Shen Yuan feels different inside than he did outside, with his feet on floors rather than in the dirt. He tries to pay attention, scientifically, to how, exactly, but it's a little hard, due to Luo Binghe currently actively undressing him. It feels amazing to be touched, even with the layer of dirt in the way. Binghe's palms are so warm and broad, and he leans into them, nuzzling at him like a cat.

It doesn't take much to get him naked; Binghe just slides the terrycloth robe from Shen Yuan's shoulders, and then his body, in all its new uncertainty, is right there. Binghe on the other hand is suddenly much more difficult to undress. Shen Yuan plucks at the hem of his t-shirt with a little petulant scowl. "I'm so short now. And I can't even tear it off you."

[NFSW.]

Shen Yuan leaves Sagramore and Laertes' rooms pleased and excited, light-headed both in the stoned way and in the literal less weight on his scalp way. He can't stop touching his new haircut, the short hairs at the back of his head, the soft, longer strands that frame his face. It's so strange—it's just hair—but it feels—he feels—it's nice.

Binghe's not in his room, but Shen Yuan takes a minute in there anyway, changing out of the robes he had on earlier and into a pair of jeans and the Naruto shirt he'd left in there at some point (he'd left it on the floor; Binghe had folded it alongside other abandoned clothes and put it away in the closet) then heads to the lounge Binghe prefers when he wants to be left alone to read but doesn't want people to forget he also exists in the Mansion. He peeks around the corner into the room and spots his beautiful head above the back of the couch. He knows Binghe knows he's coming, but the point is that he doesn't see him coming, so he relies a little more on his cultivator speed than normal and dashes over to the back of the couch, slipping his hands around Binghe's face to cover his eyes. He's reading something—Shen Yuan can't see the front of it, but it looks like a self-help book of some kind?? He'd probably be able to puzzle it out if he took a second and tried, but he's too nervous and excited to try right now.

"Hi," he says. "Hi, sweetheart. I have a surprise."

Once Shen Yuan is back in his¹ body again, one of the first things he does is look for Sagramore. Unfortunately, it seems like the Mansion is hellbent on exhausting him.² It's not like Sagramore is gone; he's at Enjolras and Grantaire's meeting, and he sees him from afar a couple times, talking with other residents, but someone else always catches Shen Yuan for long enough that by the time he's done talking with them Sagramore has vanished again. And when he has time to look, Sagramore is in none of his usual haunts. He even spends an afternoon lingering hopefully by the stables, only to catch, in sequence, Tress (nice, but not intended), and some redheaded teen in skull paint (???) who he hurries away from because he is not in the mood for all that.

Binghe, too, is pleased to have him returned to this form, despite all his assurances that he likes him in whatever body, so that's also pretty thoroughly distracting.

He misses just being able to text someone, like, hey, meet me in the cafe in fifteen for the biggest hug either of us have gotten in our lives.

Finally he wrestles his embarrassment enough and slips a note under Sagramore's door that reads, miss you bro :/, and then has a little drawing of his head and Sagramore's dog-knight head, both of them smiling and chatting. He posts up in their usual AA meeting lounge with a book. Maybe the Mansion will let Sagramore find him.

¹ Well, you know.
² Definitely nothing to do with a certain typist not having any time.

Shen Yuan leads Binghe neither to his room nor to Binghe's own. He'd needed to borrow an unoccupied suite for this, because they'd been using his room to get ready, and he didn't want to tip Binghe off by asking him to vacate his so he could set it up. He's relieved that the room is still in the same place, and that his locking talisman on the door is undisturbed; he removes the latter with a gestures and opens the door, ushering Binghe inside.

The room is warm; a fire crackles in its fireplace. This is also the only light, other than the doubled moonlight coming in through the large windows. Most of the room is occupied by a massive four-poster bed, covered in silks and furs. He's pretty proud of this setting, actually, with the part of him that isn't currently curled up into a panicked ball at the pit of his stomach. He'd originally imagined it for the ongoing fantasy, um, fanfic, um, idle daydream he's been having ever since the zombie attack, but in that one, well:

Indolent lordling Shen Yuan lolled helplessly against Luo Binghe's broad, strong chest as he was carried to the only room with a hint of warmth. When they reached the oasis in the sea of drafty halls¹ room, Luo Binghe threw² lowered him gently but manfully onto the soft bed. He straightened up and began removing his robes, the firelight turning his broad, strong³ chest to bronze. Shen Yuan gasped, pulling his own robes tighter around him. "Sir—"

"I'm afraid it's the only way," said Luo Binghe, soulfully, with his moonlit eyes. "Without my pillar thrusting hot and strong into you, you will DIE."

Um! Anyway! This is totally different, obviously!! Shen Yuan is not Shen Yuan, indolent lordling, he's Shen Yuan, immortal cultivator, or at least guy who has the body of one! He's taking charge! He's making sure Binghe has a good time!!

He turns, and presses Luo Binghe back against the door, hands on his (strong and broad) chest. He raises his eyes. "Hi."


¹ "Oasis in the sea"?? Come on.
² HE'S INJURED OR POISONED OR WHATEVER
³ Rep.

