Title: Sign (Hit Me Baby One More Time)
Fandom: Scum Villain's Self-Saving System (SVSSS)
Rating: T
Length: 515
Content notes: Mentions of self-harm and self-hatred
Summary: It's not self-harm if you're hurting a fictional character who shares your name and is identical to you, right?


Shang Qinghua didn’t know what loyalty was. Maybe that was why he’d given his own name to the most disloyal character he’d ever created. Then again, he’d also given part of his name to the most loyal, and look what had happened to them both. Dead in the most terrible of ways.

It was easy as a writer, to throw onto these characters all of his frustrations and hatred against himself and the world. Self-harming was pathetic, he’d been told, and attention-seeking behaviour at that. Why make so much trouble for everyone else when he was already so useless in the first place?

But it wasn’t self-harm if the character he was hurting over and over deserved it. It wasn’t self-harm if it wasn’t himself Shang Qinghua was hurting. Even if the Shang Qinghua in his novel was beaten black and blue, and became all the more disloyal for it, the Shang Qinghua behind the screen beaten black and blue by life rose above it and didn’t hurt anybody in turn (including himself).

Maybe he should have seen it as a sign. By transposing the harm he’d wanted to do to himself, he’d tied himself to his character inexorably on a cosmic level he hadn’t been aware of. Shang Qinghua had never been accused of being the healthiest person around mentally speaking, but he did think he exhibited better coping mechanisms than his parents ever had. Better coping mechanisms than he’d given most of his characters.

It was only when he transmigrated into his own story, cursed with the same parents he’d had in life and with less of the resources that he realised what he’d done. All the harm he’d done to that character, rationalising that it didn’t count as self-harm if all the wounds remained on his heart instead of his skin… It made it very hard to dissociate himself from the novel Shang Qinghua when he shared both a name, a family and a story.

Maybe Shang Qinghua should have seen the sign. That by making his character a target for abuse, he’d only made himself one as well. And still, now in this story just as he had in life, he still find himself making excuses for his abusers and pushing the harm further into himself. It turned out Shang Qinghua had only been doing himself harm all along, even if the pain was delayed by time and space.

“I only live to serve you, my King,” he said, body aching with new bruises he’d already gotten numb to. Only this time, he meant it in a way the original Shang Qinghua hadn’t. Because while the original Shang Qinghua had become disloyal due to his circumstance, this Shang Qinghua had remained loyal despite them. Even if his loyalty might be misplaced.

Maybe he should have seen the signs. That by making the character he loved the most hurt the character that most resembled himself, he was only hurting himself further. And hammering in the fact that Shang Qinghua, both iterations of him, was unworthy of love and deserved nothing but pain.