a sensitive instrument
by fruitjuicer

a sensitive instrument

fruitjuicer

Summary

"Have you no care?" Tang Fan berates. "Or is this clumsiness?"

"I don't step beneath blades on purpose," Sui Zhou bites back, now sufficiently baited.

Notes

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 44092467.

Chapter 1

"It will keep," Sui Zhou urges, despite the lost cause of it. He knows, with Tang Fan, that there will be no convincing him to any contrary of his decided purpose.

Still, he must try. It is not a deep cut, and the blade was not laced with anything truly endangering. He would be past care or concern if it was, however crass that is a consideration. So, Tang Fan's panic will serve neither of them.

"Be quiet," Tang Fan snaps at him, as though he has been loud, and, "be still," follows next, as though he is still moving about. What is left to the sleeve of his uniform rends easily under the probe of Tang Fan's fingers, and Sui Zhou is too slow to stifle his hiss. Tang Fan's haste makes him an ungentle thing, for all he is clearly trying not to be.

"Easy," Sui Zhou tells him, even though it, too, is a similarly hopeless endeavour. Exhaustion is a deluge that threatens in every beat to drag him under; it is all he can do, now, to hold on desperately to the driftwood of his consciousness. He must instruct Tang Fan on what next needs to happen.

Tang Fan does not take much heed of him; the parts of him that are reaching out, anyway. The presence of him that matters. He is too taken in by the sluggish tick of blood, ebbing from the gash in Sui Zhou's shoulder, the lick of its red around the tips of his fingers.

"Have you no care?" Tang Fan berates. "Or is this clumsiness?"

"I don't step beneath blades on purpose," Sui Zhou bites back, now sufficiently baited. There is no temper behind it, but the sting of his injury does lend his tone some heat.

"So you say," says Tang Fan, and before Sui Zhou can so say more, he ducks his head and seals his lips over the wound.

Sui Zhou can't swallow back the helpless, strangled groan that guts itself from the depths of his throat. His breath burls behind his breastbone, gaze swimming with his kicked-up pulse in dizzy defocus. Tang Fan returns his noise, the twinge of its indiscernible note all the more muted by the susurrous touch of his lips to Sui Zhou's bare skin. Beneath it burgeons the scrape of his teeth; the nervous lave of his tongue. The wet heat of his mouth as he sucks.

Traitorously, as writ and intended, Sui Zhou begins to rouse. Slow, but steady; like a slumbering beast tempted out by the spring melt. The torpor that ebbed against his edges but moments ago now distant, detached memory. He lifts his heavy head to look down, over, knowing before he glimpses the whole of it that he'll never be able to lose the sight of Tang Fan's cheeks hollowing out from his head. That he'll feel, like a scar that pulls taut with a limb's twist or turn, the ghost of Tang Fan's reddened lips; the blood streaking his teeth and the paling pink froth of his spit as he coughs it out onto the dirt astride them.

His lips are swollen from friction, as they always become so swiftly when Sui Zhou kisses into them; takes them between his teeth. When he swivels back to take Sui Zhou beneath his mouth again, their gazes latch, stalling him to a standstill. His eyes are stricken wide, so blown black the pools of his pupils are dappled by the moonlight limning the clearing. Sui Zhou knows it must be fear, more than anything, frantic urgency — but that is its own bedmate of desire, and it has wound itself so close, here, that it is too difficult for Sui Zhou's pulse to ignore.

Tang Fan's lips part around a straggling breath, his tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth. But the moment passes, and he speaks nothing of it, before his eyes hood and he bows his head back to his task.

Sui Zhou has to grit his jaw against his gasp, thighs tensing as he feels his cock twitch beneath the tamp of his robes. "Enough," he forces out. "Enough." Choked, as though he has been dredged from a river, left at its bank to retch up dead water. His skin is aflame, drawn all too tight across his bones.

Tang Fan, fortunately, takes his heed and then leave of it. He lifts his face with a sucked-in breath, then settles back on his knees, leaden, body swaying as if to follow the turn of his head. He drools most of his mouthful down his chin, throat working around what Sui Zhou futilely hopes is mostly nothing.

"Are you all right?" Sui Zhou rasps.

Tang Fan's nose scrunches, his sore lips pursing. "Would I not be?" he fires back, slurred. A paralytic, then, most likely. For a smart man, he's truly foolish. Sui Zhou will have to hasten all the more to find something to flush it, and mind to keep Tang Fan's teeth from splitting his tongue or his throat from closing over in the meanwhile.

Between the two of them, they can stand, at least, albeit with some disconcerting wobbling. Sui Zhou is still fit enough to take the brunt of Tang Fan's weight on his better side, and like that, it is not the worst limping trek they've ever had to take for safer ground to regain their bearings. But they've had better. And once they're in the state for it, Sui Zhou is of a mind to impress that he was the righter one, tonight, and should have been duly listened to.