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.

"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?"

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.

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.

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.