The road back to Red Lotus Pavilion drags itself into a roam. Chu Wanning feels as though he has been lumbering to it for a lifetime by the time its grounds are underfoot; that he is weighted solely by every pain waiting to be served up as proof for such a journey. If only his existence was not such a miserable one, then he could be left to wither, knelt to the snow. Instead, he merely limps on, one foot after the other.

The spark of heat that Mo Ran's touch set to the tinder of his blood has long been snuffed out, and true fever has swept over its remnantal memory. But Chu Wanning is pathetic enough to cling to whatever he can scrape together of its spectre, to pretend only its shape is what stings wetly behind his eyes, sends his pulse throbbing through his temples. That it is a different weakness borne of his innumerable deficiencies that is burning him up from the inside.

He feels rattled and uprooted, neither of nor bound in the borders of his body. But he knows what to do, and it is easy to fumble and follow after old repetitions, even blindly. He can take care of himself. Be it poorly, and no matter how pitiably, he can take care of himself. He does not need for anyone, and this, of everything, is what cannot be taken from him.

Chu Wanning is at least spared some splinter of shame when he spills medicine down himself, the sloppiness wrought by a shaking hand instead of his slack mouth, the swollen tongue that he struggles to swallow around. What a mercy. He strips stiltedly from his sodden robes and soaks his stiffened hands until they are suppled beneath the water, his long fingers paled, their skin pruning. The fresh robes he pulls over himself stick at once to his sweaty skin, their drape and cling suffocating.

He does not know quite how he stumbles to his bed, only that it is a shock to feel it beneath his knees, a sore benediction to finally burrow beneath its blankets. He shivers sharply as the rush of warmth bears down on the chill, teasing loose the guarded tension that has been gripping his spine, hunching his wounded shoulder. It is no real relief. It is barely, even, a relent.

Chu Wanning's thin face must be cracking in the thaw. He is ill of soul as much as he is temperament. He turns his head towards the branch of his arm as he reaches overhead, as if he can hope to hide himself from the very thing he is looking for. The sluggish rattle of his lungs and the snap of the sheets as his limbs unspool roars in his ears, but that deafening does nothing to drown out the quiet of the sloven emptiness in his head. His fingers brush over the spidering wreathe of his hair, then slip beneath his pillow, spilling over the brocade bag, there, tucked away safely. His other hand fits itself between him and the bed, pushing down between his legs with no such tenderness.

He mouths the shallowing pant of his breath into his robe, noses in tighter when his palm scrapes over his cock, rough. He is already swollen thick beneath the tamp of his robes, wet at the tip. Chu Wanning ruts down like an animal, chasing that shuddery, syrupy friction, a wretched whine gurgling up from the back of his throat. His shaft pulses dully against his fingers as precome soaks through cotton to slick his wrist, bared up by the ruck of his sleeve. He is so close already that he's dizzy with it.

What a sight he must make like this: a starved man gorging himself on a slivered scrap of kindness given over, unthinking. Chu Wanning wants to be sick, he wants his shame to kill him, and he grinds into his hand knowing he'll be granted neither. It is not his fate to be parted from suffering.

Mo Ran knows not what he does, nor who Chu Wanning is, how he looks and has looked at him. If he did— he would not be so careless with his kindness, at least. He would loathe him. He would understand that his every act and absence festers hope in Chu Wanning's depraved heart; that it spreads the stain of him across his life all the further. He would no longer touch him. Chu Wanning would lose everything.

Even the Mo Ran that is merely a fictive of his dreams, whose hands take his fill of him while he taunts him with cruel promissories— Chu Wanning fists tightly at the brocade bag as his hips stutter, groaning. That Mo Ran— perhaps it is not Chu Wanning's noble purity at all that spares him short of seeing his every warned-for use through to their sordid conclusions. Perhaps it is that this Mo Ran, concocted to torment him, has seen beneath his muddied surface and through to the scarlet truth of him. That this Mo Ran has learned of the pleasure Chu Wanning would steal away from his own debasing.

If Chu Wanning was split open from throat to belly all that would spill from him is wanting, and that is why he must be secluded alone with his desire, lest it blight and bane lives far more precious than his. Hunger is endurable, easily tricked with waiting. The danger rests in every taste and taking, their power to convince an incomprehensible appetite of possibility through sating. He does not need for anyone because he cannot afford it. This is his nature, unnurtured — to turn his face toward each gentling, and to bend the bough of his back to greet every brutal breaking. Everything else is fodder and veiling, pretence to elude his unmaking.

Mo Ran does not like him, and the sting of that is unmitigable, because Chu Wanning is a weak man, at best only human. But so long as he stays ignorant, held at a distance, Mo Ran may not come to hate him. It is not his thorny shizun who he should be tending to, anyway. Watering a wilted bloom is a wasteful thing. Better for Mo Ran's light to bask only Shi Mei, who is so sweet and suiting. What right does Chu Wanning have to his intrusion? To the distraction of being chased after, fretted over? To the twined locks of their hair and the lived reality of every fantasy Chu Wanning has seeded in the gardenbed of his ribs since their wedding at the Ghost Mistress' duressing? It is Shi Mei who should sleep with Mo Ran wrapped around him, who should stir to the press of his lips come morning.

Chu Wanning spills against his hand with a heaved sob, jaw creaking from the straining grit of his teeth. The room lurches as his release thrashes through him, and he retches, miserably, bile gathering at the back of his throat. Sweat drips from his brow to clump in his lashes, and the sting of it makes his tears run over, fat droplets streaking down his cheeks to smear into the snot and spit slopping his face. Chu Wanning shakes and shakes and shakes until he is numbed past aching, his every seam cusped on fraying, and then— and then. He manages a breath around it; another. The whelming tide recedes, leaving his hollowed wreck upon the shore, yet surviving.

Slowly, surely, the world steadies, if not him within it. Finally, after an age that spans mere seconds, Chu Wanning chances the slightest movement, tentative. When his will does not rebuke him, he draws his arms back against the cradle of his frame, drags his knees to his chest, and holds himself still, cowering in his own filth as it begins to set and stain. Perhaps it will seep even deeper, if he leaves it, sinking through meat and marrow into all the salt and rot that soils him. So he does. He is too spent to muster even care, let alone protest. Sleep can come take him like this, in his sorriest state, if it so wills it. He has earned that much. He deserves it.