Title: Play of the Game
Author: Timothy Wren
Fandom: Scum Villain’s Self Saving System
Relationship: Shang Qinghua | Airplane Bro & Shen Qingqiu | Shen Yuan | Peerless Cucumber, Shen Qingqiu/Luo Binghe, Shang Qinghua/Mobei-jun
Genre: Humor, Meme, Isekai, Danmei
Warnings: Canon-typical violence, Memes
Word Count: 1,584 (complete)
Summary: “Ahh, bro, I can’t fucking believe Luo Binghe is your little pogchamp.”
Shen Yuan’s eye twitches. He snaps the fan closed and a fatal retort:
“I don’t want to hear it from Mobei-Jun’s lil’ meow meow.”
–
–
Most of the time Shen Yuan is perfectly at home in his role as Shen Qingqiu. He falls into the motions easily and without thought, covering up his smile with a fan and swanning through life with a quiet, refined dignity, embodying the ideal of untouchable jade.
It’s a fiction, but one that suits him, like putting on a perfectly tailored and unspeakably expensive coat. It’s being ‘in-character’ and it becomes more and more natural the longer he does it, a mingling of selves.
He was not always Shen Qingqui, though, and sometimes fragments shine through. LARPing 24/7 is hard. He does, occasionally, break character. What is he, made of jade? People make mistakes! Knee-jerk reactions!
Most of the time he can play it off, scowl or twitch his eyebrows in warning, or dance it away behind a fan.
Most of the time, Shang Qinghua is not there to catch him and mercilessly roast him.
Unfortunately, Shang Qinghua is there when Luo Binghe, in a moment of pure protagonist badassery worthy of a season finale, lops off the head of the grandstanding lesser demon in one fell swoop, darkness radiating around him and red energy glinting menacingly against his skin and robes.
It’s such a scene that Shen Yuan cannot look away, entranced by the poetry of the swordsmanship and poetic cinema of the scene, and he mutters, “Pog.” before he can even think to stop himself.
“No.” Qinghua gasps in delight. A chill of foreboding runs down Shen Yuan’s spine. He whips around, fan up.
“Don’t look at me like that, bro, it’s far too late.” He says with utter glee twisting up his little goblin hamster face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Shen Yuan snaps the fan open sharply, turning his shoulder to the man.
“IS HE, THOUGH?” Qinghua roars, overflowing with it. “IS HE?”
“Ugh. Go to the abyss. Eat shit and die.”
“How can I die when my life is now complete?” Qingua swoons. “Ahh, bro, I can’t fucking believe Luo Binghe is your little pogchamp.”
Shen Yuan’s eye twitches. He snaps the fan closed and a fatal retort:
“I don’t want to hear it from Mobei-Jun’s lil’ meow meow.”
Qinghua clutches his heart, gasping dramatically, but Shen Yuan can see the untouched glimmer in his eyes. Oh, ugh, are they really doing this? Really, in front of his salad?
Binghe begins to cut through the little army of minions who had gathered for the ill-fated little coup, who don’t have enough intelligence stats to give up when their leader is quite literally a splatter on the rocks.
“Poggers!” Shang Qinghua calls out, one hand cupped over his mouth, and Shen Yuan is forced to smile demurely in reassurance as Binghe cuts over a glance and a questioning smile amidst the carnage.
“I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” He says out of the corner of his mouth, not looking away until Binghe does.
“Yes, yes, were it not for the laws of this land you’d have slaughtered me, etc. I get it.” Qinghua wrings his little hands together with excitement.
“There’s no putting a stop to this, is there?” Shen Yuan says in tones of great defeat, bracing the tip of his closed fan against his forehead in a cry for patience.
“Oh no– no. This is the best thing. That ship has sailed. All of the cats have vacated the bag. Pandora’s little Greek hands have fondled the box and popped the cherry on–”
“Please stop talking, you hack of an author, your metaphors are shit and you started mixing them already.” He interrupts in the most long-suffering voice.
“Lifehack.” Qinghua says. “Marry the most OP person in the entire novel, avoid any problems.”
The noise of a tea kettle comes from his throat before Shen Yuan squashes it ruthlessly.
“No problems?” He starts, incredulous. “Oh, you– Newsflash, asshole, anyone who wifes-up the MC is automatically embroiled in all the sister plots, as you– as you well know, I know you know, because I tell you. If I have to suffer these horrible plot devices, so do you!”
“Bold of you to assume Binghe was the one who got wifed-up, but go off I guess.” Qinghua says, smirking. Shen Yuan manfully resists the urge to punch him.
Once he gives in, he wouldn’t be able to stop, probably.
