After— after. When Tang Fan is home, and safe, Sui Zhou sees to it that he is comfortable, then moves to take leave of his imposition.

It is Tang Fan's fingers curling in his sleeve that stop him well before any hesitation. "Wait," he says. "Wait."

So Sui Zhou does. "What do you need?" he ventures, hoarse, for he is neither a particularly wise man nor a strictly obedient one.

Something flickers across Tang Fan's features, its perceptibility muddled by the wincing pain that has gripped him. Sui Zhou does not know when he last ate— perhaps he can see to that, as well, by cooking something that will help with mending his wounds, soothing his aches.

"It's not that," says Tang Fan, tight, his brow furrowing. "I need to— there is something I must say." With that, his fingers drift from his sleeve, and find new harbour at Sui Zhou's bared wrist, circling his pulse, there, anchored.

Since finishing his last novel, Tang Fan has not touched Sui Zhou once. Not so intentionally. Not as if Sui Zhou is something or someone he wants close, held and kept. And that is fine. That has been fair. All things beget their consequences, and he has taken his, however ungladly.

"We'll give our account in the morning," he says softly, knowing that this will break open the moment, and time, moving again, will see Tang Fan's touch fall away, his attention turn offward.

"Not that," Tang Fan insists, both his voice and his hand edged towards a frantic tremor. "Sui Zhou, it's not that." And Sui Zhou understands, at once, what it then is, must and could only be, like an animal in a snare must know its approaching end when it sees the hunter slip into the clearing.

He has heard the confessions of dead men all too many times in his dragged-long life. He does not want to carry Tang Fan's, too, now he's met the make of his mortality and realised there is business yet in his life to settle. "It keeps," Sui Zhou scrapes out. "It will keep."

Tang Fan's lips thin, his pale face hardening with that selfsame dangerous decisiveness that has driven him countless times into peril, and so will take him again, and again, and again. "You will listen to me," he says. It is firm enough a rebuke to silence Sui Zhou, yes, but it is not, for its roughness, entirely ungentle. And he is right, of course, isn't he. Sui Zhou will. He always does. "All those times," Tang Fan commences, uncontested, "I never used them. That night, I could not— how could I?"

"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou tries to interject, helpless.

"I wrote something else," is Tang Fan's unheeding, rushed confession. "Shu-laoshi did not like it."

"Tang Fan," creaks out of him, again. Weaker, now, but heard, finally, if Tang Fan's sucked-in breath is any truth or tell.

"Sui Zhou," Tang Fan mirrors. It is— exasperated. Fragile. "You are a smart man," he declares, with a confidence Sui Zhou is reluctant to second. "I need you to know what it is that I am telling you."

He does. How could he not know? He's not dared hope. He still won't, even if he must now confront it; an apparent miracle of impossibility. And he comes to it as unarmed as he is unguarded.

"Because if you do not," Tang Fan continues, wavering ever-slightly, momentum fumbling, "or you do, but it is not— if it is not the same for you— where am I to go?" he finishes, reduced to a whisper.

"Here," is Sui Zhou's answer. Moving heaven and earth as though it is the easiest thing in all the world for him to do. "Here." What else can he— there are no words for it.

"Oh," says Tang Fan, quiet. More a shape of his lips than sound. And then, with a sparking flicker of hope that warms his chest as much as it boils his blood, he adds, "Is that all?"

It is not. It is barely even the beginning of it. Sui Zhou can only show his answer, kneeling forward to rest at an unprecarious balance on Tang Fan's bed as he reaches between them. It is awing to take Tang Fan's face in his hands, to draw their mouths together. To be allowed that. Tang Fan smells of the smoke in Sui Zhou's nightmares; he tastes of the ash that grits his mouth when he wakes. His breath is as warm and wet as wept blood. All of this, and yet, he is more; he is whole and he is alive beneath and against and around him. And Sui Zhou can touch him, if he so wants. And he does. He wants so much. So he does.

Tang Fan makes a soft sound into their kiss; the ebb of him surging forward to lap like the tide over Sui Zhou's shore. Sui Zhou feels the scrape of his teeth; the smear of his spit as their mouths slide together, heating. So he takes his fill of a few more lingering presses, committing them to memory destined to be later and better overwritten, and then he draws back, to great and immediate whining.

"Sui Zhou," Tang Fan complains, when he has scrounged up his voice again. "I am not delicate."

So he is not. That he is yet here is proof of that, if nothing else. But, "You are injured," Sui Zhou reminds him. "You need rest." It is sweeter than to say the graver shape of that truth; to speak aloud that his chest was still not even hours ago, and that Sui Zhou had thought him dead.

Tang Fan seems as if he will argue it, before something, perhaps the very aching Sui Zhou has drawn back to his forward attention, assuages him. "Will you stay?" is what he asks him instead, hushed, tentative. "I know that you will not— that you cannot," he amends, circling the presence of his nightmares and restlessness both, "but…"

"Yes," Sui Zhou answers. He will. It must be the easiest give he's ever offered up to be taken. Of course he can do that much, least of all for it being so little.

"Oh," says Tang Fan again. Characteristic verbosity made succinct by the hour; the precept; the heft. Then slowly, shyly, he shuffles back, making room for Sui Zhou in his bed. He is sluggish with it, ginger around himself. But Sui Zhou is patient, here, more so than him. He can wait. And when there is at last room, Sui Zhou joins him just as carefully, with a coltishness at least as much weighted down by the gravity as Tang Fan's is by his injuries.

For a moment. It will be for only a moment, but— they have this time.