Chapter Text
Jiang Cheng’s memories of Lotus Pier are as extensive as the tomes that still line her father’s study. They are keen and blinding, sun-bright and knife-sharp. They have to be, when she’s the only living person left to carry them. They have to be, or she’s failed them all.
Many evenings, when the work of the sect is done, she’s shut herself in her office and worked deep into the night transcribing, furiously pulling details from the deep crevices of her mind and scribbling them onto paper: what trees and shrubs were planted that were since burned down, what she knew of her father’s daily routine, what they wore, what they ate, what they studied, the way zidian glinted keenly on her mother’s wrist.
Her memories are knife-sharp, and just as quick to cut. On these evenings, she gives these wispy things form, gives them weight, and in thanks they slice her, stinging. She knows what it is to die by a thousand cuts.
She does not know for whom she writes them. Future generations need to carry them, of course. But there’s a greedy cave inside of Jiang Cheng’s chest, close to her heart, where she wishes she could lock them all away. She trusts and values her subordinates, but that doesn’t mean she wants to pry open her ribcage and let them gawk.
Still, it is her duty, because it has to be someone’s duty.
This memory, though, she does not transcribe: she was six years old, sitting on the dock with A’Jie and splashing her toes in the water. A’Jie was tall enough to submerge her feet up to her ankles, and Jiang Cheng was jealous. They were eating slices of ripe melon, the syrupy juices dribbling down their fingers.
“Can I be a girl?” Jiang Cheng asked.
A’Jie, without missing a beat, asked her, “Do you want to be?”
“Yes!” she said, and the intensity of it surprised her. She hadn’t even realized that was the answer.
A’Jie wrapped an arm around her, a sticky hand on her bare shoulder. “I’ll call you meimei, then,” she said. “How’s that?”
Jiang Cheng leaned into her in response, and something in the world was lighter, and she kicked her feet.
She was meimei after that, at least in secret. As much as she wanted to crawl into her mother’s lap and tell her everything, she knew even then how important it was that the sect have a male heir. She knew that A’Jie’s future was to get married and hers was to lead, and what a disgrace it would be if her family produced no leader at all.
(Later, after he arrived, A’Die’s golden boy, her mother would shout things at her father like “Look at your son! Look at your heir!” Jiang Cheng was glad she could still be those things in his eyes. Without them, she wasn’t sure what was left.)
She still trained with her shige and shidi, and it made her feel adventurous, like a spy deep undercover. She was, in a way, guarding a secret vital for the future of her sect, and that blurred the line so much that she wasn’t always sure she was pretending. But it was fun, and it helped her keep her head above water until the end of the day.
And then she would retreat to A’Jie’s room, where she would be called “girl” and “sister” and “lady”, and she would feel her disguise sloughing off of her like snakeskin.
Sometimes, A’Jie would comb her hair and put it up like a lady’s, and paint pretty red lips on her face, and dress her up in her own old robes. Then she would marvel and say, “Look at my meimei! Look how beautiful she is!” And Jiang Cheng would believe her.
He knew, too, of course. Wei Wuxian knew. He knew from that first night, when they were enemies and then friends and then siblings, huddled together in the kitchen. A’Jie was spooning more soup into their bowls, and Jiang Cheng felt brave, and she looked at Wei Wuxian and said, “I’m a girl, by the way.”
He frowned, puzzled. “You don’t look like a girl.”
“Well, I am!” she said, feeling her armor go up, spikes around all of her soft parts, before A’Jie put a hand on each of their shoulders. Gently, she looked at Wei Wuxian and explained, “That’s because A’Cheng is so good at keeping secrets. She has to look like a boy because nobody else knows she’s a girl, not even our parents.”
“Oh,” he said. He still looked puzzled, but he seemed to accept it. He looked at her, smiling. “Can I call you shimei, then?”
“Only when no one else is around,” Jiang Cheng said.
“Okay, shimei,” he said with a conspiratorial grin. “Got it.”
She still wasn’t sure he knew what any of it meant, not right away. There were a few awkward moments when they were washing and dressing after training, when Wei Wuxian would sneak furtive glances at her naked body like he kept expecting to see something different. She could see the gears turning behind his eyes, like he was trying to solve a riddle. She would glare, and he would look away quickly. He never said anything to her directly, at least, not after that first time.
She’s not sure when, exactly, he figured it all out, but he did. Of course he did; he was the smartest person Jiang Cheng ever knew, even when he was a child.
(He used to play strategy games against her father and win. And her father couldn’t have just been letting him win; he never let her win anything.)
At any rate, Wei Wuxian always called her shimei when they were alone in A’Jie’s room, playing dress-up. Sometimes, he would ask to be dressed up too.
“I’m still a boy, though,” he would insist. “I just want to be a boy who looks pretty like A’Cheng looks pretty. Boys can be pretty, too, right, shijie?”
“Of course they can,” she said, and she would rub little red roses on his cheeks, and he would grin that big, toothy grin that split his face wide open.
(Jiang Cheng would have nightmares about that grin, turned bloody, turned screaming. About bloated fingers tearing his jaw off his face while he laughed and laughed.)
