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Shen Yuan didn’t have a will.
Shen Wanyan stood in the middle of the entrance of her brother’s apartment, stock still. She needed to take off her shoes and step in but all she wanted to do was turn around, sprinting and screaming until this nightmare passed.
It was so quiet, giving space for her chaotic thoughts to bang against the confines of her skull. She feels sick, bile burning against the back of her throat. If she strained her ears, she swore she could hear herself screaming on the phone from inside her brother’s room. She can’t remember who she had called first but the ambulance had arrived at the scene before anyone else.
Shen Yuan’s apartment needed to be cleaned out. Packed and stored away before being buried in some place where the light couldn’t touch. She had volunteered but she didn’t want to do it. She couldn’t do it.
000
Shang Yourou had three children; two strong sons and a delightful daughter. It had taken a hop, skip, jump and a leap of faith with a couple of unflattering falls but he made it. He had picked himself up and craved a space out of the world to lay a foundation. A family that he exemplified everything he had worked and fought for.
The unexpected phone call felt like a hammer against a window of a dearly laid glasshouse.
There was someone over the phone, a police officer from a southern district with a name that tugged at his memory, telling him something absolutely ridiculous. He was telling him that one of his sons was dead but that couldn’t be true. Both of his sons were sitting at the dinner table. The phone call had interrupted their weekly family dinner.
His teeth are set on edge and he can feel himself shaking from the irritation. What an uncouth prank, what malicious person would play something so vile against his family?
“Please do not call me or any of my family to make absurd claims again! I don’t have a dead son!”
He hung up, taking a moment to compose himself with deep breaths. He heard his wife’s soft footsteps coming up behind him.
“Is everything alright, honey? Who called you?”
He told her, happy to have someone to unload the burden of his annoyance with, but at the end of his short rant she didn’t react like he had expected. There was no irritation, but her mouth had dropped open and her eyes widened in horror. He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong with her but she beat him to the punch.
“Qinghua is dead?”
000
Before Shen Yuan’s death, Shen Mingjun’s debates had been confined to his office space and boardroom meetings. With matters of the home, he was more than content to let his mother and sister come and go as they pleased. They paid attention to the tiny details that always went over his head, they would know how to do what needed to be done.
However, as head of the family he had the final say on anything concerning his brother being laid to rest. Visiting the family home these days felt like being pushed into a minefield. He and his mother had very different ideas of what a proper funeral would entail. She wanted him buried but Mingjun was drawn to the more practical often of having him cremated. He wanted to host an open ceremony giving a chance for relatives to visit but his mother had no interest in hosting. He thought guests should come in something green to celebrate his brother but his mother wanted the traditional white.
He would never raise his voice at his mother but his patience was frayed. Compassionately he knew that his mother had been hit hard by the sudden passing and was still grappling with the pain but it wasn’t exactly the same for him. With another day people dug their heels and refused to push forward, his laundry lists of pressing tasks grew longer and longer.
‘You could just give all funeral management over to Mother’ his mind whispered traitorously as he impassively contemplated the empty gray boxes of his to-do list on his computer list. He was absently fiddling with a black and red keychain that he had swiped the last time he had visited Shen Yuan. Every turn of his hand caused the most infuriating little jingle from the character shaker.
Shen Yuan’s last text to him had been his baby brother demanding his prized possession back.
The sting of tears was expected but unpleasant. He would give his baby brother fifty keychains if he walked through his office door with his resting bitch face right now…but of course, Shen Yuan would not be walking anywhere anymore.
He hadn’t been able to give him back his keychain but he ,at least, wanted to give him a good sendoff.
000
“You’re going to get in trouble again if you keep this up,” Huang Huihe leaned against the doorframe as she watched her sister down another can of beer without stopping to take a breather. She would be impressed if not for the phantom sting of her mother’s venomous glare reminding her why she was the one having this conversation.
Huang Hui, the freshly born alcoholic of the family, barely glanced at her before reaching for another can from her bedside. Huihe lunged at her, slapping the can out of her hand. Hui snapped into action and the twins found themselves roughhousing, reminiscent of their childhood fights.
Huihe huffed and shoved, yelping when she felt teeth.
