Sui Zhou was never made for precisive work with frangible things, but that has not once stopped Tang Fan from taking him in hand and seeing him put to that purpose.

They are not in Zhoujiatai anymore. Tang Fan can tell that much from this little. Whether they've come north into the mountain, or gone south into the plains, though — or ended up somewhere else entirely, east or west by providence — he'd need to see the stars, first, to even have a hope of a guess at it.

So much for simple and for supposed good fortune. What a day they've had, and what a night it's apparently promised them.

Tang Fan is looking at him — hasn't stopped looking at him once, really, in some way, since Sui Zhou stepped over the threshold and into his room — but he's looking at him, now, with a wonder so holy it's encroaching on worship. As though Sui Zhou has shot down a sun for him instead of something else infinitely less incredible.

“You found me.” The almost suffocated inanity that spills out of Tang Fan’s mouth cuts down all other riotous, competing sound in the room, in Sui Zhou’s head. “I called out to you.”

“I heard you,” Sui Zhou murmurs. Even this is too much to give his voice to. He gives it over despite himself. He gives himself over in spite of many selves for Tang Fan.

"Have you no care?" Tang Fan berates. "Or is this clumsiness?"

"I don't step beneath blades on purpose," Sui Zhou bites back, now sufficiently baited.