Just as it is apt for Sui Zhou to invite him, he has grown adept at telling what it is that he is inviting. This Tang Fan is real, tonight, and so Sui Zhou goes with him all the way into waking.

It feels too honest, somehow. Too desperate. Kuan-hung's too thinned out by the hour, exposed in the liminal space between his dream and now that's still folding closed, scarring over. He rubs his cheek against his pillow, ducking his head down lower, as if he can creep closer to Fu Meng-po's voice. As if there's a body nearby to press himself into, if he just reaches far enough for it.

It makes little sense for Tang Fan to continue to take his suppressants, after everything, so of course he stops doing that.

"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.

And this is the thing: Kuan-hung's not busy, and he's sure enough to think that they both know it without his saying so. But he gives a little rolling shrug of his shoulders, anyway, with his limited range of motion, and answers, "I'm not," because he can. And, "Can't you take care of yourself?"

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.