among the bending poplars
by fruitjuicer

among the bending poplars

fruitjuicer

Summary

“You found me.” The almost suffocated inanity that spills out of Tang Fan’s mouth cuts down all other riotous, competing sound in the room, in Sui Zhou’s head. “I called out to you.”

“I heard you,” Sui Zhou murmurs. Even this is too much to give his voice to. He gives it over despite himself. He gives himself over in spite of many selves for Tang Fan.

Notes

Set during Episode 44.

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 31496495.

Chapter 1

Sui Zhou knows better than to insist again that Tang Fan stay behind. To plead or pressure him to shelter with Lao Pei, to be seen to, to be anywhere else but here, with them, seeing through this dying end.

There is always helplessness, in intimacy; hopelessness, in understanding. If Sui Zhou pushes, Tang Fan shoves. The same stubbornness in conviction that is his strength begets the determination that will likely lead him off and to his death, someday. Sui Zhou hasn’t the means to change him, nor the desire to, but it aches, nonetheless, like a bruise beneath a palm’s press, to be unable to save Tang Fan from what he won’t spare himself for.

Sui Zhou would have it no other way. That does not make it hurt any less.

“Bare your back,” Sui Zhou says, low, when their talk at the table is no longer at hand, and the silence is growing too heavy to bear. “I’ll set your wound properly.”

Sui Zhou brings his seat forward, after he's spoken, and sets himself down closer. The bandages he’s already wrapped Tang Fan with will hold and will do, but they are a momentary mediation, not a mending. An intervention that Tang Fan will be far worse off for later. They have little time to waste, is the truth and the cause of it. Sui Zhou will take each and every second of it, now, that's left, and make the rest as needed. Tang Fan has been lost in the dark of his ordeal for so long already, and though now found, he has invited further sufferance unto himself instead of rest. He’s dwindled in the days of his durance, and become indebted to the steep costs of surviving it. He must have less than nothing left in him to spend.

Sui Zhou can’t stop Tang Fan from supping poison to sustain himself in spite of sense, but he can do this one small, selfish thing in its stead. It is more than worthwhile an exchange, for him. It could even be considered fair.

The needles Ding Rong has within his tools are too wide and too flat for suturing, but there is no shortage of cultivated women in Huanyi who entertain within Wang Zhi’s preferred parlour. So, it is a simple matter, then, to surface the more delicate steel pieces used for embroidery. Thread is a less simple matter, but it can, at least, be compensated for in their haste with little disbenefit.

Sui Zhou is not deluded enough to believe that the draw of the curtains affords them any privacy, but he can appreciate the significance of intent in an otherwise empty gesture. It is an easier task, to ignore the drift of Wang Zhi and Ding Rong across the far outskirts of his periphery when their shapes are dulled and their sounds dimmed by the drape of sheer silk-satin. The muting subdual makes Tang Fan louder than he really is. It brings him back closer to what he should be, to how Sui Zhou has come to know him. As sound that drowns clamour; as colour that discords rencounter.

Tang Fan is well-kept, for a captive. Sui Zhou does not let himself linger on what that might mean, or if there are prices for it laid out underneath Tang Fan’s skin, so-far unseen. Better to be thankful in ignorance for some things. Better still to leave them be.

Tang Fan's unhurried movements bear a leaden listlessness. Every small thing down to beat and breath stilts, stops, starts. He has peeled his skin-stuck shirt from his shoulders, but the tremor in his fingers keeps shaking his grip back loose around the knot of the gauze. Sui Zhou feels the urge of his need to intervene reach out before the rest of him; his hand hesitates, though, midway. For a moment. Only for a moment, which is all it takes for him to surmount the instinctual fear that he'll hurt Tang Fan if he touches him. He will hurt Tang Fan when he touches him. There is no way that this can be done gently. To try to make it so anyway would be cruelty.

Sui Zhou can make his peace with it later, another night, anywhere as distant as he can get and be from here and now and this.

“Here,” Sui Zhou says, low. So Tang Fan knows. So he can prepare.

How well Tang Fan stifles his hiss when Sui Zhou unbinds the bandage and peels it from his back is worse, for Sui Zhou, than if he had simply screamed. Sui Zhou is climatised to screaming. He is used to the violence of Tang Fan’s sonance. This is too wounded a quiet. It reminds him all too much of the deaths he’s seen, dragged out. Hapless healing hands. The futility of hoping. The condemnable mercy of decisiveness.

Sui Zhou does not stare at the blood, as he helps ease free Tang Fan’s shirt the remainder of the way, but he sees it in the furthermost corners of his eyes. He has never been allowed to look cleanly away from it before; he is not granted leave of it now. The red beads up; blots down. It streaks Tang Fan’s back like a branching stream; strokes it like a whip’s welts. Tang Fan breathes out as though he’s been holding it, and Sui Zhou sees, too, because he must, the flinch that ripples across his skin when his ribs sag.

