open post: pollen science

[peaklordshen]

After his conversation with Sagramore, Shen Qingqiu had taken a long, hot shower, mainly for the novelty of it, and then gotten dressed again in his robes—although he wore fewer layers than were truly proper for a peak lord, and he'd forgone his guan in favor of just braiding his hair in a thick coil against his neck. He leaves the two looser loops at the front—he still can't find his fan, and it felt wrong to not have any frame to his face at all. He's not thinking about why he feels loath to fully don his Shen Qingqiu persona. He's not thinking about much, about the last few days. Instead, he's thinking about pollen.

He's in the greenhouse, carefully laying out a sample cut from every plant in the place, as well as every plant he can imagine producing pollen of any kind from the grounds. Grasses, flowers, buds, leaves, even a few species of harmless-looking mushroom. He's using a pair of tweezers he found to gentle separate them so he can examine the internal structures. Some he recognizes as entirely harmless - Earth flora; others are stranger, more alien. Some even look similar to plants from Proud Immortal Demon Way, though thankfully none are obviously aphrodisiac in nature. Shen Qingqiu is wearing his gloves and mask again anyway—he doesn't want to breathe in the wrong pollen; normal sex pollen would just increase his normal desires and make him hyper-straight, totally defeating the purpose.

He has his notebook open to a fresh page, and is making meticulous lists.

Comments

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu laughs, his eyes crinkling up at the corners. "Yes," he says. "The fish porridge. I wish I'd had a chance to ask Binghe exactly why it was so bad, but." He shakes his head, sharply. He's not thinking about that.

[onthewillowsthere]

"We made it for Luo Binghe?"

[peaklordshen]

"We did," says Shen Qingqiu, calmly and without apology. He has no idea how much, if at all, Galahad and Binghe have interacted, but he hasn't backed down from defending his honor yet and he's certainly not going to start now. "It was an apology. I--" he cringes at the memory of telling Sagramore the whole of it, put my sword through his chest-- "I hurt him. Badly."

[onthewillowsthere]

He has the fleeting thought, maybe that's what I should do, bring him food, but he doesn't know what Claudius likes to eat, only his taste in wines, which he sometimes spoke of, and anyway he promised to leave him alone, and having given back the key seems final enough on that point. Eventually he realizes he hasn't responded, and he says quietly, "I'm sorry."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu blinks, surprised. "Sorry? For what?"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu has never needed his fan more. He is going to die of embarrassment. He is going to disintegrate into dust before he can even put his lips to—to—¹

He takes the vape. "Thank you," he manages, somehow, strangled, and then flees.

¹ Even he doesn't know if this sentence ends with "the vape" or "Binghe's mouth" or... something else.

[onthewillowsthere]

"For--" Galahad sighs. "I don't know."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu pats his head fondly. "You have no apology to make to me."

[peaklordshen]

"Ah, young Magnus," says Shen Qingqiu, smiling (it might be hard to tell, behind the mask, but his eyes crinkle at the corners). "How have you been settling in? Did you find the books you were looking for?"

[onthewillowsthere]

He keeps his head bowed, eyes down. "No. I want to apologize to someone else."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu gently herds Galahad over to the stool at his work table and makes him sit. "Who?" he asks. He wonders if it's Sagramore. Maybe they're supposed to be on Galahad's great quest together, and Galahad wants to apologize for not being able to pursue it, here, or not wanting to pursue it anymore, or—really any number of possibilities. If that's the case, Shen Qingqiu is pretty sure Sagramore won't mind. He gets ready to reassure Galahad of the same.

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad sits with his hands perfectly still in his lap, the way he would at mass -- no fidgeting, straight posture, ready to be a vessel who receives God's word. He looks at Shen Qingqiu, focusing his gaze on Shen Qingqiu's eyes.

"Claudius."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu nearly gapes at him. "Claud—Claudius?" he asks, all of his noble visions of Galahad and Sagramore riding into battle side by side vanishing like smoke. "What could you have possibly done to Claudius that deserves apology?" He barely thinks what Binghe did to Claudius is deserving of apology, and he's pretty sure Galahad doesn't even have blood parasites.

[onthewillowsthere]

I came to him as someone else. I didn't make it clear enough I wasn't myself. I broke my vows and he thinks it's his fault. I tried to offer him absolution he didn't want, and I don't have the power anymore to give. I told him I want to die. I flinched away from his hand. I didn't let Lan Wangji touch my mind even though it's what he wanted. I asked him questions through a messenger after I said I would let him alone. I still want him to take me back.

He's too overwhelmed with possibilities to speak. It's been so long since he had to try and remember how to express himself -- it's been five years with Percival, and Percival always understood him without much effort. Everything here is emotions and explanations and Galahad freezes under the prospect. He shakes his head at Shen Qingqiu.

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu nods back, accepting the silence as an answer for now. He's disappointed, but not enough to press—Galahad is too fragile for that, and this might be gossip he can get from other sources. Claudius might even tell him himself, he seems free enough with his tongue.¹

"Well," he says instead. "I'm not—exactly an expert in apologies. Ours worked, but I think it was more due to luck than anything else. And I'm not sure I would advise trying with food, unless your memories are filled with expert cooking lessons that have now all flooded back to you."

