The deluge of rain that sweeps the capital is sudden. For a moment, the night is quiet; the hour late enough to be a sleeping one even in the city's underbellies, its lively hearts. And then there is lightning, thunder. The sky lights up white as the heavens open wide, and then they are sobbing with a guttural, shattered scream of sound.

Sui Zhou is soaked to his marrow in moments, if barely more. His uniform tamps fast to his chilling skin, sodden layers petaling together, the silk blue and cotton white running sheer, chafing at him in a sticky ruck. His vision blurs wet as rain runs off the brim of his hat, drops catching in his brows, the fan of his lashes. By the time Sui Zhou finds an awning to skid under, socked feet squelching in his boots, the damage to him is long done. He scrubs a hand over his face, shakes the water out onto the ground, then casts a look out, squinting past the dank and the downpour.

It's a heavy fall, thick on the air, caging. Thunder claps overhead again, closer, and lightning laps after it, closer still. Sui Zhou stands huddled on the step, drip drying slowly, run-off puddling the stone. It can be difficult to judge when a storm will end even when it is one with the courtesy to announce itself. He is not sure how long this one will be staying; if he should wait it out, or brave it home.

The shivering has set in by the time he decides that he will chance it. His blood has set stagnant from sitting idle, skin clammy, pulled too taut around him. There is fresh sweat drying cool against his temples, down his throat. His teeth keep clacking with every shake, tongue heavy, pushed up too close behind them. Sui Zhou swallows the spit that has gathered in his mouth, steels himself, steps out into the street, and—

—just like that, as though heralded, arbitrated to purpose, the sky's maw starts to close.

If only he had waited some minutes more. But, well. Home is closer to go than where he has come from, and by the time he has run himself the rest of the way there, the rain has slowed to a patter, glacial but glancing. He is flushed hot with the flare of that exertion, chest vicing tight, breath shallowing. It is a good burn, a brief respite. The gate's lock is starting to catch, and Sui Zhou can hear the creak of its hinges over the rainfall. Perhaps the wood has swollen. He will have to remember to have it seen to.

The siheyuan is dark, doused. Sui Zhou treads his way through the unlit courtyard, bridging puddles, listening out for sound. He can see on approach that the door to his room is open, thrown to a shoulder-width, just enough to see through the passage of a body in some hurry. Not as he left it. But this, too, is more a cause for comfort than it is any concern. Sui Zhou would worry if things remained as they were throughout any intervening hours he is gone; this is proof that his home is still somewhere lived in, moved through.

He toes over the raised sill and pulls it closed behind him, slow. Every step he takes is loud, waterlogged, but Sui Zhou tries to mute it, weight tipped off his heels, progress sluggish, gradual. Mindful of the night's hour and how it has coalesced, here, it's yet-liminal intimacy. He can see the shadow of a shape on his bed through the silk screen, hear the rustle of bedding rippling after the tug of minute movements. He rounds the divider, and his company confirms himself with a soft, roused sigh.

"You're home," Tang Fan murmurs. Sui Zhou stills for a moment, where he stands, simply for the pleasure of taking in his sight. "Ah, good." He reaches an arm overhead, sleeve curtaining his face, and stifles a hitching yawn. Sui Zhou does not try terribly hard not to smile. Perhaps he will be able to see it, with the casted moonlight, and perhaps not. "I thought I would pass of boredom," Tang Fan complains poutily, forearm pressing to his eyes. "The candle burned out some time ago, you know."

Sui Zhou can smell some faint staling smoke through all the muggy dampness. There is an off earthiness clinging to it, though. He thinks it could be mugwort, and that he'd know this not by trying to make it out on the air, but by taking Tang Fan's hands in his own, or furling his collar back where it crests his nape. If there is a tender red to his skin, be it at the pads of his fingers or the undersides of his wrists, the slope of his neck and swoop of his spine, then that would answer him.

"Yet timely, then," says Sui Zhou. He keeps his voice low, too, not only in mirror of Tang Fan's, but because he knows the shape of his body in his bed, its long lean lines, even beneath the covers, and so he knows they are not alone. "Is she…?" He lets it hang and trail, stilting, as he steps on the heel of his boot to help tug it free.

Tang Fan lowers his arm back to his side with another stretched sigh, then lets it drip downward, curving around Dong'er's back where she is gathered against his chest. His other arm must be cramped somewhere between them, the slant of his frame onto his side. "Silly girl," he says, fond. It is tipped more to her than to Sui Zhou, really. "Much too old now to come crawling into her da-ge's bed at the first fright." His hand smoothes across her shoulders absently, charting the rise of them with her sleep-evened breaths.

"I see," says Sui Zhou. He pries his other boot free, then sets to peeling his socks away each at a time. Something brushes against the outskirts of his awareness, skirting his nerves. Not an uneasiness, not quite, but close at heart to it. "I can go," he starts, while his face is lowered to his task.

