Archive of Our Own

Above the kitchen table in the Jiang household is a photograph of Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan, their faces staring out from the portrait and half obscured by the vase of begonias on the shelf beside them. The bright red petals are drooping in the summer heat, wilted and bright in their dampness. Yu-ayi looks out severely from her place behind them, annoyed at Wei Ying’s presence in the home even in death; Jiang Fengmian’s face is fogged by humidity behind the layer of glass over his face. His eyes are veiled by the clouding; it looks ghostly, even with the gaudy golden frame around it. 

The photograph had not been on the wall the last time Wei Ying had been home. The things that death does to the places you love. 

Wei Ying had opened the door to the house that afternoon to find opera blasting out of the old speaker in the kitchen, his city life packed into two duffel bags and his school bag. The vocals vibrated through the walls,  cracking when the speaker could no longer handle the high notes, the instrument backing sticky in the summer heat. He barely avoids tripping over the step up to the rest of the apartment, wood edged with metal that he’s stubbed many a toe on. 

Yanli had shrieked with delight, abandoning the stovetop and it’s curling steam to wrap him in her arms; Jiang Cheng had waved from his spot at the table, surrounded by paperwork and costume hairpieces, as close to a warm welcome as he’ll give. The gold jewellery had glittered dully in the mix of late evening sun and the bulb above the kitchen table, a bright halogen that seems to have been replaced since the last time Wei Ying was home. It throws shadows over the grain of the table now, the light steady, rather than the ugly flickering thing it had been in the months after the funeral. 

“Sup asshole. Shame to see you got the right train this time.”

“Shut up, that happened years ago,” Wei Ying snipped, and his brother had snickered, reaching an arm out to slap at his forearm with enough force to make a sound. 

“Stop bullying A-Ying,” Yanli had called from where she’d rushed back to the kitchen stove, to stop the pot from boiling over, and Jiang Cheng had swept an arm over the table to clear it and Wei Ying had set his bags down on the floor in the quieting sun and the kitchen had smelled like home. 

Now they sit at the dining table, Yanli having finally revealed what was in the steaming pot, and the pans hiding behind it on the back burners. The table is too big for the three of them - it’s still the one they grew up with, enough to sit four comfortably, five less comfortably, and eight in the event of company. The leg at the end of the table where Wei Ying sits is still too short - Jiang Cheng had shoved an account book under it while they’d been setting the table with the ease of years and his general disregard for the material things around him. 

“How’re your flatmates?” Yanli asks eventually, in between placing vegetables on his and Jiang Cheng’s plates. There’s a quiet ‘chink’ as her chopsticks knock the edges of the plates, and Jiang Cheng hums a wordless gratitude before looking to Wei Ying for his answer. 

“They’re good, I guess,” Wei Ying says; the words hang in the air for no reason other than the humidity. Yanli looks up at him, the short answer - she’s always known him enough to know when something’s not right. 

“And your classes?”

“Good, too. They’re hard but I’m enjoying them.” 

He isn’t sure what to say that doesn’t turn the conversation on himself. Wei Ying left Yunmeng on the tail end of a double funeral, and it already feels like he’s centered this all on himself. He wants to talk about his classes, and the mould in the corner of their living room, and his grumpy paramedic mentor, and Nie Huaisang’s horribly named budgie that he keeps hiding from their landlord, but it feels selfish to talk about having escaped Yunmeng. 

Wei Ying has a place to run away to, after the summer is over. He will go back to Beijing to finish his degree and settle back into his apartment where Xuanyu and Huaisang will keep him up all night with their discussions about TV and late night snack runs and leave food aside for him when he gets back from a particularly gruelling placement. 

Yanli and Jiang Cheng will stay here, like always, and try to keep the theatre upright, for all they are both in their twenties and too young to have been handed the books. 

He wants to tell them about his life. But he has nothing to say that doesn’t sound like a boast, so he doesn’t say anything more and Jiang Cheng simply says ‘cool’, before returning his attention to the soup.

Wei Ying looks around, in the uncomfortable silence. To an outsider's eye, everything is the same, but the chopstick holder on the table has been replaced by something pretty and carved out of pale wood, and the sideboard that he’d broken a toe on when he was seven is gone. There’s a painting on the wall behind Yanli that he’s never seen before. The evening shadows fall over the lakeside, in it - the lotus petals are dark and stained with sunset where the paint blends in rough strokes. 

The evening is hot and humid, and it seems to make the silence grow wider, emphasizing the lack of words where they should be sticky and weighted in the air. Outside, the cicada’s start to cry louder, and the freezer hums in the kitchen a few metres away.  Wei Ying watches Yanli and Jiang Cheng move around each other when they reach for food at the table, and the next moment bumps into both of their hands when he reaches for the rice. 

The cutlery is in a different drawer, now - he’d offered to help set the table and opened the second drawer down to find a mix of ladles and graters. In his childhood bedroom, there’s boxes piled on top of his desk from the storage room down the hallway. The room smells of dust; his bed is still made with the same sheets from the last time he’d been back. 

Yanli’s nails aren’t painted the pretty pink she always had when they were teenagers - they’re bitten down, now, fresh skin where she holds her chopsticks hard enough for the blood to disappear. 

“Jie, your soup is still the best in the world,” he says, eventually, in a desperate attempt to pull the conversation back to something he knows like muscle memory - Wei Ying’s life is built on compliment after compliment of his sister’s cooking, her quiet rebukes in return. It’s honest, at least - none of the restaurants in the city use the same recipe that Yanli does. The broth is always too bitter. They never have enough pork in the portion. 

Jiang Cheng doesn’t scoff at the blatant attempt for acknowledgement with the lightness they used to have as teenagers, but it’s still something, and Wei Ying will take it. 

“You’re too kind, A-Ying,” Yanli says quietly, picking at her rice, and he watches the way the blunt tip of the chopsticks sink into the white grains, sticking to the rim of the bowl. She’s using the pair that Yu-ayi would always pick out of the holder, the varnish dark and almost glowing in the singular light of the dining room. He wonders where the little pair made of light wood went; watches the way her hands go lax here and there, in between picking at her food. Her eyes are hooded and her mouth is a thin line, lips dry. 

Yanli is tired, more. If there’s one thing Wei Ying feels guilty about leaving for, it’s that. Beside him, Jiang Cheng stacks his plates and pushes away from the table, and when he moves there is the flash of an earring beneath his bangs, the stone flashing in the dim light of the kitchen. Wei Ying didin’t even know he’d gotten them pierced.

When Jiang Cheng turns the tap on in the sink, Wei Ying doesn’t offer to help. He doesn’t know how to, now. 

—

Even wavering in the heat, the Yunmeng theater rises up over the buildings around it, something grand. Something that commands respect. Wei Ying stares up at the windows on the upper mezzanine, and barely avoids dodging the cars on the road when he gets caught in the sight. The dust they stir up draws a cough out of him, and he wheezes for a moment before hopping up onto the curb and onto the stairs leading to the main entrance.

Old as it is, the woodwork on the outside has been cared for and replaced time and time over so that it still stands. It’s older than anything in this town, bar the pavilion beside the lakes, but it seems to fit in seamlessly, scarcely out of place in Yunmeng. Maybe it has something to do with the town building themself around it over the years, with only a couple of the buildings being the ones to survive hundreds of years. 

He’d woken to a note on the kitchen table in Yanli’s handwriting with a bowl of soup beside it, the plastic wrap wrinkled and fogged with humidity and steam. Sorry we let you sleep in! it had said, the blue ink fading toward the end of the words. Come find us at the theatre when you get up!

It’s midmorning by the time he pushes open the doors, the sun already high in the sky and filling the air with choking humidity. The front doors are unlocked, and he slips through them to the foyer where the electric fans are turned on high. It’s stuffy in the theatre; even with no windows, Yunmeng summer sneaks in, turning the building sticky and heavy with the heat. Even with the electric fans buzzing at high, their plastic ribbons waving in the air, it’s almost too hot to function. Wei Ying flaps at his face with the hand not holding onto his dizi case in some attempt at relief, wandering through the entrance. The foyer, at least, is the same as he remembers - same threadbare carpet with it’s red and gold pattern, a metal shutter rolled down over the ticketing booth window. The ceiling rises tall, the wooden beams curving round and towards the sky, and the area smells faintly of old wood and dust. The windows and skylights let as much light pour in as is reasonable, and then some.

There's a burst of noise muffled behind the doors that lead into the actual theatre, and Wei Ying pads across the carpeting toward them. The foyer is strange in its emptiness - places like these are supposed to be filled with people at all times, the bustle of patrons drinking and talking before a show. There is nothing to fill the hollow of the place now except for Wei Ying's footsteps and the ghosts of the theatre.

