shimmer0333
When they were young, everyone thought Shen Yuan and Bai Chen would grow old together.
They were always together, arguing, getting into trouble still finding their way back to each other.
Years later, they still are.
The problem is that one of them keeps walking in the wrong direction.
And the other has never been very good at letting him go.
There is a version of this story where they grow old together - still arguing, still solving cases no one else would touch, still sitting on rooftops they had no business being on. Bai Chen used to joke about it. What they'd do when they were too old to fight. Where they'd go.
He stopped joking after the night his clan burned.
Shen Yuan, heir to the Qinghe Sect, was raised to believe that order was the shape justice wore to survive. Bai Chen, son of the Bai Clan, was raised to believe that justice couldn't wait for order to show up first. For six years they were inseparable - two young men who became the jianghu's most celebrated pair, who became each other's home, who had no idea the world was watching them and deciding, somewhere in the dark, that one of them had to fall.
After the massacre, Bai Chen doesn't grieve the way Shen Yuan expects him to. He becomes something else instead. Something colder and more certain, moving through the world with the conviction of a man who has decided that law is a pretty word for a door that stays locked when the people inside it need help.
Shen Yuan keeps investigating. Keeps believing. Keeps trying to reach someone who is still, technically, alive.
This is a story about what grief does to people who were taught different things about justice. About how far apart two people can drift before the distance stops being crossable. About six years of warmth and what it costs to lose all of it in a single night - and whether anything survives when the smoke clears.
It doesn't end quickly. The worst kind of stories never do.
A slow-burn Chinese wuxia bromance.