Outside of A’Jie’s room, they never talked about it. Even when they were alone in their beds, Wei Wuxian never called her shimei, only Jiang Cheng. She wondered if he still saw her as a girl outside of the sacred space of their sister’s room. Somehow she was certain that her sister still saw her as a girl at meals, in the water, on the training grounds, in all the places where she couldn’t say so. Somehow she wasn’t so sure about her brother.
She never brought it up, though. Most of the time, though, she was happy just to be with them. She loved how Wei Wuxian was always so open with his affection: throwing his arm over her shoulder, wrestling, shoving, crashing into her for a dynamic wave of a hug, like swift boats pulling into the dock when their captains were too stupid and brash to slow them down. She craved that touch when they were apart, craved the warm, grounding weight of him.
But she never saw him be so freely physical with any of the other girls. Only with other boys. Other boys and her.
It would all be easier, she thought, when she was older. Once she got a little older, and a little braver, she would be able to tell her parents. She thought that maybe they would be willing to call her their daughter in private, and help her keep this secret from the rest of the world. Or maybe, maybe they would help her tell the rest of the sect. And telling the wrong person in the sect, as she learned from her mother very early on, was telling the whole world. So why not? Why not go ahead and tell the whole world that she was a girl, and a cultivator, and—
And a sect leader? No, she wouldn’t be a sect leader as a second daughter. Not the eldest, not a boy, not the strongest or the smartest or the kindest, not the best cultivator—she wouldn’t be worth much of anything.
She was eleven when she made the firm decision to never tell her parents. She carried three plates into A’Jie’s room and shattered them against the wall.
A’Jie wasn’t there, but Wei Wuxian came running, his bare feet slapping against the wood.
(He did this constantly, always ending up with splinters in his feet, and A’Niang refused to let anybody pull them out, hoping one of these times he might learn his lesson. A’Jie pulled them out behind closed doors, with tweezers and a bowl of warm water, and she told him he was being very brave, but running on the wood while barefoot was being very silly.
Twenty-five years later, he still runs at full speed down the walkways, barefoot, like he’s a child and Lotus Pier is still his playground. Every time she invites him, she swears it’s going to be the last.)
He found her crying, hot angry tears, and her face burned with humiliation that she couldn’t hide them.
“Shimei, what’s wrong?” he asked, in a gentle, gentle voice that suggested that whatever was wrong, he would fix it. Her brother would fix anything in the world for her.
“I can’t—“ she gasped. “I can’t, I can’t—“
“You can’t what?”
She took a breath, and he waited. She tried to tell him everything, or some of it, or any of it.
“It’s unusual for a woman to be sect leader,” she said, keeping her gaze fixed on the shards of pottery on the floor. “It would call my power into question, and it could hurt the sect. I could only tell people once I’m already a strong sect leader, which means my parents will have to be—”
More tears, and a warm, heavy arm around her shoulder. “You don’t think they could keep it a secret?” he asked. If you told them now?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I think they might not let me be sect leader, and they might make A’Jie do it, and she wouldn’t be able to marry Jin Zixuan and that would be my fault, and— and people would question her power too, and they’d gossip about the sect and about her and about her cultivation! They would be cruel to her and it would be my fault! Or—or what if A’Die tries to make you heir, and then A’Niang would hate me, she would hate me so much!”
Wei Wuxian knew what kind of talk she’d heard from her parents, because he had heard it too. He was there when her mother told her father, “This sect will collapse without a man to head it, and you’re raising a boy.” He was there, too, when her mother said to A’Jie, after she got winded running sword forms, “It’s a good thing you’re not a boy or we’d have to put you in charge of this place.” He objected, and earned a slap in the face that glowed red for hours.
Jiang Cheng wonders, in hindsight, whether her fears were justified. Her mother was harsh, but she was shrewd, and she would keep a secret in order to keep a strong sect leader. Her father played favorites, but he was not so unwise as to pass over a legitimate heir. But Jiang Cheng was eleven, and her brother was, too, and those fears were very real and so, so much bigger than them. Of course the worst would happen, if she let her parents have a glimpse of who she was.
She wonders, too, with a few decades’ distance, if these were all just excuses to mask her real fear, no less tremendous: that her parents would see her and still refuse to call her daughter.
There was so little to say in the face of a prospect like that. Only trite little affirmations, which she clung to like pearls, like gold, like memories of the dead. So she cried while her brother held her, and he said the nicest things, like “I’m sorry you can’t tell your parents” and “You’re still you, no matter what people see” and “You’ll always be my shimei.”
(How many times, she wonders, did he make promises like that before he broke them all? How many did he even remember? Does he care that she’ll never be his shimei again?)
And so Jiang Cheng grew into a woman in secret. She kept hope in her heart that one day the whole sect would know: maybe not her parents, but all of her seniors who loved her, all of her juniors who respected her. She would tell the rest of the world too, when the time came; she imagined herself strolling through the market stalls and being greeted as Jiang-er-guniang, and her heart fluttered. But most of all, she wanted to share this secret with all of Yunmeng Jiang. She wanted to share it with all the people who were her own.
So she trained, and learned leadership from her father, and caught fish in the river with Wei Wuxian, and dreamed of the day she would tell them all who she was.
And then the war came, and there was no one left to tell.