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Backstage at the opera house was a place strictly for performers, forbidden to the audience -- but then again, Er Yuehong had yet to meet the barrier, whether of force or of convention, that could keep Zhang Qishan from going where he wanted to go. "That was a beautiful performance tonight."
Er Yuehong carefully placed his largest headpiece on its stand, smiling even as he rolled his eyes. "You don't even like opera," he said.
"Don't like opera?" Zhang Qishan placed a hand to his uniformed chest as though he might faint, appalled, from the sheer suggestion. "I particularly loved the part where your character did the thing and sang the song to the other guy. You know, that part."
Er Yuehong was this close to pitching something at his head, an impulse controlled largely by how nothing within arm's reach was a thing he'd like to see thrown. It was a joke, of course -- no matter how much Zhang Qishan played the country rube, he was obviously a man of devastating intelligence, one who enjoyed seeing those who had underestimated him pay the price for their costly mistakes. Not only had he most certainly understood the plot, but likely could have recited large parts of the libretto, especially considering the number of times he'd heard it. Hardly a night went by that Er Yuehong looked out beyond the footlights and didn't see Zhang Qishan's handsome face there.
Chuckling at his own joke in the face of Er Yuehong's refusal to do so, Zhang Qishan picked up one of the tasseled spears Er Yuehong had left leaning against the small dressing room's far wall. He gave it a little spin in his hand. He was graceful, but all his grace was in efficiency and conservation of momentum. He could have killed a man six inches from him, but never played to the back row. "Anyway, who told you I don't like opera?"
"A certain Zhang Qishan." Er Yuehong began easing the tacked-down sideburns of his wig away from his face. He'd always felt a little self-conscious about being seen in this in-between state. Ready for performance was one thing, and ready to step out into the streets was another, but all stages in-between felt a bit unseemly.
Zhang Qishan clucked his tongue and pointed the spear in Er Yuehong's general direction. "Why would you listen to him? I hear he's a charmer and a liar."
It was an almost unbearable temptation, right then, to sweep across the room faster than Zhang Qishan's eye could track, to startle him by knocking the spear from his hand -- or even better, grabbing it and aiming it for his throat. Er Yuehong could do it, too, and without removing a single piece of his heavy costume first. The thought of the look of surprise on Zhang Qishan's face made him smile to himself.
"So where shall we go for dinner?" asked Zhang Qishan.
The question was all but nonsense -- at that hour, they would go to whatever teahouse or stall was still open, if any even were, and if all had closed their tables for the evening, they'd returned to the Hong Manor and ask some of Er Yuehong's handsomely paid servants to fix something for them. A thought struck Er Yuehong, though, and before he could think better of it, he let it slip his mouth: "I think we should dine by the seashore." There, it was Er Yuehong's turn to make a joke. An impractical one, as well -- the nearest coast in any direction was much farther than even the fastest horse could have made by suppertime.
Zhang Qishan, however, seemed delighted by the suggestion. "Shall we, then?" he asked, putting on airs and giving an exaggerated bow in the western style, sweeping arm and all. "The two of us to the seashore and back before dawn, before anyone notices we're gone?"
Only the gesture of unfastening the ties that held his long yellow cloak in place kept the shake in Er Yuehong's hands from being revealed. "And what mystical creature would one ride to achieve that journey?"
There was a little twist at the corner of Zhang Qishan's mouth, as though Er Yuehong had told an even funnier joke there. Instead of explaining just what had been so amusing, though, Zhang Qishan pointed at the knot, which was stubbornly refusing to yield to Er Yuehong's attempts to undo it. "Do you need a hand with that?"
"I've got it," Er Yuehong declined politely. He'd been in and out of costumes like this nearly every day of his life; he didn't need help. A performer was allowed to have help getting dressed and undressed, but should never need it. To depend on another was a weakness a man could not afford. What if everyone else backstage were suddenly struck with a series of terrible ailments? The show would still need to go on. And there, just like that, the knot gave way and his cloak came free. All it had needed was a little persistence.
"It seems you do," siad Zhang Qishan, his tone pleasant but unreadable.
~*~
Er Yuehong had two problems, and they were both Zhang Qishan.
The first of those problems was Zhang Qishan, the man. That problem was not Er Yuehong's alone; that problem was the problem of everyone who had the fortune, or perhaps more accurately misfortune, of Zhang Qishan's acquaintance. He was handsome and stubborn and reckless and confident and a thousand other things that made him unfit for polite society, except for how he could be perfectly well-mannered and -behaved when he wanted to be.
The second, however, was all the parts of Er Yuehong himself that Zhang Qishan made unavoidable.
He could still recall the sound of his father's voice as he'd icily informed Zhang Qishan that, sorry to disappoint, but beneath all their trappings and airs, all the women he'd seen on the stage that evening were actually men. Of course, Er Yuehong had heard the rebuke for what it had really been: not so much an insult to the cultural intelligence of their visitor, but a warning shot to let his son know not to try anything untoward where others might notice. For all the ancient nature of their art form, his father had been at heart a man of the modern world, and that world was one in which ancient deviances and indulgences could not be tolerated, particularly among men, even more particularly among men together, to say nothing of when such matters involved his own son.
Not, of course, that Er Yuehong had ever made a single noise, whether in his father's earshot or not, about his proclivities in any direction. As far as his father and everyone else were concerned, Er Yuehong was as sexless as the mannequins on which his costumes hung between shows. Once he'd even had a dream where he'd removed his robes after a performance to find nothing beneath -- no flesh, no blood, no body, just an empty space adorned with baubles and silks. He'd wept upon waking, and when the maids had asked him why, he'd had to spin the dream into a nightmare insead of aspirational.
