rise without branching
by fruitjuicer

rise without branching

fruitjuicer

Summary

"You would not hurt me," is what he says, careful, caged in. "You could never hurt me."

This, they have argued to a stalemate of irreconcilable disagreement; could so continue to press in unwinnability until the Heavens broke open overhead and the mountains crashed down astride them. But Sui Zhou serves to live as much as a man as he does a blade, and in that he is long intimated with the lay of blame for a tool in the wield of a hand.

Notes

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 45339076.

Chapter 1

Sui Zhou does not meet his waking with grace. He is only a man, after all — one whose make and mettle are both bone-tired. So, it is with irritation first boiling to the surface that he stirs, roused by the pluck of Tang Fan's hands over his blanket, the prompt of his whispered name.

The moon is thin in the sky tonight, dwarfed by the drift of the clouds. Sui Zhou knows Tang Fan blind; in the dark he sees only the wisp of his outline, limned by dull silver. The light washes his skin out to an almost sickly paleness; the shadows stretching his limbs to something spindling, ethereal.

"What is it?" Sui Zhou asks softly, voice scarce from sleep. The heat of his riling is already snuffed out, of course; no ember could endure overlong the douse of his fondness, which gentles even exhaustions.

Tang Fan shifts so slightly that, could he not hear the breath he takes with it for himself, Sui Zhou would be uncertain as to its nature: a truth of his body or a trick of this hour. "I need you," he answers. When Sui Zhou makes to rise, though, Tang Fan's hand snaps between them like a striking viper, fanged fingers fitting over his sternum. "Don't," he starts, only to then stop just as suddenly. He's cold to the touch, ice melting dry through Sui Zhou's sleep shirt. "Just… let me," Tang Fan says, low, after a lingering moment. "You can rest through it."

"All right," Sui Zhou accepts. What other choice would he make, even if he had it?

"Good." Tang Fan's silhouette gives a short bob at the head, stilted. It is sharp enough to rustle the fall of his hair, sending the glossy strands spidering across his drawn-thin face. Sui Zhou wonders if he has slept; when.

Tang Fan recedes, slow. Sui Zhou follows the shift and shape of him through the dark; the fall of his feet to the floor, the creak and wallow of wood as doors are parted and drawers opened. Sui Zhou does not need to look to see, not when he knows all the whole of Tang Fan like the land tells the vastness of the sea from the kiss of its tide to the shore. There is something frantic to it all; the churn of a building storm. Sui Zhou wants to wade into it, fetch Tang Fan out from amongst its waters. But he does not. Tang Fan said to let him, and Sui Zhou will bend as he's been told.

The short scrapes of Tang Fan's breaths, overlayered with the slinking scuff of his skirts, are first heralds of his return. Then follows the fumbling claw of his long lean limbs as they climb him up the bed, crawl him over Sui Zhou's supine body. Hung above him like this, the inken shawl of his hair slung between them, Sui Zhou can see the way the moon dapples the gleam of his wide eyes, the red creeping the edges of the white.

Sui Zhou does not reach out, however much their closeness affords it; in spite of how the very urge moans through to the bone of his fingers. He lets Tang Fan scramble as he must, lifting to the coax of his hands only enough to turn the head of his task from hopeless. Tang Fan threads the belts of his harness, but does not buckle them, abandoning their mooring to only the pin between the fall of Sui Zhou's body and the bed. His impatience with his cock itself is not dissimilar, slotting it in the ring with barely a stroke over the shaft to test for its stay or give. An ungiddy hurry, unlike any way they have learned and found and should come together.

When Tang Fan straddles over his lap in a lunge, a hand sifting for the waist of his trousers in spite of the cinch of his belt, all his modest layers, Sui Zhou finally catches him at the hips. He must. Tang Fan's gasp at it is ragged, as if it's been struck from him. "I don't need it," he preempts haughtly, knowing. Seeing through. "I want to feel you."

"As pain?" Sui Zhou rasps, as much to cut as to tell. It makes the pause more than endears it — Tang Fan's features twist, then stiffen, like delicate jingtailan over ceramic.

"You would not hurt me," is what he says, careful, caged in. "You could never hurt me."

This, they have argued to a stalemate of irreconcilable disagreement; could so continue to press in unwinnability until the Heavens broke open overhead and the mountains crashed down astride them. But Sui Zhou serves to live as much as a man as he does a blade, and in that he is long intimated with the lay of blame for a tool in the wield of a hand.

"We have the night," Sui Zhou answers him, parting his belt; his robe; spreading his petaled skirts out all the wider. More than that, even — the whole rest of their lives together, if he need speak it. There is no burden in the reminding.

Tang Fan capitulates; as needed, if neither intended nor expected. He sinks down, syrupy, until the sediment of him has settled into Sui Zhou's thighs. Sui Zhou's cock grazes over his mound, tip teasing a slow edge up the crumpled plain of his belly. It is an easy fit for his hand between Tang Fan's legs, where he traces the seam until his folds part for the insistence, opening him up to the blunt press of Sui Zhou's cotton-damped fingers against his hole.

"Ah," Tang Fan gasps, his shudder full-body, roiling. He twitches around Sui Zhou's touch, as if to take him in by want alone. "Quickly," he hastens, "be quick with me."

