For Tang Fan, seeing the Emperor like this, stripped of all his noblest trappings, serves as the starkest reminder he’s ever been graced of his own unimportance. Even unbacked by the gilded halls of the Forbidden City, unswathed in gold, unlaureled by his dragon crown, the Emperor still towers, blue sky-lofted and peerless. An immortal whose presence alone, seated but within a stride of him, acts as chastisement for his own fleeting, humile impermanence.

The Emperor demands deference, his due by Heaven's mandate, but it is here, where he so much resembles a mortal man, that Tang Fan finds himself disarmed by it, rendered undaring and docile. It is the sacrilege of it all, maybe, he thinks: men like him are not meant to lay eyes on the Son of Heaven like this, in the quiet moments he strays too close to human. It’s a privilege for the few and the few alone: an inmost circle of eunuchs, his consorts, the chosen favoured.

So, Tang Fan heeds, more than he otherwise might, his place and his height, the space his body occupies. He keeps his chin dipped and his eyes downcast, as though he can hope to make himself so slight, so piteous, that it defangs his demurral, numbs its bite. He knows what his denial is tantamount to, and that he’s only delaying the inevitable at the steep cost of risking ire. But he does not want the honour of going to Yunhe, or any of what that entails. If he must, if he’ll be made to, then at least a refusal now buys him the clemency of time, to do— something. He’s not sure what. He knows he should be, but his focus is skittish, splintering, scattering out of scope and frame. All he can clasp onto is the immediate, in the moment: the twinge in his legs from kneeling; the ache of the knot twisting in his wine-doused stomach. Tang Fan just wants to go home, to eat, to sleep. To make sure Sui Zhou is all right, though he seemed as fine as he could be when Tang Fan was made to leave him, and he has been left in the care of many more suited to the tending than him.

He is too wound up in the parts of the passing moments that don’t matter. This must be why it takes him so long to notice that the Emperor has risen, but he has not left. The shade of his presence casts itself across Tang Fan's bent back, and the press of it is as tangible as a hand to the neck when he kneels up.

For a moment, a terrible one, they look at one another. All memory of manners wisps from Tang Fan's head, as though never once beaten nor taught. The animal can intuit it is not his right to meet this gaze; the man cannot grasp if it yet remains to be his merit.

The Emperor affords no true transparence on the matter, only a court-schooled expression, brow furrowed in a jejune tell. Perhaps he is thinking what cannot be said, as Tang Fan feels on the temeritous cusp of saying what should not be thought. That he is not the right man at all, or the man any one of them has thought he was. That there has been a mistake made, somewhere. This is worse than any refusal, when at least his arrogance can only be his own fault.

And then, the moment passes, and it takes all too much for Tang Fan not to gasp aloud his relief at being released from it. But it is relief, and release: a relent of the threat of the axe, by thanks of the executioner's arbitrary deliberation.

The Emperor's expression clouds again, and it is with this distancing that he leaves. For a while, Tang Fan stays there, on his knees, in his absence, until the shape of the veneration begins to pain him. This is service in its most ideal possibility, anyway, or so he thinks; absolute and authentic. There must be love for the fear, not in spite of it.