And what if Er Yuehong's hypothetical tastes were unbecoming? It wasn't as though he'd ever acted on them, no more than he'd ever actually murdered anyone by jabbing a painted and feathered spear at another performer's armored chest. He might as well have been insubstantial inside his fine clothes, an illusion that would disappear the moment someone peeked inside.
Zhang Qishan made him want to have a body. That was a problem.
~*~
"I apologize," was, smartly, the first thing out of Zhang Qishan's mouth. If it hadn't been, Er Yuehong would have thrown him out of the dressing room, likely through the nearest window.
As it was, Er Yuehong went about the business of mending a frayed tassel on one of his belts, keeping his eyes fixed on neatening up the golden cord. "For what?" he asked. He wasn't asking because he didn't know. He wanted to hear Zhang Qishan say it.
"For going without you."
"And?" Er Yuehong caught one of the loose threads in his teeth and snapped it free.
"And for going without telling you," Zhang Qishan conceded with a soft sigh.
" And?" A second thread was severed in the same way, though doing so with this one actually caused more problems than it solved. Er Yuehong took a breath, held it for a beat, and let it out silently. Losing his cool would do no good.
Zhang Qishan took a step toward Er Yuehong, and then, when Er Yuehong didn't react, took another. He was still dressed in the clothes he'd worn into the caverns beneath the mountain, ragged and filthy. He hadn't even gone to his home first to clean up. He'd come right here. "For ... missing your performance?" he tried.
The window was still an option. "For being gone three days," Er Yuehong snapped, dropping the fabric into his lap and turning to Zhang Qishan with an icy glare. "Three. Days. And I have to hear it from your little lieutenant?" That was unkind; Er Yuehong was actually quite fond of Zhang Rishan. But he was mad, and mad meant he was allowed to be unkind.
That brought a little smile to Zhang Qishan's lips, one Er Yuehong wanted to smack right off him. "Er Ye..."
"Don't." Er Yuehong wished he had on hand something more threatening to point at Zhang Qishan than a makeup brush. He'd almost gotten used to the term by now, to hearing it and not automatically looking around for his father. The people of Changsha who said it meant it as a term of respect, and Er Yuehong was determined to take it in the manner in which they'd intended it, no matter how much it felt like wearing someone else's borrowed clothes.
Except that wasn't the way Zhang Qishan meant it. Every time he said it, Er Yuehong heard it less as a title and more as a cheeky nickname, like the way the wives of peasant men would use lofty terms to call their husbands to supper. And Er Yuehong was not in a state to deal with that right now. He'd slept too little and drunk too much over the past two nights for that.
"You," Er Yuehong continued after a pause long enough to please his theatrical sensibilities, "are not the Jiumen Alliance. You are at best one-ninth of it. First family or last family, it doesn't matter. You cannot make unilateral decisions like that."
"I know--"
"I don't think you do." Er Yuehong grabbed the belt again and went back to fidgeting with it. He was accomplishing nothing by doing this, but Zhang Qishan wouldn't know that. And besides, the more Er Yuehong's hands were occupied, the less likely he was to strangle the man. "The other families, we're not your soldiers. We don't take orders from you. You want us all to work together? You can't just disappear and--"
Zhang Qishan began to walk toward him, cutting off Er Yuehong's scolding midstream. He crossed the rest of the distance between them, and then, to Er Ye's enormous surprise, knelt before him. With Er Yuehong seated in his makeup chair, he looked down at Zhang Qishan, having suddenly become an emperor looming over his loyal subject. Zhang Qishan pulled a small bundle of silk from one of his jacket's inside pockets and extended it to Er Yuehong with both hands. "I got you something."
Er Yuehong very nearly didn't take it. He didn't want to establish a precedent, that bad behavior could be bought off. (And it hadn't been that bad, really, had it? So he'd gone into a tomb. Members of the other families did that all the time without giving anyone a heads-up. Sometimes they didn't even come back. Then why did it feel different from him?) He reasoned that it would be impolite to refuse, however, and used that as an excuse to take the folded cloth from Zhang Qishan's hands. Besides, it wasn't as though Er Yuehong could just leave him kneeling like that, was it? Scuffed and dirty as he was, his hair mussed, the slightest crack of a healed split lip, that little smirk at play on his features--
The safest action was to unwrap whatever Zhang Qishan had just handed him, which was what Er Yuehong did. Inside was a little figurine made from an alabaster so light it was luminous even in the dimness of the shaded dressing room. It was small enough that it fit neatly into the palm of Er Yuehong's hand, but was so delicately carved that he could see clearly that it formed the shape of an opera performer, arms raised in a dance as water sleeves swirled down around the figure. He'd never seen its like before.
"I saw this," said Zhang Qishan, that horrible little smile still on his handsome lips, "and I thought of you."
Er Yuehong was downright furious at how well the gift had worked. "I'm still mad at you," he said, running a fingertip down the expertly crafted details of the figure's headdress. She -- the character was female, even if there was no way to tell if the performer had been meant to be -- spun forever, her flowing grace captured in stone. Some kind of netsuke, possibly, though even that guess didn't seem quite right, especially when added to the fact of what it would have been doing in a tomb sealed off over a thousand years ago. Zhang Qishan had brought him more than just an object; he'd brought him a mystery. The dancing woman twirled in hs fingers, spinning her way through her eternal performance. At least the little line that indicated her mouth seemed to be turned up into a smile. If it was her fate to spend forever like this, then at least it was also her fate to enjoy it.
Zhang Qishan chuckled, his kneeling posture ramrod-straight. Er Yuehong wondered how long he could stay like that, in a perfect posture of submission. And why shouldn't he be able to? He'd been trained, just as Er Yuehong had. Er Yuehong couldn't imagine any military instruction had been more exacting or unforgiving than his father's.