Sometime when Laertes is in his shared room with Sagramore and Sagramore is not, he will see a flat-pack envelope slide under his door. Inside is an elaborate ink brush drawing of a deerhound-headed knight. He's dressed like Sagramore had been when Shen Yuan had first seen him, tunic and hose, but with slightly more armor--a breastplate and pauldrons, greaves on his shins. He's seated on a stump in a small forest clearing, the trees at his back just implied with shadow, flowers blooming around his feet. His sword is standing in the earth in front of him, both his wrists resting on its crossbar, idle. His ears are perked up, his mouth wide and smiling, tongue curled, as he gazes at something to the right, out out of frame. His fur is curly and a bit scruffy, and his eyes are bright and inquisitive.

There's a second page, this one with a near-exact copy of the same drawing, only in this one the collar Laertes had worn in his portrait is buckled around the deerhound's throat. A little note appended to it reads

I didn't know if this was a shared thing??? Feel free to just get rid of the one you like less! And, like, happy to make edits if you hate both or whatever.

Shen Yuan

After shifting his way through oil pastels, watercolors, house paint, colored pencils, and an endless variety of paint markers, Shen Yuan has finally managed to get the Mansion to produce a decent set of oil paints, and—wonder of wonders—an easel. He's set up in a spacious, well-lit hall, probably for dancing or salons or whatever, where he's arranged a bunch of furniture in various configurations—wooden screens that he's draped cloth¹ over for backdrops; armchairs stolen from the lounge, wooden stools and high-backed dining chairs from the kitchens; even a lovely chaise lounge in a deep purple that he wistfully thinks he won't actually use, because it would definitely be for Aleksander, and he doubts he'll be doing that entry in his protagonists of the Mansion series after all. He has one of the stools pulled up next to the easel to hold his paints, and is wearing a wide-necked sweater over a black turtleneck and some loose, worn jeans that already have a few flecks of paint on them from when he was doing his color tests.² He's pulled his hair back in a practical bun, and he's currently laying down a layer of gesso on his canvas.

¹ Look, he has to do something with all of those robes he accidentally conjured in his last post.
² After days of feeling very lost and confused about how he's not required to LARP anymore, he's pretty much decided that it actually means he can just change who he's LARPing as at will, and the main way to do this is through fashion. Today he is An Artist.

[Primarily for those Shen Yuan has offered to paint, but anyone else is also welcome to come bother him while he works.]

Shen Qingqiu is sitting sideways and cross-legged on one of the garden benches, staring with single-minded and intense focus at the vape pen, lying on the stone of the bench in front of him. It is, in fact, weed. He's taken a slight draw—not enough to get him high, just to confirm that it lines up with his understanding of what weed tastes and smells like.

He'd tried to find Crowley to give it back, but couldn't. Something in him is glad—what if he needs it again?—but the rest of him is just tired.

He's so, so tired, and it jangles horribly against the vibrancy of his un-poisoned body. (He'd meditated, for a while, after his... conversation with Susan, and realized that the Without-A-Cure is, of course, cured—completely removed from his system by Luo Binghe's magical healing cock, and Shen Qinqgiu hadn't even noticed.) It just highlights the horrible separate feeling he's been having ever since he got here, the way it's suddenly impossible to ignore that his body and his brain don't match. Impossible to ignore the power he has, unearned, the life he has, unearned, even if the guy who did earn it was a huge piece of shit.

He feels—drained of everything he's ever been, as if his selfhood was cleared from his meridians along with the poison. The memories he has of being Shen Yuan and the memories he has of being Shen Qingqiu in Proud Immortal Demon Way both feel distant and fake, exaggerated, like they're movies he watched rather than anything he'd lived. He's not even entirely convinced, anymore, that he did live the part where he was in Proud Immortal Demon Way. No one else here was in a separate fiction before they came here, not the way he was. Maybe he'd died and come immediately here, and the whole time he'd spent in PIDW was just a weird afterlife fever-dream.

Without the poison, how would he know? Without limits to his behavior—set by the System, by the plot, by Binghe trying to kill him, what is he supposed to do? Without his family or his disciples, who is he, to anyone?

Everything had been so easy, while he was high. He'd been Bingge's wife, while he was high, Sagramore's easy, willing bro, Galahad's confidante, Magnus' friend. But he can't just be stoned forever, he's not some—fucking—surfer dude, or washed up hippie, or whatever. He's—he's gay.¹ He's a gay man. Apparently. He's at least gay enough that he enjoyed having sex with a man² while stoned, and didn't enjoy kissing a woman while sober, and he's not a fucking scientist but that feels kind of conclusive. Honestly, he feels stupid for how long it took him to figure out—Binghe was understandable, Binghe was Binghe, anyone would like kissing Binghe, but he'd liked kissing Sagramore, too, had liked when Sagramore picked him up, that very first day, when all he was to him was a handsome knight, had liked—

But going down that road feels dangerous, even though he surely must have already lost everything that's his to lose. So he's sitting here, staring at the vape pen, contemplating his one singular character trait, like he's a badly-written side-character added for the diversity quota, and lamenting the fact that there's no one even to blame for it, because unlike everyone else here, he's real.

¹ Everyone knows surfer dudes and washed up hippies, as well as stoners in general, are all straight.
² Singular, because as established the handjob with Sagramore doesn't count. Bro stuff.

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.