On the one night of their journey that suspends itself in the in-between, not yet Hetao but no longer home, Wang Zhi joins him for dinner.

There are prior steps that are taken to lead them both to the same table that warrant mention, of course. Ding Rong being uncaged is, true to fashion of defying expectation and explanation, the first step and the least notable when held up against the subsequent ones for comparison. Now, later, washed down and dressed up in silks finer than even the ones that he felt on his skin as a free man, nothing ties Ding Rong in place but the wait. Wang Zhi doesn’t choke him with the collar of it for long before he appears to give his leash some slack, as if the brevity of his absence tonight could unlatch the tension around Ding Rong’s throat enough to let him take a proper breath.

The old desire and the older duty burns up the backs of his legs and across his hands to rise to his feet, to meet Wang Zhi and lift the heft of his cloak from his shoulders before the want to have it gone even fleets through his mind. Ding Rong doesn’t leave his seat; lets it blaze over him and burn him up as he watches Wang Zhi unclasp the buckle and strip it from his shoulders with his own two hands. It is discarded with idle disregard, much like anything and everything that has ceased in any given moment to serve some manner of purpose to Wang Zhi. Then, in a few short strides, Wang Zhi is sprawling across the span of Ding Rong’s vision as he takes a seat at his opposite. His stare is dark and serrated sharp, and a strange subversion of his typical palace smile starts to stretch his lips as he settles in.

“Do you suspect I’m going to poison you?” he asks Ding Rong conversationally, the corner of his mouth crooking up around it.

“Not yet,” says Ding Rong. It’s a struggle, still, not to measure himself or mull his tone with Wang Zhi, but his spite, now, is stronger than his shame.

Wang Zhi’s laugh matches Ding Rong’s answer for its churlish, cutting honesty almost perfectly, right to the last note of condescension. If Ding Rong was a lesser man, in discipline or determination, he might have lost his hold on himself to hear it, let the shiver that prickles at his nape run rampant down his spine. But he is not a lesser man, not yet. When Wang Zhi finally unmakes him under his hands, Ding Rong will take smug satisfaction in how hard he will have to try to bend his fingers back to break his grip around that one consolation.

Wang Zhi takes up his chopsticks with a cocked brow and spears the closest dish within his reach, rising to his feet as he brings the steamed stem of qing cai to his lips. He chews, unhurried, underneath Ding Rong’s unsteady perusal, his eyes hooding. He snares another piece between his chopsticks, still damp and warm from his mouth, and serves it out onto the empty dish set in front of Ding Rong when he was himself set down at the table.

“Is that what you’re waiting for?” he asks, rhetorical, once he’s swallowed. Then, that strange smile back on his lips, Wang Zhi adds, “If you’re not accustomed to disappointment by now, you soon will be.”

He turns his attention to another dish and repeats himself: a taste, first, as if to bury the knife of proof into Ding Rong’s neck that one of them, here, is still a man of his word, before he serves them both.

Once, Wang Zhi was, to a degree, chartable. Unreachable and unattainable, but not unreadable. Now— well. Ding Rong never expected to fail; in failing, he never expected to survive. Now, he doesn’t know what to expect, and he certainly doesn’t know what to do. Not with himself; not with Wang Zhi.

“Just kill me,” he says, not for the first time, and undoubtedly for the last, when Wang Zhi finishes plating their meals and returns to his seat.

“You know I won’t,” Wang Zhi replies, still all strange smiles. Ding Rong is beginning to get a sense of this expression, the more he sees of it, and he almost feels confident, now, that he can place it as— amusement. Some sly shade of it, but barbed. Heated.

“I won’t allow you to kill yourself, either,” he continues, the conversational lilt back in his tone. He doesn’t meet his eyes; as though his meal holds more interest than Ding Rong. Wang Zhi won’t kill him; not yet. Wang Zhi won’t let him die; not yet. Ding Rong had read his mouth more than heard him say it, the day they left the city: Wang Zhi doesn’t know how to live without him. But Wang Zhi is quick to adapt, and he’ll learn to, if he so wants and so chooses.

How many nights had they shared, before, sat across from one another, eating together, concurrently intimately close and incogitantly apart? How many nights more will they share like this, in this mockery of a charade of their habits and history, before Wang Zhi has taken his fill and had his fun and decided he is done?

This was what he wanted, wasn’t it? For Wang Zhi to have no choice but to look at him, to see him. His wish has been granted, finally and at long last, even if it has come to him all warped and wrong. If he’d had his way in its entirety and as engineered, the only change, truly, in the end, would be their places. It would be Wang Zhi, and not him, all bound up in fineries and kept close at hand and side like a treasured pet.

He never would have grown tired of Wang Zhi, not at his side, or at his feet, or in— not like how Wang Zhi will surely soon grow tired of him.

“But you could kill me,” Wang Zhi finishes, at last. He meets Ding Rong’s gaze, at that, across the table, and his nose crinkles as his smile broadens. “Here, now.”

Ding Rong is no fool, not anymore, not now he’s been played for one once before. And yet. And yet, like a fool, he considers it, anyway, as he takes his own chopsticks in hand. He could. He would have them stabbed through Wang Zhi’s eye in a beat; would be on his feet and half out the tent in a breath. But what then? Even if he escaped, what else is left for him, to have and hold, to take and make? All he has and all he wants and all he is is here, because he already long ago made the very mistake to let his desire run uncurbed and unchecked, to rot down until it festered around one single need and dream.

“I’d be shackled before I could get a hand to you,” Ding Rong reasons stiffly.

Wang Zhi’s smile softens, smoothes out. “If that’s the excuse you need to justify your inaction,” Wang Zhi says, sickly sweet and serene, “then who am I to deny you it?”

He looks away. Ding Rong fists his hand around his chopsticks until his nails bite into his palm, and turns them over to bare his wrist. Lets his knuckles pale; lets the tension coil in his shoulder. Then, he loosens his grip. Readjusts his fingers. Puts the chopsticks to his plate. Lowers his eyes; lifts a sliver of doufu to his lips, and eats.

Wang Zhi hums his pleasure at his acquiescence, eyes still averted, then allows silence to speak over what they both leave unsaid.