"Do you still need to be told?" he teases, reaching up between them to path his finger across the pattering pulse in Sui Zhou's throat. "I thought I had you taught."

"No," Sui Zhou assures him. He does not.

It is a hurt, but it is one Sui Zhou asked for — a want he put into words and left in Tang Fan's hands to make what he willed of it.

His house has been so quiet without the volume of Tang Fan's life filling it, these last days.

It is the sacrilege of it all, maybe, he thinks: men like him are not meant to lay eyes on the Son of Heaven like this, in the quiet moments he strays too close to human.

Tang Fan has only grown wilder for and weaker to Sui Zhou in the years since they first met, when he made a home of this house and then the very man within it.

"Tang da-ge," she presses, trying to reel him back for a final snatch of constructive conversation before he sets off into the wilderness of his own head again, "who was that handsome gentleman?"

"So familiar." Tang Fan's preening at her address persists as far as them both toeing over the threshold before the smug smile falls flat from his face. Then, "Wait," he starts, craning so far to toss a look over his shoulder that he ends up twisting himself around in a circle. "What— what handsome gentleman?"

Tang Fan is stuck on a scene for one of his spring books. He enlists Sui Zhou to help him with some of the logistics.

Sometimes Tang Fan does indeed forget that he is not, in fact, the only learned man under their shared roof.

He is not in his body. He is not of his body at all.

The truth is that it can be difficult, for Sui Zhou, to tell where his lines are drawn until they are broken through. His body is territory once-left, now returned-to, and Tang Fan is not ignorant to the fact that Sui Zhou has come back to make it home for his sake far more than his own.