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. He paints a patently pathetic picture: slumped on the couch, the lank of his limbs swaddled in a thieved too-big hoodie; all serving to exaggerate more than dwarf him amidst the flocked girls. Whenever one sandwich clip with presumable chicken ingredients starts to play, Tang Fan limply lifts a sleeve-pawed hand to cover Ji Mian's eyes — sparing her 'the horror of realisation', as he's beratingly supposed to Sui Zhou on several occasions — but there is no real heart behind it.

"I'm home," he calls, though the clap of the door and the rustling of his bags have already long announced him. Tang Fan does lift his head, offering a flash of a smile before resuming his sombre vigil. It is more acknowledgement than he gets from any of the chickens.

Sui Zhou takes himself to the kitchen, with that, so he can become busy with putting away the few groceries that called to him on his meander home. He fishes his phone from his pocket, first, and sets it on the counter, where it can just as easily catch in the corner of his eye as it can be missed. Tang Fan might message him for something, after all, if the mood strikes but his motivation to rise does not follow. Then he puts himself to work.

When Tang Fan first accosted him with the inciting douyin, Sui Zhou had offered to make its unwieldily meated titular sandwich for him, as he tends to with anything Tang Fan shows him that is even questionably culinary. But Tang Fan, contrary to his usual delight and satisfaction, had simply huffed in gusty offence, told Sui Zhou that it wasn't about that, and proceeded to not at all illuminate him on what it was about, then. While Sui Zhou has since apprised himself of all it would take to brine, rub, and smoke chuck, and decided he very much does not want to do that, he doubts Tang Fan's persisting consternation has anything to do with his unwitting hubris.

Tang Fan can be infuriatingly indirect as to some of his thoughts and needs, expecting instead of Sui Zhou a romantic omniscience; to know him more than he knows himself. An impossible standard that in practice only serves to incite his own upset and then Sui Zhou's baffled ire when it finally and inevitably does boil over in a wave of shadowboxed shower monologue-refined arguments. Still: Sui Zhou would not love him if not for the ways he frustrates him, as needed and intrinsic as all the rest that has shaped him. And he is not entirely ignorant of Tang Fan's innermost workings; a perceptiveness owed to its virtues of attentiveness and affection.

There are no new notifications for him on his phone when he is done — at least, none that he cannot leave to wait. Sui Zhou considers this for only a moment, then reaches for the last apple in their sparsed fruit bowl. He plucks its stem into the drain with his blunted nails, then runs it under the water until its skin glides smoothly beneath the swoop of his thumb. He has a peeler in his drawer, and a corer, but it is the knife he takes up once he has towelled his palms off against his thighs.

He always loses more of the flesh this way, no matter his care; forsakes any neatness for the slices. But it all sits the same on the tongue, in the end, splitting apiece between the teeth. And like this, for a few captured minutes, he can see his grandmother again: in the very familiarity of food and tool hefting his hands; how the red peel sheds from the white like a heavy coat is stripped hurriedly at homecoming; with the thuds of the seeded core when it meets the basin, thick as a heartbeat. A pilgrimage back to devotion at its simplest, pure and uneasy, tracing over an old trail that was furrowed deep through him with only the quietest tending.

Sui Zhou arranges the slices on a plate with more care than delicacy, then reemerges to the loungeroom with it in hand, balanced like an offering. Tang Fan has moved little in the interim, but he has switched away from his sandwiches to what looks like a stream of someone in a claw game arcade. For his part, he is making an effort to appear like he's paying attention to it and not Sui Zhou from the corners of his eyes.

"Here," says Sui Zhou, holding out the plate. Once Tang Fan takes it, still feigning his relative disinterest, Sui Zhou adds in, "I need to go to Fengshengli."

That makes Tang Fan perk up sharply, his attempt to then smooth it over as something mere and casual undermined by the indignant gu Ji Mian clucks out in his lap. "Oh? When? I'll come."

"Why?" Sui Zhou asks. It is the least suspect response he can give, and yields success with the immediacy in which it provokes Tang Fan's pout, his nostrils flaring around his sharp sniffling breath.

"Why wouldn't I want to come with you?" Tang Fan counters, rambly. He's tabled the plate half between the arm of the couch and his jutting knee, and is picking away little chunks from one of the apple slices he no doubt intends to share out once he's convenienced them for little beaks. "I love you and I enjoy your company. Maybe I have things to do there."

"All right." The twitch of Sui Zhou's smile around his concession is conveniently hidden by the shag of his hair when he stoops to scoop up Dan Jiao. She is graciously amenable about being turfed from her roost against Tang Fan's thigh, all given, though Sui Zhou is sure the mashed pinch of apple Tang Fan wipes onto Sui Zhou's fingers for her once he's settled in at his side is that inconvenience's sweetener.

"Good," Tang Fan then resumes after a beat, scraping apple out from beneath his fingernail with his teeth. "It's a date."

"A date," Sui Zhou agrees.