The doors creak quietly when he pushes them open to make his way into the theatre, which opens out in front of him when he walks through.

The Yunmeng theatre is something of history. The doors bring him to the top of the aisles, looking over the rows and seats, regiments in straight lines with the two aisles splitting them into three. The seats themselves smell dry and dusty, the effect of age and an inability to give any of the upholstery a deep clean for fear of damaging the wooden floorboards beneath the carpeting.

Wei Ying has not seen the theatre since he was last home and it was still under the care of their parents; he doesn't think he'll ever get tired of looking.

Where the foyer rises tall and light, with windows and skylights where you look, the theatre is dim and  - summer pours in behind him where the doors are open, and paints the ground gold, letting a little more light into the space that isn't from the stage lights.

The stage opens up at the end of the aisle, something Wei Ying knows like muscle memory. Smooth wood, worn from years of dance and performance, the three long gouges by the stage left entrance from where a prop was dragged awkwardly and dug into the boards.

Above the stage is a huge system of light rigging - spotlights, diffusers, a chandelier. It tangles around itself, a net of wires and glass, bulbs that glow white and gold and blue and anything they need to tell a story with the times of day. Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying used to joke, as kids, that if the ghosts were really angry that they'd mess with the rig; swing the chandelier, creak the metal bars holding it all up.

Jiang Cheng and Yanli are standing on the stage before him, both poring over a stack of papers on the stage, and a couple of others are settled down into stretches. As he watches, one of the girls sinks into a split and then settles onto her belly on the wooden stage, the curtains spilling red over the bags beside her.

“Is that A-Ying or do my eyes deceive me?” he hears from somewhere below the stage, and he watches as a couple of the orchestra members pop their heads up to look for him. He waves a hello from the back of the auditorium, laughing a little as he approaches the stage from the aisle and leans on the backs of one of the chairs for balance. The orchestra pit will be opened for the actual performance, but for now the orchestra is settled on the flat space of floor below the stage that covers the pit, where the seats end. It’s cluttered with chairs, and stands, and instruments, and cases clogging the steps up to the stage. 

“Almost thought you were one of our little ghosts!” one of the uncles calls, looking up from where he’s tuning his pipa, and Wei Ying grins.

“The ghosts aren’t nearly as good company as me.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Jiang Cheng yells from the back of the stage, and the orchestra pit erupts into laughter once again, the sound sticky and cheerful in the summer air.

The musicians are all people he’s known since he was a kid - back from retirement or their winter jobs to play for the show they’ve been supporting for longer than he’s known Yunmeng as home. The guzheng player is new, though. He looks strangely out of place in Yunmeng, in his button down and pants, hair cropped short at the back of his neck.

“Who’s our guest?” he asks, staring at the man, and lets his lips slip up into a sharp grin. "We don't get many people looking as lovely as you around here."

"You insulting us?" the sheng player calls, one of the women who used to be friends with Yu-ayi. Wei Ying laughs at it, flapping a hand in apology, before turning back to look at the newcomer.

Wei Ying knows how to flatter, even if the person isn’t someone he cares to know. But the man is pretty, if anything - sharp eyebrows, quiet eyes. His hands are balanced above the strings of the guzheng in a way that suggests it’s not his first instrument but it’s something he still respects deeply.

"C'mon, just your name! Pity me that at least," he calls to him, and the man gives him a slight frown, before replying.

"Lan Zhan."

"Oh," Wei Ying says, a surprised realisation coming over him. He leans more heavily on the back of the chair to lean forward to look at Lan Zhan. "You've taken over for Wen-popo?"

"Just for this season."

“Aiyo, what a shame. Such a pretty face and I’m only going to be able to see it for a couple of weeks.”

Lan Zhan makes a face, and the rest of the orchestra laughs at the way Wei Ying pouts, half a joke and half truth. There's a thump from somewhere on stage; above him on stage, he can see one of the prop girls dragging an electric fan to set up by the curtains.

"Stop being a menace and get up here," Jiang Cheng calls, and Wei Ying drags himself away from the orchestra pit reluctantly, waving at Lan Zhan before he hoists himself up on stage. His palms are sweaty from the heat - they leave hot marks on the stage sealant, where it's peeling up at the edges, dried out from the heat.

"Nice of you to finally join us," Jiang Cheng says, the edge of an insult, and Wei Ying just slaps at his shoulder, the dull sound of impact being swallowed by the humid air. Jiang Cheng slaps him back, skin on skin this time, sticky in the heat, and Wei Ying whines even as he sets down his dizi case to unpack it.

"You should've woken me up if you wanted me here on time."

"You would have just complained the whole time. I was doing everyone a favour, really.”

"Stop bickering," Yanli calls, gliding across the stage with the effortless skill of years of stage managing, scripts and papers full of stage directions piled in her hands. She waves Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying's hands reaching to help, shuffling them into order by herself.

"Now, do I have to tell you all where you have to be, or can I trust you know that much, at least?" She says it with the cheeky confidence their mother had tampered down in the theatre, but had grown in the back rooms of the theatre, the practice studios of the dance school down the road. Her quiet laugh follows Wei Ying when he scrambles to his place in the center of the  stage, Jiang Chng close behind him - there is the telltale sound of shoes sliding on the stage. When he turns, finally, Yanli has settled to the side of the stage with her script, a watchful eye as people settle into their places to start rehearsal. She'd been the one to take over the roles their parents had left behind alongside the theater, both choreographer and director in tandem. Inheritance is not always something material.

"Are we good to go?" she calls, and Wei Ying nods, Yinzhu standing between him and Jiang Cheng. There's no one else on the stage with them, the three of them alone for the whole show; it's traditional, to tell the story only with the siblings.

A traditional play is all that has become of the three children of Yunmeng, their names lost to history and tales. There are only the two brothers who betray each other's trust, and their older sister, married away and then dying in her attempt to bring them back together as three. It is told in dance. It is told in song, as all old stories are most aptly communicated. Performance is the most universal medium.

Yinzhu is playing the sister this year - she’d been older than them in high school, with dark eyeliner at rehearsals and a demeanor that scared the shit out of Jiang Cheng when they were teenagers in dance class together. They'd never performed with her in an actual show - they'd done some dance performances together under Yu-ayi's watchful eye, but never something of this scale. She'd come back a couple of years ago to help her family’s business once she finished her studies, something related to business in the university a few cities over.

She stands sure and tall of herself beside him now, her eyeliner once sharp and now melting at the edges in the heat. She won't keep that posture - will stand strong, but in a quieter way, something nondescript. Something about the way an elder sister stands. Wei Ying knows the way that Yanli holds herself.

They’re lucky that the three of them know the parts well - they have fifteen days and their muscle memory to rely on. They're starting with choreography today, all the way through their childhood through to the fight choreography with Wei Ying and Jiang Cheng, to the slower parts. They'll move to blocking after that, and then to the on stage music, after that - Wei Ying's dizi sits at the edge of the stage, waiting to be sung through.

"Alright, A-Ying, A-Cheng, can we go through what you remember of the battles?" Yanli calls, once the slower first act has been muddled through, and Yinzhu steps to the side of the stage so the two of them can stand back to back in the center of the stage. The prop swords in their hands are sheathed with soft wood, but there's metal beneath, and the heft of it is tricky to reconcile with the light, effortless movements required of the battles. Jiang Cheng ducks under his arm, and Wei Ying leaps, muscle memory of hours under Yu-ayi's tutelage coming to the front.

With only three actors, it’s up to the two of them to carry most of the action - they convey war by spinning around each other, light-footed, fighting invisible enemies with their stage swords.

Jiang Cheng is the dancer of the two of them. Wei Ying has always been good; he was trained under Yu Ziyuan, after all. But Jiang Cheng breathes it. He knows performance in his bones - he’s been slated to play the youngest sibling since they were kids and he was handed a performance sword and taught how to show anger. 

Wei Ying was never set to be anyone, in this show. He's known it his whole life, seen it every year but the last two, been involved in sets and music and running around being a menace as a kid, getting under all the actors feet. He could play either of the characters - the younger brother, the older one, even the sister. But the older brother is his now, and it seems to fit in a way he's not sure how. He knows the role in his bones, for all he’s never performed it. He knows the main parts, the dizi score, but not the intricacies of it. It's up to Jiang Cheng, then, to coach him through the minutiae of the dances, the movements - Yanli calls from the side, a softer mimic of her mother, a shout of "further to the left, A-Ying!" The stage blurs around him when he spins, forgetting the trick of having something to focus on, and he stumbles here and there in between swinging the sword in his hand at the empty spots of the stage.