Of course, he wasn't really being submissive. Zhang Qishan was nothing if not a man in full control of his life, to say nothing of the lives of everyone around him. It was a maddening personality trait. Er Yuehong hated it. He hated more that he had been ensnared in its web.
At last, Er Yuehong sighed and rolled his eyes. "All right, get up, get up. You've made your point. You're forgiven. Get up."
Zhang Qishan didn't, though, at least not right away. He held his kneeling posture for a full moment longer, looking up at Er Yuehong with those soft brown eyes of his. It was taking every ounce of control Er Yuehong had in his body not to think about what Zhang Qishan could do so easily at that level, or how little effort it would take for him to reach across the tiny distance between them and touch Er Yuehong's seated body. It wouldn't even have taken effort at all -- barely the strength needed to lift his hand, and Zhang Qishan could have rested it on Er Yuehong's knee. He wouldn't have done that, of course not. But he could have.
After staying put just long enough to convey that Zhang Qishan's rising was his own idea, and not obedience, Zhang Qishan stood again. "What are you singing tonight?"
"Nothing you're going to hear." Er Yuehong scoffed, eyeing the condition of Zhang Qishan's clothes. "I wouldn't let someone in your ratty state in the front door."
"Back door it is, then," said Zhang Qishan with smart little wink that again nearly got him thrown out the window.
~*~
From the moment he'd been pressed into the art form, there'd never been any real question that Er Yuehong would take the women's roles onstage. Why would anyone have thought otherwise? He'd been a beautiful child with delicate features and long, slim limbs, and he'd taken almost immediately to the precise hand gestures and the gliding footwork that characterized the dainty beauty of opera heroines. The vocal skills had taken longer, but they took longer for everyone. No one emerged from the womb knowing how to sing opera.
He liked best the costumes for the female characters. He found the male characters' looks handsome on other players, but he'd never felt quite suited to them -- especially the orange foundation and the hideous hovering beards whose strands threatened to rush down his throat every time he inhaled. He preferred the way the pink shadow bloomed like a carpet of flowers around his eyes and cheeks. He'd always been partial to pink.
When he'd been a child, he'd snuck out of Hong Manor whenever he could and run out into all the areas of town his father had told him he should never go, and especially never go alone. He'd hidden in the shadows and watched people. He didn't want anything salacious out of it. They were just interesting to him, living out their lives so unlike his own. He watched them like they were characters on stage, playing out their own little operas.
They even had their own stock characters. Curtains parted to reveal the vendor with the noodle cart, the elderly man with the warm smile and forearms like oak from decades of kneading dough. In from the wings came the mother herding a dozen children, too many of them too close in age to have been all hers, but all hers anyway in terms of responsibility. Now the clever beggar made his entrance, playing up his limp for sympathy as he held out his begging bowl, but still injured enough that it didn't disappear completely when he ran from angry shopkeepers, accusing him of thefts he might or might not have committed. Near the footlights shuffled the studious child, come to market on his own, squinting at characters scrawled in the margin of a scrap of newspaper, filling up his basket before returning home to a mother likely too busy or, more likely, too ill to make the trip on her own.
His favorites had been the whores -- not the high-class ones in the brothels (where he never could have hoped to have snuck into anyway), but the ones who plied their trade on the streets. He'd watched several times as they'd pleasured their customers in the alleyways behind buildings or the doorways of shops closed up for the night. It had never more than incidentally aroused him; that wasn't the point of his voyeurism. He'd been more interested in the dances they performed, as artful and well-practiced as the ones his father had taught him. If he'd been secure enough in his hiding spot, he'd become their little shadow, moving along with them. He would splay his fingers the way they did when they put their hand on a man's chest, curve his wrist the way they did when they slid their hand down the front of his trousers. He would try to make the smile they wore when their clients gasped in pleasure, though that could only ever be an approximation, as he brought no mirror with him, and hid in places too dark to see even if he had. He'd learned the dances of passion without ever touching another body.
He didn't do that anymore. He was too old for that now, and too famous besides.
Now he went to brothels as himself, out of the shadows and under his own name, and if anyone had a problem with that, they knew better than to tell him to his face. He liked spending time in the company of other performers, making music for audiences only large enough to gather around a single small table. They liked him, Er Yuehong could tell. They let their masks slip ever so slightly around him, and he did them the courtesy of allowing them the same. They were in the same business, after all. They both knew how to pretend to be the women men wanted.
~*~
Er Yuehong was startled to open the door to his dressing room and find Zhang Qishan there, sitting in Er Yuehong's makeup chair. He was out of uniform, dressed only in a simple suit and pair of trousers, though that did nothing to remove his commanding air. "Now this is a change, that I've made it here before you," said Zhang Qishan with a smirk.
"How industrious of you," said Er Yuehong, shrugging off his coat. The first frosty winds had come early this year, but Er Yuehong didn't mind. He liked layers, and, as his chosen name would suggest, he liked winter.
Zhang Qishan rubbed between his fingers a jeweled brooch that had fallen off one of the other performers' costumes a few nights ago; Er Yuehong hadn't yet had a spare moment to sew it back on. The jewels weren't real, of course, just molded glass over colored metal. Yet another trick of the theatre. "I dropped by your house lat night, but your servants said you were out."
"Ah." They hadn't told Er Yuehong that he'd had a visitor. Then again, he'd arrived home rather late and gone straight to his workshop instead of to bed, then straight to the theatre just after breakfast, so perhaps he hadn't given them the opportunity. "I was at the brothel."
