittering in his hands with the sheer force of the energy it emanated. Something in her lurched, unpleasant and afraid, at the way he grinned down at the rest of them- loose limbed and easy, frightening. Completely at peace.
It scared her.
Then Liu Mingyan was grabbing her by the wrist again. Her eyes were bright and wild above her veil, and she was dragging Ning Yingying through the corridor, away from Binghe, away from all of the sounds of blades clashing and yelling. Something in her went limp and quiet and pliant, tugged along by this woman she didn't know how to feel about anymore.
By the time they'd found safety, her face was wet with tears. Liu Mingyan produced a filmy handkerchief from a qiankun pouch and offered it to her, silent, to wipe her cheeks free of salt. There was a terrible understanding in her eyes, and Ning Yingying couldn't bear it- couldn't bear to even examine it, what was happening back there. The sects pitted against her shidi. The world against him, and him against the world, and she wasn't sure who she was more scared for. She turned away, but she didn't let go of Liu Mingyan's hand.
Halfway through washing her face, she realized that what she'd thought was a handkerchief was actually a spare veil, and had to bite down on her lip to prevent herself from starting to cry all over again.
Liu Mingyan refused to leave the cultivator's outpost for the next few weeks. "It isn't safe," she repeated over and over, even when Ning Yingying cajoled and pleaded and screamed at her that her shidis, her shimeis, were out there. She was the first disicple of Qing Jing Peak- in action if not in name, since she was the one who actually fulfilled most of Ming Fan's duties. It was her responsibility to keep them safe, and if there was to be a war then it was her job to make sure that they stayed away from bloodshed, from a conflict they had no reason to be involved in. They were children, out there. She could think of each of them, could picture those who hadn't yet even formed the beginnings of a core; could picture them dead and bleeding in the grass, the way she remembered from the Immortal Alliance Conference.
It was a picture she had refined over the past five years, dreaming of Binghe broken in the weeds, bleeding under her shizun's sword. Now the bodies flickered back and forth between him and everyone she'd helped mentor, and both images made her throat go tight and taut with a shaking fear.
She couldn't let that happen again. She couldn't.
Her pleas fell on deaf ears, though. Liu Mingyan was stronger than her, and almost nearly as determined as she was. Ning Yingying fought her wildly, deceptively, without even trying to fight her at all. She threw herself at Liu Mingyan from behind the first day, after pretending that she understood why Liu Mingyan wouldn't let her leave, pretending that she could accept it. It didn't work, though. Between the two of them, both of them knew the other far too well.
She tried to sneak out the door in the middle of the night. She pleaded and she lied and she bit at the flesh of Liu Mingyan's shoulder as she was carried back inside like a sack of rice, sobbing and ripping with her teeth, futile. Every night, back in the same bed, an arm slung around her waist as insurance.
Every time, the same words. "It isn't safe," repeated over and over again. Liu Mingyan might have meant them as reassurance, but Ning Yingying heard the exact opposite. Every time it was a reminder: her martial brothers. Her martial sisters. None of them were safe. Binghe- her last memory of him surrounded by swords, wild and untamed and still, always, in her memory a touchable and woundable thing- least of all.
How could she have ever let her worst nightmare come true twice over, she thought, as Liu Mingyan pressed qi into her bruised wrist. How could she have failed twice in exactly the same way?
The last day in the outpost together, Ning Yingying gave up on pretense. No tricks, no deceptions- she raised her eyes to Mingyan's, to the girl who had been her best friend in the absence of Ming Fan- and without saying anything lunged at her. Sword against sword. She had no more energy for anything else.
The ensuing fight was laughable . Liu Mingyan didn't break her skin even once; instead, Ning Yingying nursed bruises as she took hit after hit from the sword's pommel, or from the flat of the shining blade. Her arms ached. Her whole body ached. Everything hurt, not least of them her heart; she threw her sword against Liu Mingyan's with all the strength in her body and ended up on the floor, Mingyan's arms around her as she screamed.
"Let me go ," she cried out, to no answer. Mingyan tightened her grip for a moment and then loosened it. It was too late for her to even try to take advantage of it- she felt like wrung out rags, squeezed free of any will to keep fighting. Her knees buckled and she slid to the ground, too exhausted to even cry. They stayed on the floor like that for a long time, entirely silent.
In the bedroom, later, she put her back against Liu Mingyan's chest in the dark and tried to cherish the warmth there. Breathed to the count of her heartbeat, thrumming. She could feel the sharp line of her jaw on the top of her forehead- held so close she didn't know how to leave.
Out of the darkness, Liu Mingyan said, "Tomorrow. We will leave tomorrow."
Her eyes closed- something in her chest knotted, too tight, her throat closing up and her mouth aching with what she couldn't say. Ning Yingying moved closer to Liu Mingyan in the dark and tried to remember how to breathe as she fell asleep.
Four hours of flying by sword was supposed to be enough time to prepare her. It was supposed to be enough. But even years later, she remembers the way she caught her breath when Qing Jing Peak came into view, the way her foot almost slipped off the blade in shock. Liu Mingyan caught her by the elbow, and so she only wobbled instead of plummeting to her death fifty feet below.
It all felt like a dream- a nightmare pieced together from all her worst imaginings of what could have happened, cobbled together over the past few weeks of waiting for the worst. The horrible acrid haze of the smoke, rising from her home and polluting the crisp air- it should have smelled of lotus.