Yanli calls a break, eventually - while she's directing Yinzhu, Wei Ying weighs his dizi in his hands, the wood worn and shiny from years of practice. There’s a pile of music in front of him that he already knows; the dizi, after all, is the voice of the story.

Whoever told the story first must have decided that this performance doesn’t need words, just the keening cry of the flute over the orchestra’s support. That’s why Yanli had called him up at the end of his 12 hour placement and asked him to come back for the festival.

“There’s no one who knows the part who can play dizi like you,” she says, voice grainy over the phone line when he picks up. Wei Ying had hummed, tugging off the dry, blue rubber of his gloves and unclipping his name tag.

“Jie, I’m really not sure-”

“Please, A-Ying. Just for the show.” Yanli never begs like this. Wei Ying pauses, halfway through balling up his gloves for the wastebin in the corner of the ambulance, the rubber damp where summer had drawn out sweat.

He thinks about being eight and staring up from the aisle to where the actor playing the older brother was keening through the hollow wood of a dizi, dressed in crimson and crying for his sister. Thinks about being seventeen and playing through the songs of war lightning fast in the back rooms, because the slow dirge had always weighed down the scene. Thinks about the warm, cramped kitchen of his family’s home, and the way he hasn’t seen them in months.

“Okay, jiejie,” he had said, and booked a train home for two weeks from then.

—

"Where are you taking me?" Lan Zhan asks from where he's being dragged by his sleeve toward the central area of Yunmeng. He'd put up a reasonable defence against Wei Ying's pleading to go into the city - something about rehearsing his pieces for the show, how he needed to go over one of the parts more, before the next rehearsal. Wei Ying knows that he is hard to say no to, though, and Lan Zhan had been no more difficult than dragging Huaisang and Xuanyu out for breakfast on weekends. Lan Zhan's voice betrays no sense of concern or annoyance, but there's something uncertain about it that Wei Ying is hoping the market will dissuade. The overt friendliness of Yunmeng locals has been met by Lan Zhan in the form of the orchestra and stage hands, but the market is another thing altogether.

"Well, I was going to give you a big tour of Yunmeng today, but Jiang Cheng is being cruel and wants us both back by midday for rehearsal,” Wei Ying says, the barest hint of a whine in his voice. “So today it’s the market! And maybe the pier, if we have time before Jiang Cheng starts blowing up my phone with angry WeChat messages."

“Do you know each other well?”

Wei Ying has the quick, sharp memory of last night and the wrong cutlery drawer. Jiang Cheng’s lack of argument when Wei Ying put the washer on the wrong settings, the way all of the adventure novels that used to clog Jiang Cheng's half of the bookshelf are gone.

“Well he’s my brother, so yea,” Wei Ying says, instead. “Grew up with the asshole so even if we try to hide to get more time to look around, he knows all the hiding places in this area.”

“Oh,” says Lan Zhan. He does not sound surprised; he's staring at Wei Ying from where he's started to keep pace properly, long legs at balance with the way Wei Ying finds himself walking too fast anywhere. Emergency runs in his blood, he guesses. “I was not aware you were related. I assume you grew up around the theatre too, then?”

“No other choice, when your family owns the place,” Wei Ying says, kicking a can on the sidewalk. He's a little surprised Lan Zhan didn't ask about the different last names, but it's a pleasant one - Lan Zhan's politeness isn't as cold as Wei Ying had thought.

The noise around them grows as the sidewalk dissolves into the paved road, blocked off for the market with cordons and someone redirecting the traffic down another street.

“The years I have put into that place," Wei Ying groans as he steps off the curb, half truth and then tipping down into a laugh. "I’m owed compensation for child labour at this point.”

Lan Zhan hums. “I had wondered,” he said. “You do not work in performance arts. I was curious as to why you had been the one cast as the older brother in a piece that is so important to the area’s history.”

“Ah, well,” Wei Ying says, straightening up from his giggling. “I know it as well as anyone here. Jie asked me to come back because no one else knows the dizi parts who could come on short notice.”

Around them, town is decorated for the festival - lanterns strung up outside businesses and houses, hand painted banners, the sweet, smoky smell that means the stall selling rice stuffed lotus root is open for the summer. Wei Ying gives himself a moment to breathe it in, and starts to walk in that direction.

"Enough about me though! Why are you playing with us? You don't exactly look like the kind of person to volunteer as a guzheng player for a show like this."

"I have time available in summer. I wanted to do something to help if I could.”

Wei Ying quietly thinks about the account books piled on the table in the kitchen at home, the way every single person is there of their own volition. There is no money changing hands this year.

"You don’t work over the summer months?” he says instead, looking up at Lan Zhan.  

“I am a teaching assistant. Music history."

Wei Ying lets himself laugh at it, the fittingness. "I was wondering!" he says, dodging a group of children with candy melting sticky on their hands. "Why here, though?"

"I thought the story was interesting,“ Lan Zhan says quietly when they turn the corner of the stalls, his gaze dropping to the stalls of crafts and art and snacks instead of Wei Ying's face.

Wei Ying hums in agreement at the answer as Lan Zhan picks up a hair comb from one of the stalls. There's lots of traditional pieces on display for the start of the festival - across the walkway, there's another person selling colourful, cheaply made fans reminiscent of something out of a xianxia drama.

The show is performed annually just for the festival - it's a Yunmeng folktale, after all. It's the most famous one, at that - the one all the foreign travel bloggers come to see when it's festival time, the one families make time for in the final week of the festival when it's performed. There are others, of course, with happier endings; love stories, comedies, stories of harvest, stories of battles won. But this one is history - there are still reminders of the story baked into the region; the layers of soot beneath the dirt a reminder of something burning long ago, the manor on the pier something still standing even after hundreds of years. People flock to remember their history, especially if it is dramatised.

Wei Ying tells Lan Zhan as such, who nods quietly. "It's an easy way to remember," he says, rubbing a thumb over the jeweling on the comb in his hands.

Wei Ying hums in agreement at the answer, watching as Lan Zhan sets the comb down and picks up another. His fingernails are rounded at the tips, carefully kept, and Wei Ying grins quietly at the way he huffs when one of his bangs falls over his eyes. Lan Zhan catches his eye, though, and turns away with a frown, setting the comb down with a quiet thanks to the stall owner. Wei Ying offers a wave of his own to the girl manning the table, before taking a couple of long strides to catch up to where Lan Zhan is apparently determined to look at every single stall. Wei Ying doesn't blame him. Everything Yunmeng makes is beautiful.

“Did you know there's ghosts here, Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying asks, once they've walked through all the stalls of the artisans, Lan Zhan quiet as he looked at the lanterns being sold, Wei Ying chattering about anything and everything he could think of related to the area. He knows he really should let the poor man be, but it really is too much fun to fluster him. Lan Zhan replies quietly to each topic, and this one is no different.

“There are ghosts everywhere,“ Lan Zhan says placidly, dodging a vendor running past with a pile of boxes.

"You're no fun," Wei Ying whines, once he's dodged the man as well, but there's no heat to it. Lan Zhan slows for a minute, looking at him though, and continues.

"The other musicians have mentioned, though. The theatre?"

Wei Ying perks up at that, grinning when Lan Zhan looks at him. "Yep," he says, stretching his arms behind him “People say it's the people who used to live around here! That they like to watch the shows,” he says. “But all the performers reckon they’re the people from the play we’re putting on now. The siblings or whatever. They’re waiting for a show that is good enough to put them to rest,” he laughs.

Around them, the breeze blows hot and stuffy, ruffling the stray hairs on the top on Lan Zhan's head, the flags and banners around them, before being weighed down by the heft of the humidity. Around them, there is the noise of voices upon voices, calling orders and bartering offers at the tables behind them.

“Do you believe it?” Lan Zhan asks, eventually, watching him from the corner of his eye as they make their way closer to the center of the market. Wei Ying can see the rice stuffed lotus root stall a few stalls ahead of them now, the steam curling up and then disappearing into the humid air of Yunmeng.

“I did as a kid, but I'm not scared of those stories anymore. So I'm not sure.”

“I don’t think those kinds of ghost stories are meant to be scary,” Lan Zhan says, quietly, and then doesn’t say anything more.

Around them, the market heaves, the sun bearing down on the colourful stalls dressed in silks for the occasion. In his pocket, Wei Ying’s phone rings once, twice, with the pop song he has set for Jiang Cheng, and then it doesn’t ring again.

—

Later in the week, after they have finally started to add Wei Ying's dizi playing into the rehearsals, he manages to drag both Lan Zhan and Jiang Cheng to the traditional residence on the lakefront.