Zhang Qishan's eyebrows arched visibly. "I didn't take you for the type," he said.
Er Yuehong was long-practiced at the art of rolling his eyes so his exasperation could be seen from the back row. There was no way Zhang Qishan missed that one. "They're cultured women. We make music together. It's very civilized. You should try it sometime. Civility, I mean."
"Please, I'm a simple country boy," said Zhang Qishan, who was not. "I'll go with you next time, though."
Now it was Er Yuehong's turn to have his eyebrows creep up into his hairline. He would have said that he didn't take Zhang Qishan for the type, except there was no reason to assume otherwise. Most men were that type, the type that enjoyed the company of pretty women who made even prettier diversions. And Zhang Qishan was handsome -- more than handsome, distractingly handsome, ridiculously handsome, handsome in a way that Er Yuehong might not even believe was real had he not found it placed before his own eyes. What clutch of perfumed, seductive ladies wouldn't love to get their hands on him?
He must be special, one of them had said, which had been Er Yuehong's cue to stop talking, because if she was saying things like that, he'd already said beyond too much. Not that they'd tell, of course, or even judge. They understood tastes and types. They spoke many languages of desire.
Still, there was something too uncomfortable about being seen, even by friendly eyes. "All right," said Er Yuehong, who was a glutton for punishment. "We'll go." Of course he'd bring Zhang Qishan with him into a den of lovely creatures who had no qualms about throwing themselves on him for his attention. As a child, he'd trained by standing for hours in a single position, holding himself rigid until discomfort bloomed into full agony, then receded again into the dull roar that was the closest distillation he'd ever experienced of the nigh-unbearable nature of his own existence. He could endure anything.
"And then the seashore after, for dinner?" Zhang Qishan gave him a little wink. "Alas, though, times being what they are, we may have to make do with the river instead."
Er Yuehong ran his hands back across his short hair, drawing it away from his face. "You shouldn't--" He exhaled and looked away, busying himself with one of the million tidying tasks always needing to be done. "Don't listen to me. Sometimes I just say things." That was almost completely untrue. Er Yuehong was very good at keeping his mouth shut. He had an entire circus of thoughts happening inside his head at all times, and maybe one word in ten thousand managed to find its way out.
At least, that was how it had always been before. Zhang Qishan made him say the strangest things. He must have mastered some ancient Zhang alchemy, some very strong magic indeed that loosened tongues and made other people say things they shouldn't say but absolutely meant. Things such as how much Er Yuehong's heart ached to think of Zhang Qishan at the seaside, his hair blown back by the salt breeze, the sun on his strong features. It was ridiculous. Why the seashore? Er Yuehong didn't even particularly care for swimming. He was having ridiculous thoughts again. He was certain they were all Zhang Qishan's fault.
"I like when you say things," said Zhang Qishan, like that was a thing that anyone said at all, much less friends among themselves. A wife might have said something like that to her husband, or she might have simply thought it, or she might have had no choice but to endure the strangeness without complaint. Ya Tou had made him aware of the gradations of such an existence. "And I like the sea."
Of course he liked the sea. Two vast, wild things, they surely had a lot in common. "And have you yet found the magical creature who can ferry us there?" asked Er Yuehong with a wry little laugh. "Do the Zhangs perhaps keep a dragon somewhere in their employ, ready to provide transportation? Faster than a train, less costly than an airplane, the only concern being its curious appetite?"
"Not a dragon," was all Zhang Qishan said to that. Spinning the ersatz gems in his fingers, he stood from Er Yuehong's chair. "I won't be here tonight. Or likely the next. Duty calls."
Er Yuehong wasn't surprised. He'd already heard some talk about military movements, the arrival of a general or some other equally decorated officer, spoken on the ripples of gossip that ran through Changsha like rivers themselves. Of course Zhang Qishan had more important places to be. He was an important man in several different worlds, all of which were more worthy of his presence than was a table in an opera house. "Did you come here just to tell me that?" asked Er Yuehong, readying himself to hear whatever real issue of concern had brought the Great Master Buddha, as he had of late become popularly known, into his humble domain at such an hour of the morning.
Zhang Qishan only nodded. "Yes."
"Oh." Er Yuehong suddenly felt caught flat-footed. He realized he hadn't removed his scarf when he'd walked in the door, and he set about fussing with getting that hung up along with his coat. It was a good distraction. He had so many things to do. He was a busy man. Busy men didn't have time for butterflies in their busy stomachs. "Well, I shall endeavor to go on despite the absence of a notorious opera-hater."
"That's the spirit." Zhang Qishan placed the brooch atop a table with a quiet click of glass and metal on wood. Incompatible elements. Probably some disastrous feng shui to the whole business. As though this place needed any more. "I'll make it up to you."
"There's no need to."
"I will," Zhang Qishan insisted, and Er Yuehong didn't know whether he was more afraid that promise was a lie, or that it was the truth.
~*~
He'd never explained Ya Tou to Zhang Qishan. He'd never explained her to anyone, really, save announcing to all concerned parties that she was his wife now, and that she should be treated accordingly. To their credit, they had.
She was already asleep when he got home that evening, so he took his tea and book into her room so he could sit beside her bed and enjoy them there. In a way, it was a test of his own skills of stealth, that he could do so without disturbing her rest. She would never mind even when he did wake her, but that was beside the point of the exercise.
It was difficult for him, sometimes -- more than sometimes -- to be a husband. He actually did quite well at it, or so he'd gathered from the stray comments that met his ears. Ya Tou was the envy of all the women of the town. He didn't know how to feel about being the reason why.
