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.
In the wake of Qingming’s revelation, the night bleeds out into a sombre quiet.
Is it him that courts such misfortune, Qingming wonders, neither for the first nor the last time in his long baned life, or is he the misfortune courted?
Tang Fan is not yet particularly panicked about his present predicament.
Ding Rong should have suspected scheming the moment he saw Wang Zhi in red.
How many nights has he entertained this very vision of Tang Fan, all lean long lines and li after li of smooth skin? Most, in some shape or another, since Tang Fan first stormed into his life and made his home in what wreckage he found there. Too many, but so few. To have it now, real enough to see, too far from reach to touch— it’s agony.
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.
"If you have a choice in not having a choice about coming,” Fu Meng-po says, eyebrows cocked out from behind the frame of his sunglasses, “then it's not a kidnapping."
“You’re not fun,” Kuan-hung complains. “At all.”
Spring comes, and Nie Huaisang is seen with his sabre for the first time since— anyone's guess as to when.