Sui Zhou wakes to a creaking of wood, and to Tang Fan's rasping voice, reaching out gingerly for him through his room. "Sui Zhou?" he whispers. "Sui Zhou."

He should not be about at such an hour, not in his condition. Sui Zhou cannot feel anything but grateful to hear him, though he is not at all faring well for the seeing. The moon casts sharp focus on the gauntness of his face, his pale eyes, the cracked skin of his lips.

"Yes," says Sui Zhou. Or tries to, anyway, through his throat's disuse. He swallows to clear it. "I'm here."

Tang Fan's figure grows still where it is. "Ah," he breathes. And then, "Did I wake you?" he asks him.

"No," Sui Zhou answers. It is not a true lie: he was woken, but fault is another thing, and it need not be ascribed here. His house has been so quiet without the volume of Tang Fan's life filling it, these last days. Sui Zhou has grown unused to such an absence of noise; he is grateful for this opportunity of a respite from it, however brief it might be.

Tang Fan steps closer, accepting an invitation not yet extended, and Sui Zhou finds himself moving, lumbering but instinctive, to make room on his bed for him. "Guangchuan," he ventures hesitantly, knees slipping in his skirts and over Sui Zhou's sheets as he falls into his kneel. Sui Zhou is too slow to catch him, but he flinches sorely around its urgency. "We are friends," says Tang Fan. "You would say this, yes? Wouldn't you?"

"I would," says Sui Zhou uncarefully. Perhaps he is too tired for guarding, or awake enough to be convinced of its unnecessity.

"Oh," says Tang Fan, his relief exhalant. He looms closer, clumsy. Sui Zhou can see red creeping through the gleaming whites of his eyes, piercing through the gloam. "Good. That's good."

A part of Sui Zhou must wonder, bared up to the dark like this, how such an answer has come as a surprise. But, "What do you need?" is what he asks. The safest course is the one well-treaded, the road paved toward familiar destination. Tang Fan desires something, or he would not come calling. This is one of the few things that has ever uncomplicated their arrangement. Sui Zhou can rise to meet with its occasion.

"Because we are friends," says Tang Fan, before he stalls. There is a flash of dark over his face as his eyes dart to an unseeing side. Then, "Because we are such close friends," he resumes, bolder, "I could ask something of you that is— it would not impose, would it?"

"Yes," Sui Zhou tells him, "of course." He speaks it before it can even occur to him that it could be a very dangerous thing for him to admit. That it says something he is yet to interrogate, let alone commit. But it is said aloud, now, between them, and it cannot be swallowed back.

If Tang Fan hears the depth behind it, it is not apparent, at least not in the dark, not beneath the ragged heave of his breath, the crackle of his robes as he fidgets. "So when I am—" Tang Fan stumbles, stopping and starting. "Were I to— should something happen, you will, of course, take care of them. Dong'er, my sister…"

So this is what this is. "I will not need to," Sui Zhou assures him, so swiftly it is almost spiteful. I will not let anything happen to you, is what he thinks, but it sticks, thick, to the roof of his mouth, much to his gratitude. "You will be here to take care of them yourself," is instead how he finishes. "For a long time yet."

He believes that, is the truth of it. Even if it may stand against all ods, now, and defy sense. He believes that. He has to.

"Ah," says Tang Fan quietly.

Sui Zhou can no longer make out his face in the dark, but he can feel it, almost, on his skin, in the tender throb of the pulse in his wrist, the way Tang Fan's mouth curls around something unkind.

"Sui Guangchuan," he sighs out at last. It's a pithy, pitying rattle of a sound, too quiet to be heard and yet too loud to be silenced. The hand he closes around Sui Zhou's knee is cold on his skin, even through the blankets still spilled into his lap, the cotton of his trousers. "You still think I'm going to be all right," says Tang Fan, "and it really is quite… sad."

Sui Zhou does not breathe, and Tang Fan is not breathing, either. He does not remember if Tang Fan was ever breathing at all to begin with. He does not— he does not—

"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou rasps.

"You're a smart man," Tang Fan tells him. Sui Zhou does not know if it is worse that it is sweet or that it is sincere. He would be so believably himself were it not for whatever it is that Sui Zhou has done to him. "You must have realised by now that you ruin every life that yours touches."

He cannot contend with what contains no falsity, but he had not expected this moment to be its revelation.

Sui Zhou wakes up crushed between bodies and battlefield, smoke thick in his nose and dead men's blood welling up in his mouth. He claws his way out, picks himself up, and limps off, slow, into the night. He turns over soldiers in his hands again, and again,

and again, in hopes that he will find another like him, yet clinging to a thread of life.

He does not recognise their faces.

And then he does.

Sui Zhou wakes up with a man's heart rabbit-kicking against his fist, sweat stinging his red-blinded eyes. His arm is twisted behind his back, the knife in his grip still lunging for a throat. He knows the face of who holds him. He knows the face of who he is holding. He's known them for a bareness of days. He will remember them for the rest of his life.

Sui Zhou wakes up aching, and terrified, and real. Nothing that has given him chase has followed after him into this morning. He lets the fight ebb out of him like yet another life stolen, and he sinks down, empty, into the demands of daylight.

He is running out of time. He cannot afford to waste what of it is still left to him.