Still, he hadn't been prepared for having a wife to be so much like having a pet. It would have felt worse to think in those terms if she didn't seem less like a pet than many of the other wives he'd met, his own mother included. They were kept things, like birds in cages, ready to fly away at a moment's notice. The difference was that Ya Tou's cage door was open. She chose to stay. At least, he chose to believe she chose to stay. The alternative to that certainty ate at him from the inside out.
She would have let him get away with anything. He could have walked in and screamed down Hell itself at her, and she would have roused herself politely and asked if he'd wanted her to make him something to eat. He never would have done such a horrible thing -- but what about the little abuses he subjected her to? He hated that he couldn't know her mind. He hated that he barely knew his own. Did she resent when he spent his nights out with others, only to cover her distaste with an impenetrable smile? Or did it make her genuinely happy to know that he was out enjoying himself even in her absence? Did she grind her teeth every time she looked over to find him gone? Did she have to force the good cheer with which she endured all his eccentricities? Would she have been just as happy if he tripped and broke his neck and left her in the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, only without a husband-shaped burden to accompany it?
No, he needed to stop thinking like that. That wasn't fair. Just because he was a liar didn't mean everyone else was.
He wanted to believe she'd understand, someday, perhaps when he understood his own mind and heart enough himself to say it all to her, if she even didn't already. So instead he drew the blankets up around her and kissed her hair. She smelled like jasmine and cool spring mornings.
~*~
Gritting his teeth, Zhang Qishan leaned hard against the back of the chair, bracing himself with his left arm. His right was drawn to his chest, fist clenched as Er Yuehong peeled back his clothes, separating bloodied fabric from skin. There it was, across his shoulder, the bright bloody line of a bullet graze. "Be still," Er Yuehong said in his most authoritative tone.
Zhang Qishan was appropriately still. He winced as his injury was uncovered, though when that step was done, he relaxed somewhat. Er Yuehong didn't ask what had precipitated the injury. He frankly didn't want to know. He wasn't so naive as to believe that things as complex as geopolitical conflicts would disappear if he just ignored them, but until such time as he had something to contribute to either determining the solution or increasing the problem's complexity, he preferred to keep his distance.
He poured hot water into a basin and dipped a cloth in it, then pressed the cloth to the wound. Zhang Qishan exhaled heavily. He'd been lucky that Er Yuehong had still been at the theatre so late, having candles still burning and doors still unlocked for someone to slip their way inside. Not, of course, that Zhang Qishan would have let something so insignificant as a locked door stop him -- but then who would have been there to greet him and tend to him? How would he have heated the water or found supplies on his own? Whatever would he do on the day his luck finally ran out?
Er Yuehong took away the washcloth and felt his heart all but stop. The blood wasn't much, but as he wiped it away, he found the injury left something much worse -- a black stain, deep and spreading through Zhang Qishan's skin like ink dripped into water. "There's something wrong," said Er Yuehong, scrubbing at Zhang Qishan's flesh despite the wound nearby. Whatever the inky mark was, it wasn't coming up onto the cloth. "It's beneath your skin, it's--"
Zhang Qishan just laughed at that, startling Er Yuehong's concern into silence. "No, that's..." He exhaled through pursed lips. "That's been there for a while."
Confused but somewhat less panicky for Zhang Qishan's reaction to the situation, Er Yuehong looked again at Zhang Qishan's shoulder. There was still blackness against the skin, but it wasn't spreading out along veins or any other natural pathways through a body. It was instead pattered like ... like scales, in fact. Like paintings Er Yuehong had seen brought over from Japan of fierce men with backs decorated with intricate designs, their bodies become pieces of living artwork. He supposed he'd thought those as unrealistic as similar depictions of gods and monsters -- an interesting idea, but not something for the real world.
His fingers traced the curves of Zhang Qishan's shoulder, following the dark line of the beast. "How?" was the only question Er Yuehong could think to offer.
"You mean how's it work, or how's it there?"
One question at a time, then. "How does it work?"
Zhang Qishan could only shrug a little, given his state. "A particular ink. I don't know the formula. It becomes visible above body temperature." He nodded to the bloodied cloth in Er Yuehong's hand, which was still steaming slightly from the heat of the water from the basin.
"Then how's it there?" asked Er Yuehong.
"Zhang family tradition," was the explanation Zhang Qishan offered to that question. And of course it was. They all had so many proprietary tricks, such that each family became a tomb of its own, burying not corpses but secrets, and not in caverns but in the hearts of their descendents. They counted on one another enough not to pry.
Er Yuehong wanted to pry. He wanted to get his fingers underneath the fabric of Zhang Qishan's torn shirt and rip it further, tearing it away until he could see where all the lines on Zhang Qishan's body went. His pulse thudded in his ears, loud as the drums that accompanied his dances, only this wasn't a performance. There was no audience. There were only the two of them, and all of their secrets besides.
As a member of the proud and aristocratic Hong family, Er Yuehong had been raised to do nothing that was not the result of careful consideration and sober thought. It was, then, as much of a shock to him as anyone that he found himself leaning forward and putting his open mouth to Zhang Qishan's shoulder, letting the warmth of his tongue reveal the dark markings hiding there. It was a vulgar gesture, utterly unbecoming someone of his status. He didn't care. All he knew was that his entire world might shatter right then and there if he couldn't find out in that moment what Zhang Qishan's skin tasted like.
Like salt, of course, the salt of sweat and exertion, and perhaps the slightest dusting of silt that lingered in hollows below the earth. Something metallic -- bronze, perhaps? Did that come to Zhang Qishan from the air, or was it in his blood? What other secrets hid beneath his skin? Er Yuehong wanted to bite down and tear him apart to find them.