It didn't. Ning Yingying coughed so hard she felt like she might throw up, standing there above the ruins of what had been her home for almost a decade and a half now. Her whole body screamed at her to go back- to turn, fly harder than she'd ever flown before, until Qing Jing Peak was an ashen mess behind her and the world was swallowed up into the cottage where she'd spent days fighting Liu Mingyan to the floor. She wanted to have never insisted on coming back- she didn't want to go down there and have to know exactly whose bodies were strewn on the stone paths around the memories of her childhood and adolescence and her burgeoning adulthood.
Your whole life you've borne witness, Ning Yingying reminded herself, and descended to take inventory of the wreckage that was left of her life.
The bodies. So many bodies, and not nearly enough space in her body for the grief that belonged there. Ning Yingying cried until her eyes hurt. Liu Mingyan stood at her side, implacable, and never shed a single tear.
She sifted through rubble and kept track of the names of the dead for later. Someone would have to remember them- someone would have to make sure their deaths weren't forgotten, swept away by time and the columns of smoke that still rose from the roofs. Someone would have to tell their families. The realization hit her slowly, punching closer to her heart with every body she found crumpled and covered in blood and dust. "Someone" was going to have to be her.
No matter where she looked, she couldn't find Binghe. But that was cold comfort, when she found children of only fifteen gasping their deaths out in the broken up rocks and the fallen buildings. The youngest had been accepted as a disciple only a month ago- she'd watched the tea ceremony, watched her trembling fingers close around the handle and pour, eyes fixed so carefully on the spout. A baby faced little girl, who'd just wanted to learn how to be strong- who'd wanted to be a cultivator. Just like Ning Yingying had, years prior. Their sword calluses matched.
The girl's hands were broken- missing fingernails from when she'd scrabbled at the rock that had crushed her legs from the thigh down. Ning Yingying pressed the shattered remains to her chest, kissed the fingers that had poured tea for their shared shizun. Liu Mingyan stood behind her and kept her gaze averted- guarding her grief from the empty, voyeuristic world. It was a kind of respect Ning Yingying had not known existed until now, and she was sorely grateful for it.
She found Binghe in the middle of it all, his cheeks streaked with ash and tears. Something was wrong, on his face: a rictus frozen, barely twitching at the edges of his mouth. His hands were not yet dry, red seeping in little rivulets from underneath his fingernails.
"A-Luo," Ning Yingying breathed. He turned, slow, at the sound of her voice; his shoulders were shaking, his forehead blazing with the very light she'd been taught to hate. All around her were her sect siblings's bodies- his sword was still wet with their blood. She should have hated him in that moment. She went to him anyways, and pressed her face into his chest, and did not cry.
The dead were so young. So was he; so was she. Her eyes hurt, her head was pounding, and she didn't cry, but she held him until he stopped shivering. Until they both stopped shivering. Until they were only two people standing in the middle of the wreckage of their childhood, her trying to imagine she could still read his mind. Pretending the crunching beneath her feet had been rock and not bone.
"Shijie," he whispered, and she pulled back to see him smiling down at her. "Shijie, I did it."
"You did," she told him, and matched his expression even though it cut at her, the ends of her mouth wavering with the effort of maintaining the smile. "My A-Luo."
When they married, she cried; he didn't.
The ceremony was beautiful. It was everything she could have possibly dreamed of as a foolish little girl, back when the idea of a marriage between them was something she nurtured in her heart at night. And when Binghe kissed her, his lips were soft; he tasted like cherries, just a little bit past ripeness. She clung to his shoulders and trembled and didn't dare let go.
Beneath them in the dark dungeons of Huan Hua Palace, evil things were happening on her husband's orders. She had not looked at Ming Fan's body. She did not ask where her shizun was, what had happened to him. The other women didn't either, but then again they had less reason to care.
Liu Mingyan stood at her side. She would be a fellow wife, soon. Ning Yingying took comfort in her presence in the way she did little else, and she could not stop thinking about the way Liu Mingyan had held her while she slept in the little cottage. The night before the ceremony she had dreamt about it, had dreamt about Liu Mingyan moving in her and above her. Her shizun would not have approved of the match. He would not have approved of this one, either. Ning Yingying wondered if he had, in fact, wanted her for himself. She was fairly certain at this point that she would never know.
She wondered if the rumors were true. If he was down there, in the dark, hanging from the ceiling. The servants whispered- Binghe wasn't as subtle as he thought he was. She could go and check, if she wished.
But Ning Yingying was very tired of bearing witness.
The man standing in front of her held her so close. The warmth of his body was a furnace, supplied by demonic power that she could not begrudge him for, could not hate him for- she pitied the mark on him, pitied the way her shizun had been right, pitied the way all of this had played out. She had been his witness. It had done nothing for either of them.
All around them were people who loved him. It was an exact mirror of the way she'd spent her whole life. For years the rest of the world had hated him as she'd held him in her heart in silence. Now they praised his name in the streets. They feasted in his honor. They called him Emperor and paid him their allegiance. They loved him.
And here she was, staring up at him as he bent to kiss her, her hands fisted in his sleeves, and she hated him with a vigour that she could only swallow back, and try and make the best of.