He can do this. He has done it before. Heavens willing, he will at least be fortunate enough to do it again, to have the chance to, if it must so come to pass. Sui Zhou need only narrow himself down to the body. The breath; the blood; the sinew. All flesh parts the same. It is tended the same, too.

Sui Zhou sets his hands to his belt detachedly. “Rest your head forward, on the table,” he instructs. The clammy body-warmed metal of the clasp feels distant, even up fraught-close beneath his fingertips. His voice sounds even further out than that. Tang Fan sinks down into that last unencroached whisper of space and obediently brings his face to rest, upturned, on the smooth surface. Cheek to wood. Wide dark eyes darting out from underneath his lashes, searching out Sui Zhou from over his sloped shoulder. Sui Zhou strips himself to the waist perfunctorily, layers wilting to the floor. He has no need to linger. It is a secondary act, devoid of demand to exorcise care.

Sui Zhou assesses the body before him. He kicks off his boots. Says, to the body that is Tang Fan, here, in all ways but the ones Sui Zhou cannot have it be, if he is to do right by it, “Let your arms hang at your sides.”

Tang Fan lets them spill from his lap with a stung, spit-wet seethe. There is fresh sweat, beading up high on the sunken span of his back at that slightest exertion. Sui Zhou slicks his thumb through it in a short, swift stroke, stopping it at the pass before it trickles lower and further waters down the blood.

It opens Tang Fan up, to have him like this; stretches the terribly-tracked gash wide in a way that worsens itself on Tang Fan’s own accords. He is shaking, he can’t stop shaking, and every ruined breath comes in rasping, sob-tinged tears. There are no better alternatives. There are only the choices that Sui Zhou is making for him, and this is the hand of the hurt he’s dealt out. Once Sui Zhou— starts— Tang Fan cannot tense into himself, hung out limp.

Sui Zhou folds his belt over itself once; again; again. He leans forward, then up, until he is almost half-risen, the take of his own weight onto himself making the backs of his thighs ache. Tang Fan’s skin is sallow, sodden with the sheen of his sweat. His eyes have fogged over once more, half gone with the strewn of his head from the pain. But there is still a glint of grit yet there, in his gaze. A spark of flint.

Tang Fan parts his lips before he needs to be asked or coaxed or made. The roof of his mouth is cool on Sui Zhou’s fingers; his tongue furnace hot. Sui Zhou presses the leather between his teeth — an awkward fit, however much Tang Fan lifts his heavy head to attempt to abate it — and draws away. Tang Fan grits his jaw, setting it tight. He sinks again, eyes fluttering shut as his nostrils flare around his shallow exhale.

Sui Zhou reseats himself, and assesses, again, the body. It is not a soldier’s body, but the frail jut of bones beneath thin paled skin does not make it a disbelievable soldier’s body. There is no one soldier’s body. There is no one man’s body. Sui Zhou has seen many, laid down in evocation and littered out in ephialtes. Often, for him, now, the line between either blurs fine enough to become both.

He scraps some of the gauze he’s unspooled from Tang Fan, fists it in a loose fold, and douses it in herbal sterilant. Then, Sui Zhou begins to wipe down Tang Fan’s back. He is quick and he is clean. Duly cautious, but only just. There are thoughts in his head, all the while, that he does not trust to come close to his tongue. It will do no good to ask Tang Fan to bear what he must bear. It will serve no comfort to tell Tang Fan he is taking well what he must take.

There is only the body. The sounds Tang Fan makes are listened to, but not heard. Set aside, instead, in a dark and terrible place where they will slowly rot through the hollow of Sui Zhou until he is warped impossibly more wretched for the having and the guilt of them. Inextricable from the rest of what else he keeps of Tang Fan with and in him. What is given. What should, perhaps, for greater good, not be granted.

Sui Zhou discards the soiled gauze on the tray. Wipes his fingers dry on his thigh. Then, he takes the needle between the pinch of his thumb and forefinger, one-handed, reaching towards his own face with the other. His hair is still bound up. The locks that are weaved into his braid won’t do. But those that are swept up into his topknot— Sui Zhou finds his temple, then feels higher, higher, until he eases some of the slicked back strands loose and plucks one free at the root.

His hands stay true, here. Steady, still, in their service. Delicate work is not so different from indelicate work. Stranding a needle moves a man in much the same way as slitting a throat. All take the hone of the body; all demand the focus of the mind. The dearth of all hesitation.

