the road is known

The case in Pei Huai’s hometown does not turn out to be much of a case at all.

Tang Fan complains, of course, though his belligerence seems centred more on the breakfast he didn't get to eat and the travel he had to do. He bickers, boisterously, with Pei Huai for a round or two before he is bribed and balmed with food, and then that seems to be the end of it for him.

Sui Zhou minds it even less than the little bit Tang Fan does. Monotony is still novel new, these fledgling days after Li Zilong’s fall. The peace has not yet overstayed for so long that Sui Zhou is uneased, a broken-through bulwark waiting expectant for further blows to follow. The fear that comes with safety is too rotted deep to sinew for him, now, to unlearn, but what is not mendable is still, often, endurable.

It has gotten easier, given time. Perhaps it will get easier still, given more. For the moment, it is a good calm. It is doing him good, if not so much to have himself, then at least to know Tang Fan is having it, too. There has been a sore need for it.

So, Sui Zhou relents to the repose; breathes through it. He thinks Tang Fan does, too, as the hours unwind into the drag of days. He must, for the idle waking moments he steals away and spends at his sister's side, his brow pinched in contemplation, their heads bent close together so that their whispered conversations do not carry.

It is not Sui Zhou's need to know things Tang Fan does not or will not tell him. He is allowed his worry, but he acknowledges his place within it. It is enough, to see Tang Fan gradually unguarding. Sui Zhou has no concern for Tang Fan greater than that he feels as much as he is kept safe.

They linger for a night, after and past any last need of them, for paperwork or presentation at the clinic or yamen or otherwise. Then for two, until to prolong their departure any further would require they speak aloud the stall in their very staying. Tang Fan is reluctant to go in the same way he always is when he feels goaded into doing something he does not want to do, but his resistance is a shade less performatively maudlin than his usual fuss of fare.

Sui Zhou watches for him, and waits for him, for there is no doubt, anymore, that this is something he would and will do. Eventually, it is Tang Yu, of all of them, that all but chases Tang Fan over the raised doorsill and down to the carriage, wielding a mother's flurried hands and a sister's pointed look.

Tang Fan demures and drifts, pensive, in a way that grips deep and digs in, breaking skin. It makes their return journey subdued. It has every right to be: a moment’s lenience for weakness is but meritorious requital for hardship, and suffering ignored does not become undone. It is all right, to call it something as severe as that. It is fair.

It is all right. It is not the silence before a screaming thunder; a foretoken of dawning danger. It is just— passing through. A bridge crossed over; a moment absent all question.

It stays and stays even after the travel has been shaken free, its exhaustion slept loose. Still. It is all right. Sui Zhou does not pry; lets it lie; leaves Tang Fan be. He knows it will scar over, like Tang Fan's back and all other things that have been survived do. He knows it takes its time.

Everything is different, but nothing has changed. Tang Fan has long been a welcome presence in Sui Zhou’s home, in Sui Zhou’s life, at Sui Zhou’s side. Always been, Sui Zhou allows himself to amend, in moments that are so dark and so quiet. Always will be, Sui Zhou allows himself to admit, in ones where there is enough room made in the crowded clutch-together of himself that he can fit courage between the cracks.

He imposes, but Tang Fan is not an imposition. It had taken Sui Zhou some time to learn that distinction, and more to understand it: that Tang Fan is vim and volume given voice, that he takes up places so that they do not waste empty. That when he makes space for himself where there is no room for him to be, he does not make others smaller for it. Sui Zhou has reoriented and rebuilt around the intrusion of a life he never thought he'd lead and a person he never thought he'd lead it with, but it's the only ask ever made and expectation ever had of him that has been neither a concession nor a cage.

And so, for that, if for nothing else, out of all the other things Tang Fan has done for and given to him, it is enough. It is enough, to have this: a home to stay in, to come back to whenever and whyever left. It is enough, to give this over to Tang Fan as well, that he can have it, too.

It is a few days, after that, before Sui Zhou sees Tang Fan again for longer than in passing. The capital is at peace, but it is not peaceful. Work keeps, but it does not wait. There is always something more for them to do, something new.

He looks as tired as Sui Zhou himself feels, is what he first thinks of the sight of Tang Fan drifting into his room, pale as a vision. He is too soft-limned and unbloodied for Sui Zhou to mistake him for an apparition, a dream walked out from any of his waking nightmares.

"What is it?" Sui Zhou's voice is thick with sleep, words slurring together, woollen in his mouth. He is still picking up the pieces of himself that have been strewn across the boundaries that run between rest and elsewhere. It takes him a moment to pair this Tang Fan, the now, to the last Tang Fan, before. Tang Fan is quiet, throughout, in a way that makes the silence deafeningly loud. "Are you hungry?" he asks, clearer, now. He can't with complete certainty actually remember when he last saw Tang Fan take a meal. Sui Zhou had brought dinner to him in his study tonight, but that does not mean he has eaten. It is as good a place as any other for him to start.