Well, dragged isn't as true as it had been the other day with the market and Lan Zhan - Yanli had pushed them to take Lan Zhan to some of the more touristy places in between rehearsals on grounds of being new to the area, and Jiang Cheng has always been weirdly partial to the area. They'd been kids the first time he'd visited, and Yu-ayi had lost sight of them in the crowd of tourists. They'd been barely six. Jiang Cheng had managed to bring them around to the entrance even though they'd never been before - Wei Ying remembers Jiang Cheng tugging at his hand and leading them through a maze of pathways and hallways that spit them out at the front gates by the snack stall. Yu-ayi had yelled at them back home, but Jiang Cheng kept going back. Some uncanny knack for the place. Wei Ying never quite understood it, for all he loves the place.

Even so, it's a Yunmeng tradition, to visit the residence. The place is relatively packed, people having come back for the festival. It's how it goes; come to Yunmeng, come to the pavilion to see the lotus bloom bigger than in the lakes.

"I'm going to look at the ancestral hall," Jiang Cheng says, once they're through the front gates, already walking away from where Wei Ying and Lan Zhan are standing at the maps.

"Sure," Wei Ying says, but Jiang Cheng is already too far away to hear what he's said, and his hand hangs limply in the air before he lets it fall back to his side. Lan Zhan is looking at him curiously when he turns to him, and Wei Ying forces a grin onto his face. He's good at this. Wei Ying has learned how to smile in the face of death, and those who are close to it, because when you are scared and young and hurting, if someone smiles at you while they are checking your blood pressure and makes you one of those weird glove balloons, it is not as scary anymore.

"C'mon Lan Zhan," he says, and his voice sounds strained, even to his own ears, but he knows how to push past that. "Guess I'm the tour guide now!" He throws a hand out to the entrance to the first courtyard, where the dust has settled as the big tour group that had come in with them has left for the other side of the residence.

“It’s well taken care of,” Lan Zhan comments, looking around, and Wei Ying hums as he chances a glance at a visitors map to remember which way the inner ponds are.

“Well, we can’t forget the ghosts,” he says nonchalantly, glancing back to Lan Zhan. “What we call history, they call home.”

“You talk about them a lot,” Lan Zhan comments, as Wei Ying pores over the little side paths on the maps, nodding an agreement to his words. 

“I guess. I grew up with them.”

“At the theatre?”

“Yea. I mean, all places like this have ghosts. The theatre is just kinda more visibly haunted than most.” Wei Ying laughs at the edges of the words, remembering what it was to grow up with the stories of the dead. “Our dad used to say they’d make sure we were actually studying when we were hanging out backstage. Yu-ayi just used to say they’d eat us if we didn’t do what she said.”

“Why the theatre though? I know you said people have a story about them being the siblings from the story, but why not here?” Lan Zhan motions around them to the residence, the traditional hall and pavilions spreading over acres. “I’m sure that’s where they would have been from there if they were real.”

“Well, they’re ghosts,” Wei Ying says, quietly. “All you can really offer them is singing or silence. The theatre is the best place for them, I guess.” 

He turns away, before he can see whatever expression Lan Zhan has at his words, and spots the little lotus symbol on the top right of the map. “We’ll take this path,” he says, grabbing at Lan Zhan's wrist to tug him along the little paved paths that run between the different areas of the residence.

Jiang Cheng has long since disappeared into the crowd, probably wandering one of the verandas towards what would have been the family residence at the back, the rooms big and empty from where you can see them.

The way they talk is strained, now.

Years ago he either would have left without a word, leaving Wei Ying to stumble after him with a laugh at the back of his throat, or made a snarky comment. Now he just says when he's leaving and Wei Ying takes it standing where he is.

The other day on stage, Wei Ying and Jiang Cheng had stumbled over each other, Wei Ying stepping out too far and catching Jiang Cheng's foot as he moved around him. And he'd done it again. And again. No longer like high school, the year after, where they knew each other's bones to the extent they knew when they were going to move. Now, he can't get his steps in tune, and he doesn't understand the way that Yanli corrects him anymore. He is standing under a rehearsal spotlight in the middle of the stage with them on either side of them, and yet they are slipping away from him in the way distance breeds.

"I never asked, the other day," Lan Zhan starts, startling him out of the thoughts. "What do you do for a living? It was rude of me not to reciprocate your question."

“Oh, no no no, it’s fine Lan Zhan! I don't mind, it was interesting to hear about what you teach,” Wei Ying says, waving his hands around a bit as they cross the low lying bridge over the water that runs through the compound from the lake. “It’s not half as interesting as you, anyway. I’m a student! Paramedic school.”

"Did you only just start studying? I was under the impression you and your brother were about the same age" Lan Zhan asks, his head tilting to the side slightly when he does, and Wei Ying giggles quietly at the sight.

"Not really. I got halfway through an arts degree and dropped out. Worked for a year or so and then started with this."

The stone paved path eventually falls away to a dirt one, splitting the grass in half, and sloping gently down to the water. Most of the original bridges have been replaced by floating ones, made of big white squares of plastic that sink slightly beneath their feet. Wei Ying dances across them, the plastic creaking slightly as it bends, before leaping onto the shore on the other side. Some of the larger bridges further inside the compound are still made with wood in the old style, beautiful, tall, curving structures over the little eddies and streams that run through the compound. The beams and planks and handrails are all smoothed over with decades of peoples hands and feet over them.

It’s one of the many things the pavilion has in common with the Yunmeng theatre. Something replaced bit by bit, over and over, by people who cared enough for the place to not let it die. The people of Yunmeng love their ghosts. They keep what they can alive.

The bridge leads them to what once would have been a receiving area for guests, little white plaques placed everywhere with information scrawled on them in a mix of languages. As expected, Lan Zhan lists to the side to read through the information boards, and Wei Ying grins at the way he folds his hands behind his back before leaning over to look at them.

Wei Ying turns away from the sight eventually to look around the room, to see if anything has changed in the four years since he has left this town and come back only for a double funeral. He knows the place well - the bright wood, the open windows, the paintings on the wall in their long glass cases, the end of the scroll resting on the base of the box. There's parts to it that can't be accessed - some of what would have been bedrooms or dormitory rooms, the original kitchen.  They'd tried to sneak in when they were in high school - Jiang Cheng with his freakish understanding of the layout, Wei Ying with enough charm to occupy one of the workers while Jiang Cheng worked on one of the locks. They'd been caught, of course - Yu-ayi had yelled at them for an entire evening. They hadn't cared.

The floorboards that make up the dais in the back of the hall are one of the few parts of the residence that are still from the original structure - they’re fenced off to avoid damage and wear, along with the carved chair atop it, and Wei Ying stands in front of them, fiddling with the plastic chains. Imagines looking up to someone sitting in it, and wonders if people were meant to feel reassured or afraid when they looked up to that.

Lan Zhan apparently eventually finishes reading all of the information boards and comes to stand beside Wei Ying to look at the dais, the throne in golden wood. Wei Ying waves a hand at it absentmindedly, laughing a little as a thought comes to mind.

“Imagine if we had this place as a prop,” he says, waving a hand around the receiving area, the paintings on the wall in their glass cages.

“It would be the most historically accurate version of the play,” Lan Zhan concedes, leaning in to look at the carving.

“Eh, I don’t know. I feel like half the charm is that it’s far from accurate.”

“What do you not think is correct?" Lan Zhan asks, and Wei Ying turns away from where the kids have run back to their parents to face Lan Zhan, who's stopped looking at the carving.

“Well, mostly the costumes and stuff. I think it's cool that the props kind of warp themselves to fit the times, but I don't have any doubt about the story itself being accurate."

“Why so?”

Wei Ying thinks about being twelve and yelling at Jiang Cheng, and his brother yelling back - something about a video game, and loss, and frustration. A-Jie had been the buffer; had told them to stop it, and made them make up. Later, outside the corner store with sachima sticky on his fingers, Jiang Cheng had offered Wei Ying his bag of chips. A-Jie had ruffled his hair, and then frowned at the bruises on their knees like she had never been angry at them a day in her life.

“Anyone can write a good villain story,” Wei Ying says, turning away from the dais to look out to the glittering lake, “but every sibling story is based in truth. It’s hard to tell something like that without there being some level of sincerity to it.”

Later, they find Jiang Cheng standing at the end of one of the docks, staring out at the water from where he's sheltering from the sun under a pavilion. When they reach him, he turns in silence, and all he gives is a nod.

—

That night, the kitchen table is quiet. Yanli sets the dishes down, and they eat, and then they are done. It's becoming uncomfortably common; the three of them settled around the old wood of the dining table more like ghosts than siblings. Even in the wake of their parents death there had been more noise than this. It was far from the bright singing that comes with a family of performers, but it was an elegy nonetheless. Now, they have nothing to talk about, and every meal is a practice in stilted speech. The dinner table is a liminal space and the doorway feels guilty every time he passes through it to leave.