“Oh my god, this crazy bitch!” Huihe wrenched herself away to sit on the bed, running her hand over the spot to soothe the pain. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“What the fuck is wrong with me?” Hui fired back. “What the fuck is wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with you and that mother of yours? Our brother and her son just died in a city almost three hundred kilometres away and neither of you even pretend to care!”
“He was our step brother,” Huihe pointed out, rolling her eyes. She couldn’t understand why Hui had even reacted to the news. Shang Qinghua might as well have been a stranger on the road for all the closeness he had to their family. Their mother hated to be reminded of her first failed marriage. That meant no photos, no cards and no calls.
“He was still our brother!”
“What brother? Do you call every strange man you happen to share a connection with ‘brother’? What has Shang Qinghua done to deserve that title?”
Hui’s mouth pulled back in a nasty sneer. “What would you know about connections? You toddle after our caustic bitch of a mother even when you know how she feels about us-and him.” Like she had been slapped, all the venom drained out her expression leaving behind only a pale diminished facade. “My brother died and I can’t even go to pack his stuff.”
“That caustic mother you so hate feeds and cares you with all her heart,” Huihe spat incredulously. “How can you be so ungrateful?”
“Shall I roll over for her because she treats me with as much courtesy as the family dog?” Hui shook her head and wrapped her arms around her middle. “Just go. Leave me alone.”
Her twin’s distress shook her heart and she reached for her but Hui jerked away. “I said leave me alone!”
Huihe sprang to her feet, annoyed all over again. “Fine, continue to live like a corpse. Why don’t you try to join that brother you love so much? See if I care!”
As she strode away, she contemplated sleeping over at her boyfriend’s to avoid the inevitable blow-up once mother and obstinate daughter clashed. “Shang Qinghua, you fucking misfit bastard,” she scoffed as she began to type away.
000
Her world might have collapsed when she had found her brother, cold and immobile on the floor but her life hadn’t ended there. Life has a way of moving on and she had to get with the program.
She had convinced her brother to leave Shen Yuan’s apartment with her - and she had decided to give back to the community that he had despised (loved) to be a paragon of hate-reading for. She could have never managed to come to this conclusion by herself. Her phone chimed and she leaned over to look at the glowing screen, a small smile creeping onto her face when she saw Huang Huihe’s message. She made quick work of texting her back before standing to brush down her skirts.
She had made a new friend in the most unlikely of places.
In an ironic twist of fate, when she had reached out to the author to discontinue Shen Yuan’s private subscription she had been met with the author’s younger sibling, informing her that the author had also passed away in a tragic accident. Shockingly, or maybe expectedly, they had bonded. It was like God's blessing to have someone who could understand the heavy weight on her heart.
Huihe opened up on how their brother had been their greatest support, even though he wasn’t always there and the pain and trouble his publishing company had given him about a year into his publishing. Shen Wanyan talked about her brother’s passion for the novel and how much joy and stress engaging with it gave him.
Time passed and now it was six months after she had found her brother. Four months since she had met Huang Huihe and two weeks since they had decided to hold a livestream auction for Shen Yuan’s duplicates.
She hated to part with them. She was keeping some because she had been in the queues for those limited merch drops and those memories would stay in her heart forever. Huihe wanted the profits to go to funding adapting the novels into comics and fighting to get her brother’s copyright back. Shen Wanyun wasn’t sure if that’s what her brother would have wanted but he would have killed a man for his favourite character so maybe this was as close as she would get.
We're going to be v-tubers for a day. Are you excited? Huije had texted when they had concluded their plans.
It was a plan. A step to the future, That she was slowly coming to terms that she was going to move forward, changed and hurt.
She hoped that Huije’s plan worked out. She hoped that her brother was happy wherever he was now, and she hoped that one day it wouldn’t hurt to think about her best friend that she had lost.
–
“You good bro?” Shang Qinghua waved a hand in Shen Yuan’s face, only risking because his friend’s possessive husband was away. “You went away in the middle of your rant. Left me high and dry.”
Shen Yuan reached up to wipe his eyes. He stared confused at the slight dampness on his fingers. “Fuck off Airplane,” he grumbled, shaking his hand lightly. “Just felt weird for a moment”
“Take care of your health, bro. There are people here that care about you.”