There was a soft groan at that, one that Er Yuehong was startled to find did not come from his own throat. A hand carded through Er Yuehong's short hair, first holding him in place, then pulling him back -- but barely long enough to catch his breath before the skin beneath his mouth was replaced with Zhang Qishan's mouth, and Zhang Qishan was kissing him hard, with tongue and teeth and want.
Two warring impulses took to battle inside of Er Yuehong in that moment. The first told him to melt into Zhang Qishan's arms, to become pliant, to let Zhang Qishan sweep him away like a flood from a burst dam, drowning everything in him. The second called him to fight, to grab, to bite, to do whatever he needed to satisfy his own need for the man before him. Er Yuehong settled on the middle ground of grabbing Zhang Qishan's shirt and pulling their bodies close, letting Zhang Qishan take the lead while also letting him know that if he chose to stop, there would be consequences.
Zhang Qishan didn't stop. His left hand in Er Yuehong's hair tightened, while his right, more cautious for his wound, found its way around the small of Er Yuehong's back, grabbing Er Yuehong's body to him as though he were as ephemeral and delicate as the characters he played on the stage. Er Yuehong made a noise at that, one he'd never known he'd been capable of making. Zhang Qishan swallowed the sound with his own mouth and kissed harder for it.
So this was hunger. Er Yuehong had thought himself above such a base instinct -- at worst, the occasional victim of a wild impulse that could be tamped down. He hadn't realized he'd been starving until he'd had his mouth on Zhang Qishan. That Zhang Qishan might feel the same thing, that he might want Er Yuehong so much it overrode his own ironclad systems of self-control, that seemed impossible. And yet here they were, tangled in each other's arms with active want. Neither of them was tolerating anything.
"Commander Zhang!" was all the warning they had, but it was enough. In the split-second before the door opened, their bodies separated like magnets that had suddenly flipped polarity. Zhang Qishan grabbed for his shoulder while Er Yuehong sank to the floor to pick up the washcloth he'd dropped. Perfectly innocent, nothing for Lieutenant Zhang to see as he bustled into the dressing room, concern written all over his face. "Commander Zhang, there you are!"
At least the flush to Zhang Qishan's cheeks was congruent with the pain after an injury. "Lieutenant," Zhang Qishan greeted hm, and if his voice were heavy with hard breath, so what? He was wounded. Wounded men sounded like that.
"Some soldiers said they'd seen you slip in -- oh, Er Ye!" It was as though the lieutenant has been so focused on finding his commanding officer that he'd managed to overlook Er Yuehong completely, seeing him only as one of the many pretty objects in the room until he stood fully upright. "Thank goodness you were here."
Yes, thank goodness. "Just patching what I can," Er Yuehong said, which seemed like a casual thing that might be said by someone who wasn't running his tongue along the inside of his lower lip, trying to savor as much of the taste of Zhang Qishan's mouth as was still lingering there.
"Let's get you to the infirmary," said Lieutenant Zhang, getting up under Zhang Qishan's left side. He didn't seem to so much as blink to see the black markings across Zhang Qishan's exposed skin. A Zhang family tradition, indeed.
Zhang Qishan grumbled, but he didn't make much protest. He didn't say much of anything, in fact. He kept his dark eyes downcast as he allowed himself to be half-carried out of the dressing room and toward a more standard medical facility, which was in fact the proper place to get bandaged up, not with the makeshift supplies in a half-lit dressing room where there were all kinds of unforeseen dangers, like hands and mouths and bodies. It would be safer for him there.
Just as they were walking out the door together, though, Zhang Qishan looked back -- but Er Yuehong felt a stab of panic overtake him and looked away before he could read the expression on Zhang Qishan's face. He didn't want it to be regret. He might die if it were regret.
~*~
He'd never wanted to be a father. He'd barely bothered to feign disappointment when one of the many doctors come to give their expert opinions on Ya Tou's condition had declared that by no means was this woman ever to get pregnant, as there could be no outcome from that for either her or a child but disaster. Ya Tou herself had seemed only obliquely bothered by both this declaration and the doctor's subsequent insistence that they should never do anything that could even tempt pregnancy, if they knew what he meant. They did.
And at any rate, base reproduction was far from the only way to secure one's legacy. There were many youth out there: smart, capable, hardworking. He had brought up several through the theatre, a few of whom had held enough promise to take their skills to locations and stages far more cosmopolitan than Changsha. He'd not only let them go, he'd sent them on with his blessings. He was not an irrational hoarder, be it of antiques or of people. He was not proprietary. He did not have to be the sole owner of anything. He was a generous, understanding person. He could share.
On his walk home that evening, he got as close to the Zhang Manor as he could without attracting anyone's attention, which still put him a few streets away, just beyond the reach of military checkpoints and the watchful eyes of eager young soldiers. He could have gotten closer, of course -- there were precious few places in Changsha where Er Yuehong could not simply walk in through the front gates. They might even have encouraged him in, if they'd seen him, sending word all the way ahead of him to let their commanding officer know his dear friend was here to visit. They would have thought it a great politeness.
No, it was best to stay quiet. Best not to be a bother. Don't be a burden. He'd already spend too much of his life being a burden. He was being a burden at this very moment, standing alone in the street, daring to exist in the same air. He was a weight around the ankle of everyone who got close to him, and the water below was cold and dark.
Not a father, then, but a teacher. He could be a teacher. The shackles of a teacher were lighter than the shackles of a father. All things dissolved more easily than blood.
~*~
The bustle of rehearsal meant a flood of cast and crew in and out of the backstage areas, which meant that Zhang Qishan might have been standing there for several minutes before Er Yuehong noticed him. He was leaning against a stack of trunks, unobtrusive in his civilian clothing, his arms folded across his chest in a pose that might have been wholly casual, except that his right one was being supported by a simple sling. He looked as though he could have remained that way for hours, a piece of the scenery, perfectly content to watch the brightly colored theatrical world spin before him without his input.