What have we done to ourselves, Wei Ying thinks, looking across the table now. Jiang Cheng is looking steadfastly down at his food. Yanli's eyes skitter between the two of them in apprehensive concern. What have we done to each other?

Once the dishes are done, and Yanli has put her cooking show on the TV, Jiang Cheng settled in a chair beside her in the cramped living room, Wei Ying excuses himself to the balcony. The air is hot, in the way summer nights bleed orange in the darkness, and the sound of his dizi has a weight in the air, the notes singing out and stopping dead in the thick humidity.

He stays there until the stars are the only lights around. When he slides the glass door open to go back inside, the TV is off, and the lights have been switched off, everywhere but the kitchen.

—

Rehearsal breaks start to fall later in the afternoon, everyone tired and slow in the light of the stalled time after lunch. Summer brings sticky heat, hot gusts of air through the open back door curling around where Wei Ying is sat on the edge of the stage, fingernails scoring the skin of the lychee in the bag next to him. He can hear the muffled voices of people talking backstage, the occasional burst of laughter from one of the older orchestra members. Others have gone out to buy lunch, or to run home for it - the benefits of the theatre being so central to Yunmeng’s town planning. Wei Ying had simply run down the street to the stall that had set up last week, and come back with a plastic bag of lychee, the plastic thin and rustling when he reaches into it for another.

Lan Zhan is sitting below him in the clutter of the orchestra's chairs and stands, picking through a piece on the guzheng. The sounds ring out in the soft emptiness of the theatre, the strings sharp and tuned where they call out over the quiet sounds of others' conversations.

"Lan Zhan, you do realise you don't have to practice?" Wei Ying ends up calling down to him, leaning over the edge of the stage to see where he's picking through one of the war songs. "It's a break, have you never heard of one?"

Lan Zhan cuts off his playing with an unresolved chord, the note hanging in the air sharp and unfinished before it fades in the humidity. "I just want it to be perfect," he says, and something in Wei Ying's heart squeezes at it, Lan Zhan's dedication to a production with no expectation of perfection from him.

"And it will be, with you," he says instead, freeing a hand from the plastic bag to pat the space beside him on the stage. "Anyway, c'mon, I have way too much here, I need help to finish them." Wei Ying's fingers are glossy with the juice when he holds a lychee down to Lan Zhan, the fruit sticky and saccharine on his skin. The late afternoon light bounces off the flesh of the fruit, shines it yellowy and marble-like between his fingers. 

Lan Zhan looks down at his instrument with a frown, and holds up a hand as if to convey an argument against it.

"Just leave it be! Come sit up here with me, you can wash your hands after."

Lan Zhan does; not without a final, forlorn glance at the instrument and it's strings; and hoists himself up onto the stage, sitting down beside Wei Ying. The metal plate that runs along the edge of the stage is warm beneath his skin where shorts give way.

"Here," Wei Ying says, and places a lychee in Lan Zhan's hand, already peeled. The juice makes his skin tacky where he grazes Lan Zhan's wrist with his fingers.

"Thank you."

They sit in silence a moment, then, the quiet repetition of peeling the fruit setting a pace for their breathing, the way Lan Zhan starts passing Wei Ying unpeeled ones. Looking out from here, all there is is the seats, and the back doors, and the aisles, and the impossibly high ceiling with its rafters and lights and years of songs packed into the wood grain. The air is dusty, too, even with the humidity weighing most of it down - it’s like a grain filter to look through, dust mites drifting lazily in the late afternoon light.

Somewhere, there is the muffled voice of Yanli outside on the phone, the sound of the fans they've set up on stage so that they don't die of heatstroke in the middle of rehearsal. The wet, smacking sound of their mouths where the fruit gives way to teeth.

"Hey, Lan Zhan."

The other man makes a questioning noise, looking at Wei Ying where he's sitting beside him.

"Why are you here? I know you said you wanted to help, but why this show?’

Lan Zhan is quiet for a moment, chewing on the lychee he'd just popped in his mouth, before letting his hands settle in his lap. They’re good hands, Wei Ying thinks. Calloused on the finger pads, perfectly kept fingernails. Careful. They twist for a moment before he speaks.

“The story is important,” he says. “The music is half of it.” Lan Zhan looks pointedly at the orchestra pit, and then to where Wei Ying’s dizi lays abandoned in its case on the stage, it’s red tassel hanging out.

Wei Ying hums, digging into the bag for another lychee, and the plastic rustles loudly when Lan Zhan keeps speaking.

“I wanted to help, too,” he says. “I saw the show when I was younger; my mother brought me and my brother to see it while we were here for a trip;”

“I didn't know you had a brother!” Wei Ying exclaims, twisting to look at Lan Zhan. "You never said!"

“He’s three years older than me."

“Oh, he's the same age as A-Jie!”

Lan Zhan hums in agreement, still chewing on the piece of fruit. “Anyway, I heard through a colleague that you were looking for a guzheng player this year. I wanted to help, somehow."

Wei Ying smiles quietly. The things people do for memory.

He puts another piece of fruit in Lan Zhan's hands, before leaning back to settle onto his hands, tipping his head back. “What’s your favourite scene, then?" Wei Ying asks. “I’m sure you have one.”

“The wh-”

“Nope, you can’t say anything about how the show is a whole and can’t be separated into parts.”

Lan Zhan is making a very stricken face, and it bowls Wei Ying over, the look of absolute surprise at being read so easily. He tips back with a laugh, lying with his back to the stage to stare up to the muddle of light fixtures hanging above them. The spotlights, the diffusers, the delicate chandelier of glass and crystal that's been there generations back.

“Lan Zhan, you’re too easy to read,“ Wei Ying laughs, still lying down, and Lan Zhan makes a half sound, something breathy and hot into the air of the theatre. The silence holds, for a moment, but it's nice. To have someone to talk to like this again. Wei Ying is still grappling with silent meals at the kitchen table.

“C’mon, you’ve still gotta answer the question," he says, turning his face to look at Lan Zhan where he's still sitting.

Lan Zhan is quiet, almost guiltily so, and the density of the air makes it all the more prevalent. Wei Ying has a rising laugh in the back of his throat.

“You like the sword fights, don’t you.”

Lan Zhan's silence is an answer in of itself, and he peels another fruit, ears red as Wei Ying laughs, pushing himself up to look back over the theater. The afternoon light is creeping into the aisles now, gold spilling over the carpeting and seeping toward the stage. There is the smudgy movement of wavering heat or ghosts in the seats.

"What about you?" Lan Zhan asks, drawing Wei Ying's attention away from the seats.

"What about me what?"

"Your favourite scene."

Wei Ying lets his gaze tip down to his fruit-sticky hands, running through the show in his head. He loves the thrill of the battles. Loves the way the siblings spin around each other in their dances close enough to overbalance but never doing so. The comedic moments, the way the sister slaps the two of them around the back of their heads before smoothing a hand over their hair gently.

"I just like the ones where they’re happy,” Wei Ying says, quietly, as people start wandering back into the theatre, done with lunch. “Even though those are the ones that make the ending hurt more.”

At the top of the aisle, Yanli and Jiang Cheng enter the theatre from the sweltering heat of summer, heads pressed together over the screen of a phone.

“And your least favourite?”

Wei Ying starts packing fruit back into the bag, the skins rubbery under his fingers when he drops them back into the plastic. Lan Zhan is still looking at him, waiting for an answer he knows Wei Ying will give.

“When they all go to the different stage positions,” Wei Ying tells him, eventually, just before Lan Zhan climbs down off the stage to where his instrument sits. Lan Zhan will know the scene - they spent two hours rehearsing it the other day, to get the timing perfect. The way the older brother wanders to stage left, steps languid and weighted - the way the sister follows him a few moments later, moving to stage right, steps light and reaching for someone else. The younger brother, left in center stage alone and reaching for them both. Wei Ying keeps messing up the timing. He lingers too long in the middle. “That’s the worst part.”

—

Wei Ying fiddles with the switch on the last fan to switch it off, dragging it to stand in line with the others along the edge of the stage. The last dregs of sunlight are coming through the back door; Yunmeng summer draws out the days, taffy long and sticky until seven thirty. For the last few days, the air has been dead, not a hint of breeze, and they've been relying on the electric fans in order to not collapse while rehearsing. It's as if the heat is weighing down any hint of wind, choking down any relief from the humidity.

Somewhere behind him, Jiang Cheng is moving the chairs from where the orchestra's been set up in preparation for the cleaners to sweep the floors tonight; they haven't spoken since earlier, and so the only conversation between them has been the clatter of furniture and the slowly quieting hum of the fans. Everyone else has gone home but for them, and Yanli is somewhere backstage in the office, the small cramped room beside the doors that open up to the back of the theater.