That is not to be Sui Zhou's concession here — but he will afford Tang Fan not to linger. The moment the laddering breach of his fingers slips from damp with friction to dewy with Tang Fan's slick, he draws away, holding his breath to better catch the soft swell of Tang Fan's sigh. It is an affront to memory, to stop and so abruptly, when his bone and muscle have all been mapped to knowing what it takes and indebts to ransom Tang Fan of his tension, bring him to safe and trembling. But any hour is young so long as what Tang Fan needs from him is time, and Sui Zhou can taste the first promise of what is to come when he kneels Tang Fan up, bares him just enough.

When the head of Sui Zhou's cock snubs up tight against his hole, purposed, Tang Fan's mouth parts around an echo of sound, his shiver webbing from his bottom lip to the slope of his neck. "Please," he begs, "please," even as Sui Zhou is already pushing him down at the flank, pressing in, and in, and in. Heedless of the hesitance that flares deep from his chest when Tang Fan's face contorts in evince of his struggling.

"Oh, there," he murmurs, when Sui Zhou has sunk him to the root and filled him to flowering at last. Sweat pearls his temples as tears do his lashes, spit his bottom lip. "You are— you are so…" But he does not finish that, in the end, falling instead to what passes for silence.

Sui Zhou allows that. Tang Fan's body speaks aloud all the words of assurance he can and will not get his tongue around, from the tremor in his thighs as they tighten in around him to the blush that is blotting his cheeks, bleeding out to his throat. Sui Zhou wanders his hands slowly over what his reach encompasses, the heels of his palms kneading at the chines of his hips, testing for any contest, a command to relent. When none so comes, he threads his fingers beneath Tang Fan's shirt, next, rucking it to the knuckle so he can pet over his belly at leisure.

All hangs still across the seconds, except for the truly helpless: the swell of Tang Fan's chest around his fraying pants and hitching whimpers; the scratch of his nails over Sui Zhou's sleep shirt as the anchor of his grip drifts; the rock of his hips as he squirms around the stretch of Sui Zhou's cock, its plunged relentlessness. Sui Zhou, too, takes his breaths; whims his touches; grinds shallowly into Tang Fan's cunt when he must. Trying only for friction enough to dull the heady, hungered heat pooled between his legs, balm the lancing throb of his swollen clit and the twitch of his hole as he drips.

It must only be minutes, indeterminate from hours, days, ages, before Tang Fan surfaces their silence back to quiet, building towards the noise of a shattering point. "Guangchuan… ah." His lashes flutter, brows drawing tight together with a quiver that creeps through his jaw, over his lips. "I will— you'll make me come," he warns, bequeathing the belly of something weakened, made animal in the throes of its panic.

"Would that be so terrible?" Sui Zhou encroaches, ever gentle, voice whittled to a roughened rumble. It mustn't be, surely, for Tang Fan undoes so beautifully it is as if he was permitted it, teeth grit around his whimpering and curled toes scrabbling through the bedding. The branch of his back arches with it, likened to breaking, head sunk to a weight and his throat bared for every pulsing flinch, his desperate breathing. A moment's tableau that tells as much a tale of want to escape as it does need to stay.

"Oh," Tang Fan pants out, frailed. He sways back, slumping in on himself as his hands skitter over Sui Zhou's shoulders, seeking purchase. Sui Zhou does not keep him to a place, but he holds him through what else remains, resteeling.

"Lay down at my side," he whispers, while Tang Fan is still yet shuddering. Then, he shows the hand of how he never meant for there to be a choice in it, lifting Tang Fan from his cock at the hips with a practised ease; seductive effortlessness. Tang Fan whines harshly, cut free, washing out the wet squelch of his well-fucked cunt. Sui Zhou seizes on the last of his used resistlessness to roll him down on his side, drawing Tang Fan up close and clumsy to his chest, their ankles twining.

"Wait," Tang Fan edges out, breath sucked in, as Sui Zhou's hand presses in between them. Errant, Sui Zhou wilfully twists his cock free of its ring, the harness already fallen away, awkward between the press of his legs. "I said, I, that I would—"

"I have it," says Sui Zhou. He is the surer one of their two tonight: this can be his to do.

Tang Fan does not fight him, at least not by body, and so Sui Zhou is able to push his cock and its rigging to an elsewhere behind them. To strip Tang Fan down to the sliver before skin-bareness and draw his trousers back up his hips with little troubling. Yet, "How will you rest?" Tang Fan protests next. "I am only— you won't fare on the road."

If he does not, then so he won't. But he has marched under far worse than sleeplessness, for all the lesser causes. "Do you believe that to matter more than this?" Sui Zhou asks him, then, in turn. Compelled, in this quiet dark, to relinquish some vulnerable revelation as though it is tender and new again. But so be it. These are always Tang Fan's, to hold and to have. Whatever he desires. However he decides.

The quiet stretches, over a staggered moment. Then, "No," says Tang Fan, voice tight. "Of course not." Inscrutable, save for disbelief. But he settles to stay in Sui Zhou's arms, slack, as if the compulsed strings of his have been cut from some great strain. Relenting wholly, at last, to Sui Zhou's care; a shared comfort that will requite them to morning.