“‘Newsflash, asshole’ is weaksauce as far as this goes, anyway.”
Shen Yuan snorts– ugly, reflexive and without regard for the face he’s wearing.
“What, do you want to make it an actual competition?” At the unholy glee that breaks line a sunrise on Qinghua’s face– the face of someone who hasn’t had the internet or reliable, instantly accessible entertainment for a lifetime– he starts to backtrack.
“No, no, it’s definitely a thing now. A proper thing. Thing squared.”
“Stop trying to make fetch happen.” Shen Yuan says, almost desperately.
“Oh, we are well beyond fetch.” Qinghua sways a little on his feet. “And I’mma let you finish but this is already the best idea of all time.”
“This is possibly your worst idea and please recognize that this is me, in the situation that I’m in right now currently, saying this.”
“Hey, wait, no– we agreed that this version of PIDW is emphatically not my idea.” Qinghua swings off the plot with the attention span of a puffed-up rodent.
“I can’t believe you’ve fucking done this.” Shen Yuan counters, completely flat, and gestures pointedly around their environs, before, as an afterthought: “Also, I didn’t agree to shit.”
“I, for one,” Qinghua draws himself up with great dignity, “welcome our new queer demon overlords, and in fact–”
“This has gone on too far. I regret all my life choices.”
“False. This is the most fun I’ve had in weeks. No, in fact– this is the most fun I’ve had since we spiderman-pointing-meme’d each other to begin with.”
“You say that like you clocked me as a transmigrator on sight.”
“Well, you couldn’t even clock me as trans, so.” Shang Qinghua rolls his shoulders. “I think the powers of observation rest with me by default.”
“You literally didn’t notice the self-indulgent, wish-fulfillment, perfect gay male power-fantasy character–who is literally your ideal man— could possibly be in love with you. Despite, I repeat, writing him as your perfect dream guy.”
“Oh, you do not want to throw these rocks in this glass house, Mr. It Took Dying Twice and Literal Fucktons of Bullshit to Realize the Main Character Was in Love With You.”
“I turned your ultimate stallion novel protag gay.” Shen Yuan says with a casual confidence he doesn’t feel, tilting his chin away “Your argument is invalid.”
“The real protag was the homo inside us all along,” Qinghua mutters. “I know it was for the money and all but I think it’s both the biggest heist ever pulled on anyone, and the ultimate self-own to think I could write anything straight.”
“Ding-dong, you were wrong.” Shen Yuan says quietly as Binghe finishes up and works his way over through the corpse-strewn battlefield. He won’t say it but he’s grateful for Qinghua’s distraction from the carnage.
“I was so wrong that the universe had to self-correct.” Qinghua says in tones of sudden realization. “Like, dude. I tried to sell my soul for het porn and got rocked into a danmei isekai for my sins.”
“No, I got rocked into a danmei isekai for your sins. You’re just here for the shits and giggles like a goddamn vacation.”
“Girl, you can call me Oprah because you get a vacation, and you get a vacation…” His murmur dies down into nothing as Binghe gets within range and the latter adopts a wide smile.
“Shizun.” He demurs, lips like twin petals turning up at the edges, eyes a glowing red. He is ravaged by different colored splatters and Shen Yuan should be put off from it but he cut his teeth on video games and action movies, so instead all he can think is: so cool…
But he has dignity so he smiles with his eyes and raises his fan.
“All done?” He asks loftily, as if Binghe had gone off on his own for an errand during the shopping, and has now returned to the party.
“Yes. Apologizing to this husband for the delay.” Luo Binghe steps closer, between him and Qinghua, until Shen Yuan can smell the perfumed oil he uses on his hair and be ever so slightly dizzied by the height of him.
Shang Qinghua, however, has zero dignity on the best of days, and says in the softest voice he can muster:
“Notice me, sempai.”
Shen Yuan glares at him less over Binghe’s shoulder as around his elbow, and tries to mentally convey ‘I will gut you like a fish, bitch’ as Binghe kisses his temple.
Qinghua smiles back guilelessly.
–
Five days later, when the scribe of the North tonelessly drolls on about supply orders, Shen Yuan realizes it really is going to be a thing.
An ongoing thing, even, as opposed to a one-time mistake.
He’s at the palace visiting while Binghe showboats around the edges of his main territory as a veritable nuclear deterrent, and makes the mistake of catching Shang Qinghua’s eye just as the decrypt ice demon says,
“Three hundred sacks of flour, sixty-nine cases of…”
“Nice.” They say, at exactly the same moment, only to blink in surprise that it happened, and it’s then that Shen Yuan knows they’re both doomed.
–