"Would be nice if you could start getting that part right tomorrow," Jiang Cheng says, suddenly, the words offhand and sharp where they sit in the air between them. Wei Ying turns to where the other is shifting the chairs from the side of the stage to backstage, the heavy curtain that separates the two pulled aside and tied up at the stage exits.

They've already argued about it today, going over and over the same section before Yanli stepped between them and told them to just move on from that section.

"We can go over it later," she'd told them, and then looked them in the eyes with a sternness reserved for scolding. Wei Ying knows the look from years under her eye, years of bickering and growing storms between him and Jiang Cheng. The steely eyes, the slight shake of her head, the eyebrows drawn in. This is not worth what it is coming to. Something of that scale was going to end with yelling. There is no honour in doing it in a rehearsal with others all around you, mid-morning and a few minutes after break.

Wei Ying had caught Lan Zhan's eyes when he'd moved back to stage left and shook his head. That kind of argument wouldn't be spilled there. It was nothing for Lan Zhan to worry about. He supposes they're doing it now, then, between the stage and the hallway, with Wei Ying still coiling the wires from the fans around his hand.

"I'm doing my best," he says with a hint of annoyance, turning back to where the electric fans are all lined up at the edge of the stage, plastic brittle in the heat. Behind him, he can hear the angry clatter of chairs as Jiang Cheng stacks them against the wall, the telltale sound of metal against the wood of the theater.

"No you're not."

Wei Ying feels a pulse of annoyance, frustration at the way Jiang Cheng states it like a fact; the way that Wei Ying keeps tripping over Jiang Cheng's feet in one of the battle choreographies, the way he keeps having to think about how they don't know how to breathe around each other no when they used to have the same pulse as kids and then scrappy teenagers.

"I don't know how to fix this if you won't work with me!" Wei Ying snaps, standing up to turn to where Jiang Cheng is setting the last chairs down by the wall with more care than his words have ever been afforded.

"I am working with you," Jiang Cheng snarls, whipping around to glower at Wei Ying, eyebrows knitted together and his jaw clenched. Wei Ying forgets, sometimes, that his brother was taught anger and knows it too intimately, now. "You're the one who doesn't know how to adjust! Everything is different here, don't you see? It doesn't pause when you leave! We had to deal with everything left behind!" The words fall out of his mouth like they've been waiting behind his teeth for the last two weeks, dripping molten onto the stage like something ashy.

"What?" Wei Ying says, dumbfounded, halfway to stepping forwards across the stage. "The hell are you talking about?"

Jiang Cheng sneers, striding forward with no hint of the hesitation that Wei Ying has. The way they change; Jiang Cheng was always the hesitant one, trailing after Wei Ying when they were younger. Now, he presses face to face with Wei Ying, snarling.

"You do realise who this falls on? If this goes wrong you get to leave, go back to your little apartment in the city with your little friends. Do you know what this show means for the theater? Everything falls apart if this doesn't go well and you're not the one who has to shoulder it! We do!"

"I'm not the one who put all this work onto your shoulders," Wei Ying snaps, incredulous. "Why are you blaming me?"

"No, but you were the one who ran away," Jiang Cheng yells, and suddenly Yanli is skittering onto the stage to grab at his arm where he's surging forward to Wei Ying. He doesn't realise until he tries to focus on the floral clips in her hair that his sight is blurry.

"I-"

“They left us because they died,” Jiang Cheng says, bitterly, Yanli still holding his arm back. “You chose.”

Wei Ying doesn't have any answer. Jiang Cheng laughs cruelly at it, straining against their sister's hold; Wei Ying just stares at the both of them across from him, a floorboard between them.

"You didn't even keep in touch! You didn't help! Do you know what it's like here? This place is falling apart around us and we don't even know where you are half the time!"

“How was I supposed to know this is how you’re feeling when you wont talk to me anymore? I don’t know you anymore,” Wei Ying screams back, and then there is Yanli’s other arm around him, tugging him back from where he’d started forward, and Jiang Cheng’s eyes are wet, and now Yanli is yelling.

"Stop it, both of you! You're both in the wrong, now stop it. " Her words cut when they need to. They hurt, now, even though he knows they’re warranted for the both of them, even though he can barely hear them over the rushing in his ears. The next words are lost in Jiang Cheng's yell, but they feel like something straight from their mothers mouth. Anger lives on in the Jiang family. It just shows itself differently.

"You don't even act like our brother anymore," Jiang Cheng yells, and then there is just howling. The back door shrieks when it slams open, a sharp gust of wind curling through where they're standing backstage and whipping it's way across the stage with a scream. The wind is frantic; shadows sweep across the stage like dark, stretched figures. Jiang Cheng wrenches his hand free from Yanli's grip to clamp his hands over his ears at the screaming, what sounds like voices upon voices upon voices shrieking at them.

The ghosts of the Yunmeng theater are not so much folklore as people think they are. Memory is stronger than death, sometimes. It remembers. It leaves things behind.

Wei Ying's words are swallowed by the hurricane, and then he watches as the light rigging above the stage, all that molten glass and crystal, creaks, and snaps, and falls. The chandelier shatters on impact, collapsing onto the boards of the stage, which jolts at the weight, the destruction, and Wei Ying has the unnerving feeling of someone standing over them while they watch the glass shatter and skid across the stage, bouncing off the side of his shoes.

Elder sisters do not like to see their families fight, he thinks hazily, as Yanli lets go of his arms to stand dazedly in the middle of the screaming wind as it quietens slowly. The summer dust settles onto the stage where it blankets the shine of broken glass.

There is a moment of gaping, yawning silence in the aftermath of whatever that just was. Jiang Cheng stands across from him, staring in silent shock at the mess of glass and warped metal on the stage; Yanli is still between them, taking another step forward towards the damage before she snaps out of whatever daze she's in and turns to the both of them. 

"Are you okay?" is the first thing she asks them, back to the rows and rows of chairs and scanning them up and down for injuries like when they were little kids and got caught in the brambles down by the lakeside. Wei Ying is the one who should be checking them for injuries, but Yanli has been assuming that job since they were five and she was nine and was sticking bandages over their cuts. He doesn't think he'll ever quite take it over.

"Okay," she says, flustered, and Wei Ying wants to tuck her loose hairs back into their little bobby clips. "We're all fine. Argument on hold, we're cleaning this up first," and the way she says it is so no nonsense that all We Ying can do is laugh at the sudden way the argument dissolves. She's always been able to do that, to get between them and end a life-ruining fight like it's nothing. The way she states it as a fact. The constant we. We're fine. We're cleaning this up. Jiang Cheng must think the same, because there's a twin laugh across from Wei Ying, his brother's lips curving up in amusement.

"Guess they'd had enough of you two arguing over the years," Yanli mentions, toeing at a piece of glass and pointing over to the side of the stage where all the cleaning equipment has been stored for as long as they can remember. "Off to work, you two."

Jiang Cheng tugs a pair of brooms out of one of the cupboards, barely avoiding pulling out a pile of old costume racks alongside it, and Wei Ying takes one with a quiet 'thanks', before dropping the end to the floor and dragging it behind him as he wanders back to where the lighting rig is collapsed on the ground.

“Sorry about that,” he calls out to the rows of seats when they make it to the stage, and there’s a noise like a whispering laugh, hot wind forcing its way through teeth, through the doors.                                                                                                 

—

That night, Yanli crowds them into the kitchen with her and makes them help with the prep. Jiang Cheng still chops without curling his fingers under, and Wei Ying takes advantage of the way Yanli keeps slapping at Jiang Cheng's hand to sneak pieces of vegetables. The ways that we relearn our family's rhythm. The ways we learn to move around each other.

Wei Ying tells them about Huaisang and his horribly named budgie, and Xuanyu's collection of energy drink cans, the frustration of fallouts and the accompanying satisfaction. Yanli tells him about her friend who painted the picture in the living room, how it had been a gift on the first anniversary of their parents death. Jiang Cheng tells him about the dance classes they want to start back up at the theater, the drama he’s been watching that he thinks Wei Ying should watch. He talks quietly about the struggle of holding something up on their shoulders at 20 years old when it’s something that’s been built up over hundreds of years.

Yanli reaches across the table at some point to grab at their hands, rubbing a thumb over his knuckles with a thumb.

"I'm so glad we're still together," she says, voice thick, still smiling.

Even later, Jiang Cheng offers Wei Ying his open bag of chips, shaking it to make them rustle. Wei Ying grins, and takes a whole handful. He earns a slap, and a laugh, and turns back to the TV.

