"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.

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.

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

How can he want for something he does not have when its lack leaves no absence?

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.

By the time Sui Zhou returns with breakfast, Tang Fan has expended every effort to do nothing more than roll over in their bed, putting his back to both the door and the day.

Ding Rong, in his narrowed dagger-keen focus on his task, is unsure of the time when he is first made aware of Wang Zhi’s approach. He knows only by the dark of his workroom, dim-lit by his low-burned candle, that it is well into the evening. He knows only that it is no other visitor but Wang Zhi, circling into his periphery, portended by a flutter of draping fabric, because no other but Wang Zhi would dare to come unannounced.

It's not a complicated thing, in the end.

In Seaburgh, Henry Long and his friend retire to bed.