Alas for Er Yuehong that he was caught the moment he looked at Zhang Qishan. Their eyes met, and Zhang Qishan's pleasant little smile hooked up into that horrible, handsome grin of his. He didn't move, though. Well, fine; as the host of the establishment, it should by all rights be Er Yuehong's job to come to him.
Such was easier said than done. Er Yuehong forced himself to rise casually from the seat where he'd been applying his makeup, testing a series of new powders to see how he liked their look against his fair skin. So far, he was impressed. "Commander Zhang," Er Yuehong greeted him, mindful of how many people were moving around them. Not a single one of them had bothered to call to Er Yuehong's attention that they had a visitor. Zhang Qishan really had become part of the Changsha architecture. Like the Buddha in his front courtyard, he might have always have been there.
Zhang Qishan's smile warmed further as Er Yuehong moved closer. He didn't stir from his position, though, leaving a polite distance between the two of them. Enough of a gap for two friends to respect as they conversed in public. Not close enough to touch, even if they'd wanted to.
And Er Yuehong did want to. He wanted to, to the point of distraction. It seemed like every spare thought he'd had in the days since their shared moment had been about kissing Zhang Qishan. The memory had invaded even the thoughts he hadn't had to spare. He wondered if anyone else had noticed. They certainly hadn't called him on it. That was a terrible thing in its own way, having acquaintances and subordinates so polite that they never would have mentioned even if the whole troupe had known about their leader's terrible, all-consuming infatuation with a man he absolutely could not have, except for the terrible knowledge that maybe he could.
"Er Ye," said Zhang Qishan. There was a dreamy edge to the sounds, a breathy warmth. His tongue made those sounds. Er Yuehong already knew more about that tongue now than he should. He wanted to know even more than that.
"How are you feeling?" Er Yuehong cleared his throat. Why was he anxious? He had no need to be anxious. They were talking like friends, because they were friends, which meant that Zhang Qishan had apparently forgiven him for the indiscretion of the other night. Er Yuehong didn't know if he should be forgiven for such a thing. He didn't know if he wanted to be. "Are you mended?"
Zhang Qishan shrugged, the casual dismissal of a hero who could not stand to be pitied about his own condition. "On the mend, at least."
Er Yuehong felt his gaze dragged to the floor. The real test of quality for the white powder on his cheeks would be that it would keep any hint of blush from showing through. "My apologies," he said, hoping that would suffice to cover all his indiscretions and then some, while promising that he would not transgress again. He could keep his hands and his mouth to himself. He could behave. He was very well-behaved. Just ask anyone. Except, perhaps, his father, and he wasn't around to be asked anymore. There, the perfect crime.
"For what?" asked Zhang Qishan, and when Er Yuehong glared up at him to see if he was joking, he clearly was not. His face was open and honest, his expression warm. It was terrible.
He'd never been asked to articulate his shame like this before. It had always been an unspoken presence, said without needing to be said, and that even only when it had been a thought risen to draw anyone's attention. The reality of it hung like a stone in his chest. "For..." Er Yuehong drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He had impressive lung capacity. It took a minute.
Zhang Qishan stood upright from his leaning posture and took a step toward him -- and reached for him, and reached for his arm, right there in the middle of the busy dressing room and everyone. He put his hand on Er Yuehong's forearm, right where his sleeve cuffed, so that most of his hand came to rest on the fine fabric of the costume, but his thumb landed square on Er Yuehong's bare skin. His touch was warm, so warm that Er Yuehong couldn't stop thinking of the dark ink beneath his clothes, of how heat made it bloom like night flowers. "If you tell me you didn't want that," Zhang Qishan said, tone as casual as could be, but each word soft enough that no one's ears but theirs heard them, "then I'll be the one to make the apologies. But I think you did."
"Don't apologize." Er Yuehong's own voice was barely breath rattling from his overheated chest. "I did."
"So did I." Zhang Qishan's thumb moved slowly across Er Yuehong's skin, its tiny motions teasing at the delicate hairs there. "So where shall we go for dinner?"
Er Yuehong couldn't help it; he laughed, and in that laugh he felt the knotted tension in his body shatter, as though he were a figurine once encased in glass, finally feeling freedom from constraints he hadn't even been able to see. "It is mid-afternoon, and I still have a rehearsal to conduct," Er Yuehong chided him in the manner of a man who hadn't just been presented with an offer that was the most tempting thing in the world.
Zhang Qishan shrugged. "I can wait."
"You..." Er Yuehong exhaled through his pursed, painted lips. "You shouldn't feel obligated," he said, the protest coming almost as a reflex. Sometimes he worried that everyone in his life might feel obligated to him -- his wife, his troupe, his household servants, his entire family line, and now even his ... well, whatever Zhang Qishan was to him. He didn't know if there were words for it, ones that existed when they couldn't be whispered between lips pressed tight together. Their entire relationship might be a fable for the stage, a charming fiction. He might blink, and it would collapse with nothing underneath.
"Obligated?" Zhang Qishan rolled the word off his tongue as though he'd never heard it before. He looked Er Yuehong in the eye without fear or hesitation, and with not a hint of regret anywhere in his warm smile. "Er Ye, have you ever seen anyone make me do anything I didn't want to do?"
As long as they both would live, Er Yuehong would not.
~*~
Sometimes when he performed, he felt as though he were underwater, all movements slowed by some great invisible resistance. Every step had to be planned, every sweep of an arm a deliberate act. Everything took effort. He sometimes wondered if he might topple over backward and sink toward the stage instead of crash into it. For just a moment, perhaps, gravity might be kind.