—

Four days is barely enough time to fix the damage, but Yunmeng loves it's theater, and by the time people hear about the damage there are people there to help. Wei Ying stands on the stage while they do, staring up at where the metal beam has been rigged back up. Most of it was undamaged; a miracle, but all the glass and light bulbs still need replacing, and they're likely going to be performing the first show with only the most basic of light riggings.

"That's all we need, though," Jiang Cheng says over dinner, and Yanli stares at him in shock for a moment across the table, before Wei Ying watches her go back to her food with a small smile creeping onto her face. He's right, Wei Ying thinks, later. The show needs to be lit, but there's no effects embedded into it. It's been performed since before they had this fancy lighting rig; it can still be performed that way. All they really need is a spotlight, and enough diffusers to even out the lighting on stage.

It's a race for time, alongside the final rehearsals for the show, and the days drag long and slow in the building heat, the air onstage almost stagnant sith the humidity. They're going home late more often than not, and breaks are getting shorter and shorter.

The rest of town is gearing up for the performance, too - for all Yanli and Jiang Cheng have feared the ticket sales, Yanli keeps wandering away on phone calls with school groups or others booking group tickets.

And through it all, they're running through the pieces over and over and over again until they can't get anything wrong. Yinzhu learns to be weightless even as she scolds them in their scenes together, how to die gracefully for all she was always someone who favoured power in her dances.

Wei Ying's feet are bruised where he lands after leaping, and he ends rehearsals breathless after playing his dizi loud enough that you can hear the keening in the rafters. At least he's stopped tripping. Jiang Cheng keeps his feet pulled back for that movement, and Wei Ying learns to take a bigger step. It was just a matter of adjusting where they were to each other.

Lan Zhan buys him dinner one day, after rehearsal, and Wei Ying sits facing him on the stage surrounded by takeout. Lan Zhan's digging through his vegetarian meal across from him, legs crossed and back straight in contrast to where Wei Ying's lying the stage to eat his curry.

The theatre's not completely empty, but it's quiet enough to talk privately. Someone's packing up their instrument in the pit, which has been opened up finally, to run dress rehearsals, and there's the echo of a bang when they presumably knock one of the stands. Jiang Cheng has already left the theater to walk home - he'd had food delivered there before Lan Zhan had walked in from the carpark. All Jiang Cheng had done was give him a flat look, before jerking his chin to where Lan Zhan was standing, and walk away with a wave.

Wei Ying's halfway through his food when he looks up from where he's eating to see where there's red welling up on Lan Zhan's finger.

"Oh, Lan Zhan, you're bleeding," he remarks, setting his chopsticks down to point. The aluminium foil on the edge of the container lid must have nicked his thumb, and Lan Zhan stares at it in a moment of quiet surprise. The little bead of blood welling up bursts after a moment, spilling silken and crimson onto the cotton of his shirt, and Lan Zhan presses another finger to the wound to stop it bleeding.

"Hang on, I'll go grab some stuff," Wei Ying says, pushing up from where he's sitting to dig through one of the little cupboards near the stage exits, where he knows there's a mini first aid kid. There's the sound of shuffling behind him, and when he gets back to the middle of the stage, Lan Zhan's pushed their takeout to the side. Wei Ying sets the little first aid pack down and reaches for Lan Zhan's hand to look at the cut. It's small and doesn't really need any attention, but he may as well wrap it up a little. The kit has a tube of antiseptic cream in it, and he daubs it over the cut, a thumb pressed to the inside of Lan Zhan's wrist to keep it still. His pulse is rabbit fast, and Wei Ying laughs a little internally as he dabs at the cut. The blood smears under his finger and the white of the cream before he wipes it off on the skin of his knee to unwrap a plaster.

"It's good that it's shallow," he says, the plastic wrapper crinkling when he pulls it free, the cellophane immediately fogging in the humid air of the evening. "You can take this off tomorrow and it'll be fine."

He zones out a little as he presses the bandage over the cut, and for a split second it's like his hands aren't his own. There’s a cold whisper at the nape of his neck, and for a moment his hands feel wet.

“Wei Ying?”

"Nothing," he laughs, quiet and sure as he shakes himself out of the moment. "Just deja-vu, you know what it's like. It just felt like we'd done this before."

Lan Zhan hums as Wei Ying wraps the ends of the plasticky bandage around his finger, flexing it once, twice, before letting it settle on his thigh.

"Thank you."

"No problem," Wei Ying says, crumpling the wrapping from the plaster to stuff it in his pocket and pushing the little first aid kit to the side to settle back down onto his stomach. Lan Zhan pushes his container toward him with a hand, before reaching for his own.

They eat in silence for a few minutes, Wei Ying scooping at the edges of his container to get all the chilli flakes. Lan Zhan eventually sets his chopsticks down with a dull clack noise from the soft, cheap wood, looking to Wei Ying with an indecipherable expression.

"Are you prepared for the performance?"

Wei Ying meets his eyes with a raised eyebrow, laugh caught in the back of his throat. It tickles, but he talks through it, setting his own chopsticks down.

"Lan Zhan, you've seen me run through it every day for the past week. Are you saying I'm doing something wrong?"

Lan Zhan looks a little flustered, for all it could be the heat, but he shakes his head, picking up his chopsticks again to pick through the cooling meals in the plastic container in front of him.

"No. Just checking that you're happy with it."

Wei Ying thinks about earlier today, the mindless way they'd breezed through the first half of the rehearsal - the way he had moved without thinking, played through the dizi parts as if someone else was guiding his hands, his movements, his breaths. The blur of his vision, the hazy spaces around Jiang Cheng as they spun around each other in the light of the late morning humidity.

"Yea," he grins, looking back up to meet Lan Zhan's eyes. "I think we're ready to go."

—

The minutes before a show are all chaos. It's not a large space, backstage, so it's packed with people, all moving around each other - stagehands and lighting crew, costumers who are mostly just the women from the tailors shop in town who have been helping to make the costumes for years. The lights are dim, too - there's only a lamp set up above them, throwing thick shadows over the hollows of Jiang Cheng's face in the chair beside him.

"You look terrible," Jiang Cheng says, with the exact same powdery makeup that Wei Ying is wearing on his own face.

"As if you can say anything," he snips back, before Jinzhu grabs at his face with a manicured hand to swipe around his eyes with a brush. It itches, and he squirms in the grip before she releases him with a scowl.

"This would be less painful for you if you stopped moving."

"But it feels weird ." 

"Deal with it."

Wei Ying whines, but acquiesces and lets her go at the other eye with the dry brush. Jiang Cheng snickers beside him, and Wei Ying flings out a hand to smack him, even with his eyes shut and face being manhandled by Yinzhu's twin sister with a torture device in her hands.

"A-Ying? A-Cheng? A-Yi- there you are!" he hears Yanli call, and turns his head to spot her weaving her way through the sea of people like they're nothing, her hands absent of the stage directions she's been hanging onto since day one. She's been out by the ticket booth to see the people come in - nothing she needs to do, but some kind of reassurance that people are arriving. It seems they have - in droves.

"There are so many people ," she heaves, crouching down in front of the chairs they're sitting in to stare up at them with wide eyes. Her hands are steady, though, where she presses them to the ground to keep her balance. 

"Jie?" Jiang Cheng asks, lips curved up in an amused smile. "You okay?"

"I don't know where they came from!" she exclaims, eyes bright and voice high. "Did either of you say something? Did someone else advertise it?"

"I don't- oh ," Wei Ying says, cutting himself off in realisation as Jinzhu smears blush over his cheekbones.

Nie Huaisang. He'd mentioned the show to him when he was leaving for the break, Huaisang in the middle of 'curating his instagram feed', whatever that was supposed to mean. He's never thought much about his little flatmate's following on social media, just that it was a lot. Enough, apparently, to sell out the next three shows, according to Yanli.

"That's why they're all so young!" she exclaims, when he explains. "And there's so many of them!"  

Yanli's joy is something infectious, bubbling over when it gets to be too much and spreading to the people around her. Jiang Cheng grins, something sharp and kind in one, and Wei Ying does the same, reaching out to pat at her arm through the sleeve of her blouse.

There's a call of Yanli's name through the bustle of people, and she pushes up from the ground in an instant, spinning to her brothers with a fierce determination on her face.

"You're going to do great," she says, pressing a kiss into the top of Jiang Cheng's head and then his, a light pressure and then she disappears into the crowd. They'll see her in a few minutes,  standing in the wings on the other side of the stage to observe everything. Make sure everything is running smoothly, watch for anything that goes wrong. The tasks of the eldest sibling.

A costumer pins another hairpiece into Yinzhu's hair where she's sitting beside them, having done her makeup already. Wei Ying and Jiang Cheng have always been terrible at it though, so Jinzhu only trusted them with the foundation before she took over.