Tang Fan's huff carries like a bellow. "It is your bed!" he clucks back, chiding. "At least spend some time in it." Sui Zhou balls up his socks and shoves them into one of his boots, knowing remorse for it will find him in the morning, and rights himself. The moment he looks up, Tang Fan's eyes find his and take hold of his gaze, his attention. "Come here," Tang Fan tells him. "Let me warm you back up to something lifeful. You look like they've dredged you from the canal."

Sui Zhou tries to stymie the peal of his laughter as it swells in his chest, full. He does not want to break open the night anew with noise, however mirthful. It could wake Dong'er, and she should have her rest. "That dire?" he asks, wry, when he can trust himself to be quieter.

"Worse than," Tang Fan effuses readily, prepared. Sui Zhou takes to the ties of his hat, next, conscious of the way Tang Fan's observation lands on him as he does, heavy as a hand. There is a physicality to its presence despite their very distance. But then, there is always pressure to Tang Fan's regard of him, how it presses in and takes up its space beneath his skin. It is not oppressive in its constriction.

Tang Fan seems content to chatter, and Sui Zhou is content to listen to him. "Lightning struck closeby, I think," he narrates as Sui Zhou — not wanting yet to trail water further into his room — sets his hat on his boots and straightens for his belt. "Ah, maybe. No fire, but you wouldn't know it for the shouting."

His belt joins his boots and hat, and Sui Zhou pauses for a moment, fingers perched to the buttons on his lapel. "No wonder she came to find you," he remarks, buffering his hesitation before he starts to properly unclasp them.

"This was after!" is Tang Fan's barely-hushed exclamation. "She slept through that one." Had he less sense of his space, he might have shot upright, as well; Sui Zhou can see the way the pull of the urge jerks through his shoulders, in the kick of his feet under the covers.

The particulars of his night's chronology are, apparently, important enough to him to warrant impressing their accuracy in counterpoint to Sui Zhou's presumed presumptions. So, Sui Zhou affects a note of contrition to his hum, shucking his outermost layer to pool down at his feet, and Tang Fan barrels onward.

"It was such a clamour, Sui Zhou," he regales. The twinge in his tone is truly pitiable, Sui Zhou will give him that. "I was frightened too, you know."

"Perhaps she came to comfort you, then," offers Sui Zhou. It's as much a tease as it could be the truth; Dong'er is a keen girl, after all. His middle robe, too, finds the floor, and then the inmost, leaving only his black trousers to keep him alongside modest. The clammy dampness on his skin, the misting chill— he still feels it, as he knows he should, but it is washed out by the heat brambling in his chest, the way his breath is starting to kick up as if he is breaking out into a run.

"Well—" Sui Zhou cannot hear Tang Fan's swallow, not with any preciseness, but he knows all the ways it stilts and stalls a conversation. "Well," he repeats, firmer. "Someone had to. I was left all alone, in such a big bed. Cold and unheld."

"I'm here now," says Sui Zhou. This, too, this simplest thing, is as much the truth as it is something else. He finds he can't quite meet Tang Fan's eyes as it comes aloud; it is a baring that runs deeper than the skin he's stripped down to. That splits him open wider than any lash or strike has dared. He needs a moment with his bearings, and so he pats down his thighs, testing the dryness of his trousers.

It seems Tang Fan needs a moment with his bearings, too. "And yet you're still so far," he points out, once ready, and Sui Zhou levels with his gaze again, knowing no further age or wait will do more to prepare him. The expression he finds, there, on Tang Fan's face, is inscrutable to him. So newly intimate, despite everything, that he is struck with an unsurety as to what to do with it.

And then Tang Fan says, "Would you hurry?," so very, very softly, breathless and beckoning, and Sui Zhou knows what it means, how he is to answer it. Not even a scream could quicker spur him: he closes the room between them with such a swiftness to his strides that it startles a laugh from Tang Fan, barely-muffled. It chimes like a bell in Sui Zhou's ears, warming, thickens his blood with sweetness. He puts his knee against the bed, reaches over Tang Fan's hip to brace himself, then freezes as Dong'er snuffles out a sigh, sound crumpling into the leafed neckline of Tang Fan's sleep shirt.

There is room for him, of course, but it is— a reminder, perhaps, of the breadth of his body's borders; of its bluntness and its breach. With so much of him to notice, it stands to reason that, no matter the care he takes to be anything else or but, he can still be seen, felt, heard.

And Tang Fan knows him. Across any and all distance, where time spans and travel stretches. So it is no surprise at all, then, that Sui Zhou feels the skim of his fingertips on his skin as he sprawls to reach between them. He traces up the soft underside of Sui Zhou's elbow, over the twilled muscle of his bicep. Coaxes, "You won't wake her." Cajoles, "The shenjiyang themselves could file in behind you and she'd never even know they were here." Charms, "A man should be comfortable in his own home. End a long day in his warmed bed."