He didn't say things like this out loud. He didn't say a tenth of the things he thought out loud, because they were absurd and would make him sound like even more of a flighty, spoiled dreamer than he already appeared to be. Perhaps that was the reason he felt so insubstantial -- he was made up of so many thoughts, surely they crowded out his body. How could there be any room for flesh underneath? Bodies were stupid, fickle things. They wanted what they shouldn't have. They demanded what they didn't deserve. They kept the memory of things that shouldn't have been. And then, in the end, they failed anyway. Terrible.
There were a hundred pairs of eyes in the theatre that night, a thousand, ten thousand. Looking out from the stage, Er Yuehong saw only one.
~*~
The cloth that brushed across his closed eyelids was gentle -- too gentle, almost. When he removed his own makeup, he would press and scrub as needed, knowing the tolerances of his own face. But he wasn't the one holding the cloth, and as such, he was patient.
He could hear the sound of Zhang Qishan's breathing. It wasn't harsh or troubled; it was just close. It was close because Zhang Qishan was close, standing before him as he slowly, carefully coaxing the layers of paint from Er Yuehong's face. There was no one else in the theatre at this hour. "I thought you might like me better as a woman," Er Yuehong said without really thinking better of it, feeling the cloth in Zhang Qishan's hand brush against his mouth as he spoke.
Zhang Qishan chuckled a little at that. "I like what you are." Even with his eyes closed, Er Yuehong could hear the slightest smirk in Zhang Qishan's voice. He was always smiling, it seemed. Or perhaps that was only when Er Yuehong was around.
"You like women," Er Yuehong pointed out.
"I like women," Zhang Qishan agreed, drawing the cloth across Er Yuehong's lower lip. "And I like you."
"I like men," Er Yuehong said. It was the first time he'd ever said it aloud, and here it was, tumbling out of him like a fan fallen from a careless performer's hand, sent crashing to the ground below. He all but flinched, bracing himself for the heavens to open at the sound of his confession and the lightning of the gods or an equivalent force to strike him from on high, or some other punishment his father would surely have felt appropriate. Nothing came. The world was quiet. He could hear his own heartbeat.
"I know." Another pass across Er Yuehong's lips. Sometimes paint could be stubborn. "I'm glad."
Er Yuehong couldn't help the slight frown that furrowed his brow. No one was glad about that. "Why?"
"Why?" echoed Zhang Qishan, as though the question were absurd. Perhaps it was. "Because it means I get to kiss you."
And that was precisely what he did, the romantic bastard. He tucked his fingers just under the point of Er Yuehong's chin and lifted his face up, so that Er Yuehong opened his eyes and found himself staring into Zhang Qishan's, which were as dark as the patterns on his skin. The two of them weren't far apart in height, but it was enough that the gulf seemed enormous at this distance. Zhang Qishan held Er Yuehong there for a moment, then leaned in and pressed their mouths together.
It was not the kiss they'd shared on the night Zhang Qishan had arrived wounded, the needy encounter of teeth and injured skin. Zhang Qishan kissed him as tenderly as he'd wiped the makeup from Er Yuehong's face, again almost too tender for what Er Yuehong wanted. Certainly too tender relative to what he was capable of.
Zhang Qishan was the beast. Er Yuehong didn't know how he knew it, but he knew it. There was strange and wild magic running through his veins, like the ink of his curious tattoo, just waiting for the circumstances in which it could be seen. The Hong Family had passed down through its generations a wealth of stories about its members' dealings with legendary creatures, all of which seemed to wind down to the same conclusion: don't. Some prices were too high. Some hungers could never be satisfied.
Well, to hell with their wisdom. Er Yuehong had never learned a single lesson any way but the hard way.
One of Zhang Qishan's hands came up to the high collar of Er Yuehong's shirt, unfastening the first of the buttons there. All his outer costume layers had been shed earlier and hung up appropriately, leaving him in only his lightest inner garments. They were fully decent, of course, and if he'd had to run right then into a public street wearing nothing else, he would not have been in any way scandalously attired. Still, after performing center stage with practically his own body weight again in costumery on his frame, this felt almost as good as bare. He shivered as the backs of Zhang Qishan's knuckles brushed down his bare throat, down to where the next button held the sides of the fabric together. That one, too, fell open beneath Zhang Qishan's nimble fingers.
"Careful," Er Yuehong warned, and when Zhang Qishan's body stilled with curiosity about the remark, Er Yuehong sighed against his lips. Well, he'd opened his mouth; there was nothing left but to own up to whatever curiosities might slip out. "You may find under there I'm nothing more than a trick of the light."
Zhang Qishan kissed him hard then, grabbing at the sides of Er Yuehong's face with both his strong hands. Surely all the paint hadn't been removed yet; surely Zhang Qishan's hands were smearing its remnants across his skin, blending them both into one another. Er Yuehong threw his arms around Zhang Qishan's neck, holding on tight as Zhang Qishan stepped them backward together until Er Yuehong's back was up against the solid wood door of the tall costume closets. The sudden pressure was startling, and even more so for how Zhang Qishan got his knee between Er Yuehong's thighs, pressing there in a way that made Er Yuehong gasp and clutch at the fabric of Zhang Qishan's shirt.
Breaking from the kiss, Zhang Qishan turned Er Yuehong's head to the side and bit at his ear. "You feel solid to me," Zhang Qishan whispered, punctuating his sentence with teeth. "And anyway, Er Ye, aren't you more worried about what's under my skin?"
Worried wasn't the word for it. "Show me," Er Yuehong whispered, leaning his head back and exposing his throat.