The outfits are simple, in comparison to the grandness of traditional Peking opera. The sharp makeup is a given, of course, but it’s less dramatic, and their faces are far from the pale complexion and thick features of Peking makeup. Wei Ying and Jiang Cheng’s hair is left short, and the three of them are dressed in relatively simple hanfu. It’s been that way forever, though. Yunmeng theatre has a life and history of it's own; it has its ghosts, and it's narratives, and it's weird, wobbly, mismatched orchestra.

Wei Ying remembers being a kid and scrambling around to help with the actors - the heavy silk plain and striking in the lights of the stage. Crimson for the eldest brother; purple for the youngest; and soft lilacs and greens for the sister. The red flows over his knees now, thick and weighted where the seams are, so that it spins through the air smoother than it would with thin fabrics. When he smooths a hand over it, he can feel the layers of embroidery, almost invisible in the dark with the monochrome stitching. In the lights of the stage, he knows they're visible, the florals and flames, the contour lines of the lakes of Yunmeng stitched over the shoulders. Beside him, Jiang Cheng grumbles as Jinzhu moves from Wei Ying to him, smearing thick eyeshadow under his eyebrows in a bright colour.

His dizi is settled into its case on the side of the stage, ready to be picked up halfway through the performance, in the short break he has between battle scene and battle scene.

He absentmindedly raises a hand to rub at the thick eyeliner, and Jinzhu slaps his hand away from her hard work. "Not on my watch you don't," she hisses, and Jiang Cheng snickers, before she goes in with the powder and he whines.

"Wei Ying."

"Lan Zhan!"

The other man is dressed in the dark colours of the orchestra members, almost blending into the dim lights of the backstage set. The orchestra is already set up downstairs

"You here to tell me to break a leg?" Wei Ying says, half teasing. Lan Zhan steps closer to presumably peek at the makeup on Wei Ying's face, the bright lips and sharp eyeliner, the red shadows. "Gonna give me a kiss for luck?"

He is not expecting that to actually happen, so Wei Ying should be forgiven for his brain short-circuiting when Lan Zhan leans in to press his lips to Wei Ying's. He tangles his hand at the short hair at the back of Wei Ying's head where Xuanyu had put the wrong clipper size on, presses closer when Wei Ying kisses back.

There's a whisper of a laugh somewhere and a sigh, and Wei Ying presses into it, the soft heat of the moment, the fingers at the back of his neck.

"Oi!" and then Jinzhu is whacking at Lan Zhan's arm with her makeup pouch. Wei Ying whines when he pulls away, but Lan Zhan is fighting a battle of his own, and the image of six foot two Lan Zhan being attacked by Yinzhu's twin sister and her makeup pouch is too much for him to take before he starts laughing.

"Mercy on him," he wheezes, grabbing at her sleeve to no avail.

"Why did you let him do that?" she hisses at him, before turning back to Lan Zhan with the fury of a woman who's just had twenty cents of product wasted for a sappy moment. "Look at that! You've ruined the lipstick," she yells, ushering him away from where Jiang Cheng is cracking up, bent in half in his chair. "You owe me a drink." She calls it over her shoulder, already turning away from where Lan Zhan is getting swept into the flow of people heaving down to the orchestra pit with a look of absolute bewilderment on his face.

Wei Ying likes him so much. In the moment between Jinzhu turning around to find her lip colour and turning to fix it up, he presses two of his fingers to his lips, tacky and waxy where he touches, and blows a kiss to where Lan Zhan is still standing, stock still in the middle of the chaos of backstage. Even from here in the dim light, Wei Ying can see his ears glow red.

"Good luck, Lan Zhan!" he calls, raising a hand to wave him off as Lan Zhan flushes even further and turns to head down to the orchestra pit. 

When he turns around, Jiang Cheng and Jinzhu are both staring at him with varying degrees of disgust.

"Look at that smudging," Jinzhu says, the same moment Jiang Cheng goes "That was the worst thing I've ever had to witness."

"Shut up," Wei Ying grumbles, and allows his head to be tilted up for a touchup.

Jinzhu finishes touching his lips up the moment the call goes out for the performance to start, and gives the three of them a glare that is probably meant to convey if you sweat through this and ruin it I will never sneak you snacks at rehearsal again.

"You two ready?" Yinzhu asks, adjusting her hair pieces as they make their way to stand in the shadowy spot of the wings that affords them a small glimpse of the audience. Yanli was right about it - it's packed, every seat filled by Yunmeng locals or younger people in trendy clothes, crammed in where there's a spare seat. Beside him, Jiang Cheng takes in an audible breath, wide eyes made even wider by the makeup around them.

"That's a yes," Wei Ying grins, turning to where she stands in her purples and greens, the silvers in her hair.

The minutes before a show are all chaos, but the moment before the curtains rise is simple silence. The lights dim, and the curtain starts to shift, and the three of them walk out onto that big, empty stage.

—

Performing is a blur every time. Wei Ying barely registers the flow of his feet, the way he and Jiang Cheng hang off of each other in dance, the way Yinzhu is soft and upright at the same time, the movements of being an eldest daughter that Yanli had coached her through. At some point after all the rehearsals, you stop being yourself. By the time the stage swallows you, there is only the character, and an invisible hand tugging you through the movements that your bones know.

The show goes as it always has. The siblings spin and dance around each other - tug each other back from others, dance as a trio with no one else on stage to take them away from each other. There is a war - Wei Ying and Jiang Cheng fight back to back, stage swords biting the air and invisible enemies. The eldest brother disappears, and reappears from the wings with a dizi in his hands and red shadows under his eyes. There is more fighting; there is a victory, finally, and a short-lived one.

The eldest brother walks away to others; the sister walks the other direction for another. The younger brother is caught in the middle, until they are all pulled back together in the depths of another battle.

The death of the sister is met with the keening cry of the dizi in Wei Ying's hands, the youngest brother clutching her to his chest before letting her lie on the floor and raise his sword to his brother's throat. There is a fight; something broken and disorganised for all it is fast and flowing, as if it wasn't choreographed properly and they are trying to miss on purpose.

The final scene is the most famous image of the show; the one that gets used as the header for foreign blog reviews and the one that is framed in the office of the theatre. The two brothers, pressed together; the eldest in his blood red costume halfway to tripping backward and held up only by his younger brother.

The stage is dark - there's a single spotlight on them. One of Jiang Cheng’s arms is wrapped around Wei Ying’s waist and the other is gripping him by the wrist. Wei Ying’s dizi in his hand is held in the air above them, unable to move, and his other hand is clutching at Jiang Cheng’s forearm in desperation. Their legs are tangled. Jiang Cheng looks at him with betrayal, something else behind the eyes, and they pause the moment, hold the pose for seconds. And then how the story always goes. The youngest sibling let’s his older brother go, and he falls to the floor of the stage.

Wei Ying hits the stage with a thump, wincing from the ground shock, and then stays still for the last moments, lying there in the dark. In the last seconds of the play, the youngest sibling stands in the center of the stage, lit in the glare of the spotlight, alone and horrified, before the lights blink out.

In the dark, the audience doesn't see Jiang Cheng's scramble to the ground, the way he reaches for Wei Ying to check he's fine after falling the half meter to the hard wood of the stage. They cannot hear the hushed whispering - Are you okay? Yea, I'm fine. You?

In the moments before the lights come on, the moments of quiet, dark shock from the audience, Yanli shuffles across the stage to tug them both up, and bundle them into her arms.

"You did so well," she breathes into their shoulders, the three of them bundled together, inseparable for a moment. Jiang Cheng reaches out a hand to squeeze at Wei Ying's, and Wei Ying squeezes right back. In the dark, there is a whisper of others around them, joy and grief so quiet that he can't tell whose it is. Yanli presses another kiss to each of their foreheads, her lips tacky from the lipgloss she wears, before pushing them away to manhandle them into place. Yinzhu hops up from where she's been laying on the ground to stand with the three of them in preparation for the curtains to open again.

There is a speckle of applause, and then the lights flicker back on when the curtain rise.

The audience cheers. There is the clatter of instruments as the musicians beneath the stage lower their instruments. Somewhere, at the end of the rows of seats, something flickers. There is a quiet smile, and Wei Ying watches the shadow of three siblings turn away, shoulders pressed together, and disappear.

On stage, he looks around; Yanli is holding one of his hands, and Jiang Cheng is holding the other. Yinzhu is hanging onto Yanli, and he makes eye contact with Lan Zhan as he climbs on stage to stand beside Jiang Cheng with a quiet, private smile. Wei Ying looks back out at the audience, and the empty space where there were once ghosts, filled up with noise and more memory than the theatre can handle.