¹Pun intended.

[onthewillowsthere]

"No. Only catechisms."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu is not really sure what a catechism is, only that it's vaguely Catholic, probably? It remains deeply weird to meet Christians again after only spending time among Fantasy Bullshit Taoism for so long. "Alright," he says. "Well, if food is out, the other classic apology thing is flowers, right?" He gestures around them, smiling. "And—hang on."

He fishes around inside the qiankun bag in his sleeve and pulls out a book. His conversation with Laertes—rosemary for remembrance—had spurred an idle curiously for the meaning of herbs, and the library had been happy to provide... kind of. He lays a copy of the Victorian Language of Flowers out on the table for Galahad.¹ "Maybe we can find a way to say what you wish to with this?"

¹ Who may notice that it is way too thick and heavy to have been comfortably carried in a sleeve, even as spacious a sleeve as Shen Qingqiu's.

[onthewillowsthere]

That actually seems like something Claudius would not only understand but actually appreciate, and something like an expression actually manifests on Galahad's impassive face. He wouldn't actually do it; he promised not to. But the idea of looking is soothing.

"Yes." He flicks a glance at Shen Qingqiu. "Please."

[peaklordshen]

"Exactly," says Shen Qingqiu. He sighs, dispirited. He's starting to think none of the things he's gathered have BL pollen in them at all. "I also... am used to having a certain meta-level understanding of the world at large," he admits. "But here I keep being wrong about everything. The—beats are wrong, somehow. People don't act the way I expect."

[sporesprouter]

She nods slowly. "I think that if people always acted the way we expected, the world wouldn't be as interesting. It would be easier, sure, but... people are people. And that means strange and mixed-up and sometimes contradictory. It can be frustrating sometimes, yes, but I'd rather have it this way then know what was going to happen all the time."

[timebethine]

After a grey day, Laertes has dug up some St. John's Wort from the garden and brought it into the greenhouse to help shelter it from the cold. He's never kept plants before, and he's very anxious that his flowers should survive--he inspects the leaves to make sure they're still lush and green, then checks the soil with his fingertips. It's a relief to find the earth still very slightly damp.

Only then does he notice Shen Qingqiu on the other side of the plant rack with what appear to be dozens of samples and cuttings. "Hallo," he says, pitched low to avoid startling Shen Qingqiu. "Have you taken up alchemy?"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu claps his hands, delighted—not only at the hint of joy or relief on Galahad's face, but at the idea of busying himself with something like this. It was way more interesting than fruitlessly searching for a pollen that he doesn't know anything about. Not that he's giving up, of course, but he can take on another little Galahad-related sidequest, especially because he was robbed of seeing the last one through.

He... doesn't know anything about flowers, either, really, but the book has illustrations and he can make this work. "Okay," he says, and flips the book open to a random page. "Take a look and see if anything speaks to you, and I'll see if I can find it - here or in the gardens."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad leans over to look, his shoulder brushing against Shen Qingqiu's as he starts reading through the plants. "Can you find anything?"

[peaklordshen]

The thing is, Shen Qingqiu knows Tress is right. Or—she would be right, if they'd been in the real world, and half the people Shen Qingqiu had met here hadn't been from Hamlet, or weird alternate universe fantasy novels, or Arthurian myth, or apparently the Bible(??). But they are, and Shen Qingqiu himself is here by way of fiction, as well, and in fiction, people aren't people, they're characters. Puppets for an unseen author. He's used to blaming that author for the things Tress is outlining: inconsistencies, contradictions. He's used to dismissing all of that as hopelessly, depressingly OOC.

But—even before he'd left Proud Immortal Demon Way, that had been changing. Luo Binghe hadn't been spending nearly enough time with his future wives. People at the Immortal Alliance conference had died, and Shen Qingqiu had known they would, had been expecting it, had enjoyed this arc, the first time around, and he'd still felt...the hurt he'd caused Binghe, as inevitable as it had been, had still felt...

He'd attributed it to being overly sensitive on his part, sentimental toward these automatons he was surrounded by. But then he'd found out Airplane was there, in PIDW with him, no longer controlling it from the outside. He'd still written them all, they were still composed of the building blocks he'd cooked up in his feverish, perverted little brain, but now they were just—acting and reacting, bouncing off one another like tops that had been spun and released.

And the same was true, here. Everyone here had been spun up in some other world and released into this one, and in the wake of their release they were... changing. He'd been hyper-focused on the big changes¹ but they were changing in smaller ways, too. Luo Binghe had released Claudius from his blood parasites with only slight coaxing, and was making platonic friendships with women. Lan Wangji was making friends with ruthless bitches and Christian demons. People were learning from one another - skills, life lessons. Hell—he glances down at himself, barely decently dressed, no guan, his fan nowhere to be seen. Transport him back to Qing Jing right now and he'd be nigh unrecognizable.

"People," he says slowly, "are people. You're right."

¹ He means becoming gay.

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu rolls up his sleeves (metaphorically - his sleeves don't really roll). "I can try."