Sui Zhou is the first of them to wake, as he so often is.
On the one night of their journey that suspends itself in the in-between, not yet Hetao but no longer home, Wang Zhi joins him for dinner.
Ding Rong has walked himself through five vivid calculations of Wang Zhi’s death at his hands in the carriage before Wang Zhi speaks.
“I’m in need of a second,” he says.
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 should have suspected scheming the moment he saw Wang Zhi in red.
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.
Sometimes Tang Fan does indeed forget that he is not, in fact, the only learned man under their shared roof.
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.
"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?"
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.