Sui Zhou, convinced, finishes his careful climb over the tangle of Tang Fan's and Dong'er's legs before Tang Fan can draw up too closely to something resemblant of begging. He always arrives there so quickly, and holds Sui Zhou alone to blame for it. Though he tends to be right in his assessments, if not, arguably, his accusations, the only time Tang Fan need ask him for anything is when it is not already in his hands to give.

Tang Fan and Dong'er have straggled wide across the mattress, but Sui Zhou's bed was built for the room it is in, intended to be shared with someone eventually. Be that for love or for dutied inevitability; for what can exist between the bleeding lines of either. For what can bloom there, as it can anywhere, with only a careful tending. There is space for him to fit, between the wall, the canopy, and his— them, this. So Sui Zhou draws back the covers, slow, and he fills it.

Tang Fan turns his face to him, just as slow. Their legs bump together as Sui Zhou threads himself against his thighs, his back, until the places where they are not yet touching no longer matter for all the uncountable ones where they are, where they can, where they will be. The moonlight curves the shell of his ear, trails his jaw, casts the rest of his face into shadow. Sui Zhou cannot see him clearly for it. But he knows what Tang Fan looks like, and he knows how Tang Fan looks at him, and that is very much enough.

It is quiet for a moment. Perhaps it is quiet for an age. The stretch of it is the most inconsequential thing, here, that is shared between them. Sui Zhou watches the corners of Tang Fan's mouth part, the flutter of his eyelashes. He hears the hitch in the soft pull of his breath, the heavying of his inhale around the words from his chest he will be trading for it.

"Sui Zhou," Tang Fan murmurs. "Really." He cranes himself more, until the slender slope of his delicate throat is straining, his jaw tipped upward. "After all of that, are you not even going to kiss me goodnight?"

Sui Zhou bows his head in prayer and brings their lips together. His weight pools into the brace of his forearm still holding him aloft as he sets his hand on Tang Fan's thigh, smoothes it up to his hip, fingers slipping beneath his hem to press to the soft skin of his belly. There is no intent to it, no thought. It is as habitual a touch as the one that often comes to rest on the hilt of his sword — a reach for the comfort of the familiar, a resettling to a constant.

Tang Fan moves with no such unpurpose. He twists where he is cinched between him and Dong'er to cup Sui Zhou's throat, a soft sigh unfurling between the dry brush of their mouths. He leads Sui Zhou in by the jaw, urging, and Sui Zhou meets the demand of it, the desire. He teases his lips apart with his tongue until the kiss ebbs towards something more, breathy and open-mouthed. Sui Zhou drinks from the wet heat of Tang Fan's mouth, swallows every sweet sound bidden from the back of his throat. He takes his fill past fullness until the taste starts to turn towards filthy, the slide of their mouths spit-slick, loud over their roughened panting.

Sui Zhou surfaces from it after a beat too long, too hungry, startled by its paring of his better awareness. Dizzied, he blinks back the haze, takes a breath, and listens as Tang Fan takes his. Despite its staggering build, the whelming tide recedes just as quickly as it broke on the shore, swept back out into a settling sea, a stilling horizon. There is a flicker of pink at the edge of Tang Fan's mouth as he tongues at his bottom lip, and then his grip on Sui Zhou's neck is sliding higher, fingers stroking behind his ear, through the damp hair tacked to his nape.

"You're coming undone," he observes, voice scratchy, still, all wound tight. Sui Zhou closes his eyes for a moment, and grounds himself in the thought of how the pet of Tang Fan's fingers has surely done more to free his hair from its braid than all the day's furor, the night's downpour.

And yet, "It can wait," is all he says.

"So it can," Tang Fan replies. His hand falls away from Sui Zhou as he turns back over, and that is goodnight.

Sui Zhou follows him, palm settling into the valley of Tang Fan's side, face nosed to the silken curtain of his hair. He thinks he will be given some minutes of this, many at most. Then the drums from the watchtower to mark the change of hour will rouse him, or any old ache that yet dogs him will prove too much to rest through, and he'll be sent sheltering to Tang Fan's bed if he wants to hope for even a semblance of sleeping.

What a surprise it is, then, that he stirs next not from a sound or soreness, but to a room washed out bright by morning, filled by a beckoned-in sunlight. Dong'er has slipped free of them and the bed, already, and freedom has, in turn, curled Tang Fan into his chest, tucked his face to Sui Zhou's shoulder, his breath lapping the hollow of his neck.

Sui Zhou, too, has climbed all the more towards Tang Fan in his sleep, gathered him close with a hand to the small of his back, rested his chin on the crown of his head. Helped knot the now all but inextricable tangle of them together. He will have to take his time and his care to gently unthread it, more so than he would have spent in its commitment. But this is not a task that he needs to start on just yet.