This, Sui Zhou knows: the grief that whets a body so keen that it draws blood in the handling.

That night, Nie Mingjue dreams of Qinghe, but it is a Qinghe that is far from home.

Maybe it’s that aligning constellation of vulnerabilities that drives him to be that bit more honest, to give that bit more over of something he’s not even sure as to the whole shape of, let alone its potential; its consequence. “You could keep going. If I fall asleep again. You know?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, breathless and utterly unrepentant. He kisses at the corner of Sui Zhou’s mouth, petting down the column of his throat, tracing his fingers along the kick of his pulse. “Guangchuan, you poor thing, my good boy, come here.”

“Oh,” Qingming breathes out, his shoulders sinking deep with it, “how fortunate.”

Yes, Boya thinks, foolish and giddy and wrecked with affirmation, how fortunate.

Sui Zhou was never made for precisive work with frangible things, but that has not once stopped Tang Fan from taking him in hand and seeing him put to that purpose.

They are not in Zhoujiatai anymore. Tang Fan can tell that much from this little. Whether they've come north into the mountain, or gone south into the plains, though — or ended up somewhere else entirely, east or west by providence — he'd need to see the stars, first, to even have a hope of a guess at it.

So much for simple and for supposed good fortune. What a day they've had, and what a night it's apparently promised them.

Longing makes the world bright and the yearner blind, he knows, but even without his want soaking through and staining it, he thinks— he would be sure.

Tang Fan is looking at him — hasn't stopped looking at him once, really, in some way, since Sui Zhou stepped over the threshold and into his room — but he's looking at him, now, with a wonder so holy it's encroaching on worship. As though Sui Zhou has shot down a sun for him instead of something else infinitely less incredible.

Nie Mingjue wakes, and he is not within his guest rooms at Koi Tower.