Sui Zhou knows he has lost the latest ambush of attrition when he finds Tang Fan watching a playlist of rotating sandwiches he's screen shared to their television.
"Sui Zhou?" he calls out from the hall. "Are you home?" Even if he can see his dependable black workboots set in the rack by the door, well-worn soles beginning to peel back from the toes, well, who could be sure? These are extenuatingly unordinary circumstances, after all.
And, well. If Cui-mama wanted her number to stay decorative, she wouldn't have plugged it into Jin San's phone the moment she decided they had earned the dubious honour of being one of Huanyi's chosen regulars. Nor would she have constructed a reputation as ostentatious nightlife host-cum-den mother for every cracking egg hitting Changping's pavement.
Tang Fan is susceptible to long jaunts into his own self-preoccupation at the very best of times, as is needless to say, but waiting brings out the worst of his whiling.
Sui Zhou is the first of them to wake, as he so often is.
He may not always be the most patient man, but Sui Zhou has come to be good at waiting. He has taken well to the lessons Tang Fan has taught him.
This, Sui Zhou knows: the grief that whets a body so keen that it draws blood in the handling.
“I’m sorry,” he says, breathless and utterly unrepentant. He kisses at the corner of Sui Zhou’s mouth, petting down the column of his throat, tracing his fingers along the kick of his pulse. “Guangchuan, you poor thing, my good boy, come here.”
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.