Tang Fan’s face is contorted condemnably ugly by his agony; lips drawn back over the clenched snarl of his teeth, brow screwed in, eyes squeezed shut. He's weeping uncontrollably; tears streaming messily down his flushed cheeks, snot dribbling from his nose. Sui Zhou does not look at the sight of it. Not more than he is made to by virtue of having his stare set to the inexorable work of his hands as he embeds steel into flesh, as he embroiders Tang Fan back to patchwork togetherness.

It takes two hairs. Sui Zhou considers a third while he plucks the second at the root, but has dissuaded himself from it by the time he’s pierced the needle back through Tang Fan’s skin. The stitches are laddered tightly enough. He should not dare do more than what he has already done.

There is no ebb to the flow of Tang Fan’s gagged wails; they crest and crest and crest, beating wave to the shore of his chest, the cliff of his back. He is moaning like he is fevered, like he is dying. It is a cold night’s comfort, that he moans at all, that he still has sense and breath to register that he is hurt, that Sui Zhou is hurting him. This is something to tell himself.

Sui Zhou squares and secures the suture at the tail, knotting it off. “It’s done.” Sui Zhou swallows wet to sand down his rasp in his throat. He has died and lived again in the aeons it has taken for these minutes to turn over. “It’s done,” he says again. He does not know which of them the repetition is more for.

Tang Fan parts his jaw; tongues Sui Zhou’s belt from his mouth to clatter, dull, to the table. Sui Zhou watches the wet pink dart of it flicking back behind his teeth as he rises. Tracks the lave of it through the spit that has gathered at the corners of Tang Fan’s mouth as he blinks his tear-blind eyes back open. Sui Zhou opens the tin of salve, dips his fingers in it like brush to inkwell, and smears it over the incision, wringing out one last, guttural gasp.

“Guangchuan,” Tang Fan chokes out. “Guangchuan.”

“I’m here,” Sui Zhou says. Stupid. It’s stupid. He is here. He never left. He will never leave again. He feels the ghost of Tang Fan shifting against his bare chest when he bears over him to rewrap his wound; arches himself into a breaking-point contortion that his very core lashes back out against to keep them apart.

“You’re here.” One of his hands crawls up from his side to brace, all-but-lifeless, against the table. Tang Fan’s fingers twitch as much around the exertion as from it. He moves no further, save the slightest shift of his cheek against the glossy wood.

Sui Zhou brushes the fall of Tang Fan’s hair from his eyes. He wants to wipe his face, but. It— he doesn’t.

There is a comb on the table, too, and he takes it between his fingers unthinkingly. The catch of his callouses along the engraved bamboo half-moon spine stakes him back down in his own self, root to soil, soil to underfoot. He stops, here, held strung in suspension between the counterpoints of place and precariousness.

“You found me.” The almost suffocated inanity that spills out of Tang Fan’s mouth cuts down all other riotous, competing sound in the room, in Sui Zhou’s head. “I called out to you.”

“I heard you,” Sui Zhou murmurs. Even this is too much to give his voice to. He gives it over despite himself. He gives himself over in spite of many selves for Tang Fan.

“Always there,” Tang Fan babbles on, sighing out faintly. It’s a frail thing, yet so fiercely sure. The same sentiment he has so said before.

Not always, Sui Zhou thinks, but he is not unteachable, so he does not argue it. He lets himself be thanked, as he has been told before by Tang Fan to do. To accept gratitude does not require his agreement. To share Tang Fan’s faith in him is not its prerequisite.

He would find Tang Fan anywhere. If not in time, then— given time. Across jade seas, blue skies, yellow springs. No distance uncrossable. No trial unsurmountable. It is the least he can do, to oath the break of his body in such a way. It is all he can offer.

Sui Zhou lifts the comb that is hefting his hand. Hesitates, again. Another moment. Just one more, then, he sets it down, sinking to his seat in the same swung-sunk low swoop of motion. Tang Fan's hand finds his on the table, though, before he can take that last part of himself away. Sui Zhou submits to the thread of their fingers together. Bends knee to the maddeningly stilt-slow drag of their joined hands as Tang Fan brings it to his lap. Then up; fording, first, his shuddering belly, then higher, higher still, until at last Sui Zhou’s palm is being fitted over the swell of his pectoral and pinned down. He has never denied Tang Fan anything. He does not refuse him this.

“I’m all right,” Tang Fan whispers to him. “You know that, yes? That I’m all right.”

He does not sound convinced. He surely cannot hold honest hope that he is convincing Sui Zhou. But Sui Zhou leaves this be, too. He bows; presses his forehead to Tang Fan’s shoulder, and steals his moment’s reprieve. He feels the tremor of Tang Fan’s unsteady heart against his hand, and he hopes, to himself, no less foolishly, that by Tang Fan speaking this aloud, it will soon be willed into truth.

End Notes

(Stop rushing around.)

— 井底引银瓶, 白居易