"Would you?" Tang Fan asks him back, soft and flustered, preempting their well-trod steps.

"Yes," Sui Zhou answers. "I'll make you something." He has already risen to meet Tang Fan halfway; now he makes to climb free and to his feet entirely. As his blanket slides free of his legs, snatching away with it the bleeding heat and baring him to the cold air, the broader evening, Sui Zhou is caught by the yearn to gather Tang Fan close, to draw him down into his bed. To wrap him in warmth and softness, to push some sense of surety against the cusp of him until it takes. Then the urge passes, having found its peace in the imagining, and Sui Zhou stands up to attention, and he is none the emptier for its absence.

Tang Fan is still looming in the threshold between his silk screens, hands laced loosely in his lap, the inscrutability of his expression— asperous, in the dim. There is little reason for him to linger, lest he believes he will go back into the night only to find that Sui Zhou does not follow him. Sui Zhou has given him no reason not to trust that he will not go anywhere but alongside; that he will not be anywhere but close by.

"Tang Fan," he says, and though he has gentled it as best he can, Tang Fan still startles, dark eyes flying wide.

"Yes." It's too breathless, too rushed, as though he has run, that he is still running somewhere. Sui Zhou does not know how he sees his bottom lip tremble beneath the nervous scrape of his teeth through the distance and the dark, the bob of his throat as he swallows, but he does. He sees many things that he does not always believe he should, with Tang Fan. Piercing observations and unintended intimacies. All manners and matters that make him feel guilty to have, presumptuous to know.

"I will only be a moment," he says. He has to rely on what he leaves unsaid to speak its own volumes. He is unprepared in the wake of the inching, inexorable ambush of the irresolute tension that is starting to build heavy on the air between them. He is too underdressed for their kitchen.

"Right." Tang Fan's expression edges into something— something. Tighter. Unguarding. "Be quick, then," he tells him. "Don't be long. I won't— it won't keep." And then he leaves, throwing a cagey look back over his shoulder at Sui Zhou until he's slipped away behind the screens and beyond sight.

He has not been himself since they returned to the capital. Sui Zhou knows that. He has not been ignoring that. But— Tang Fan has not been himself for quite some time, now, even before everything. Not wholly. He is changed, anew, and the shape of what he will become is still little more than a callow, cast shadow; unpresent, ungrounded. It will take time to find its feet and root. It could take a life's length and worth and yet still be left budding, undone. And that's all right. Sui Zhou can give Tang Fan time. It is only in weighing up the offer of anything more than that does the question become whether or not he is allowed.

Sui Zhou does not rush, but he does hurry, toeing into his boots within the same economical motions he pulls his middle robe over his sleep clothes. The chill whips over the damp of the sweat beading his nape as he steps out into the courtyard, and he draws his shoulders in close, bracing himself around it.

The lanterns remain unlit, but Sui Zhou can make his way from the heart of his home to its belly on the count of the steps it takes alone, blind. And his walk is not unaccompanied tonight: there is the high-flung moon to guide him; the low candlelight from the kitchen splashing out onto the stone.

Tang Fan starts to speak the moment Sui Zhou's footfalls encroach up the step, so expectant that he does not even see a need to look up from his hands for confirmation. "I don't want," he starts, and then stops, brow furrowing as his fingers fumble apart the knot of the bundle he's laid out on the bench. "Only something simple," he then explains. "Plain."

Sui Zhou can smell the mutton the moment he sees it unwrapped, a pistil of red meat and white fat nestled within the petaled cloth. He circles in to Tang Fan's side, plucking at the cuff of his sleeve in absent habit. It is tailored close to his wrist; he does not need to push it up or tie it out of his way. "All right," he says. He doesn't trust what he'll do will be filling or good on any merit, but he will follow the lead of whatever silly thing that has seized Tang Fan's mind. Perhaps it is as simple as Tang Fan not having the stomach for more or else. He has never been shy about setting his standards and stating his demands to Sui Zhou when it comes to food, after all. If nothing else is certain, Sui Zhou is at least sure that Tang Fan has not tapped into some newfound well of reservation; that he would never if he found one, anyway, not regarding something he finds so important.

Tang Fan does not move much out of his way, but Sui Zhou has grown accustomed to it; has learned to work around and with Tang Fan as much as any other fixture of his kitchen. It is easy to sink into; having his hands to work while Tang Fan is all but pressed to his side even when he is in motion, the carry of his voice and the crowd of his presence.

Sui Zhou can feel Tang Fan's eyes on him like a solid weight, as steady a touch as a hand pressed between his shoulder blades. He can sense the inevitability of his interruption before it comes, but it is only after he has scraped his knife down the mutton, and is turning it over to repeat the same on its other side, that the interruption eventuates.

"That isn't enough," Tang Fan says. "You need to do it again." So Sui Zhou does. Tang Fan clucks and fusses about the vegetables, so Sui Zhou does not rinse them for boiling. Tang Fan tells him to use a different oil, so he sets the one he has fetched aside. He does not comment on the starch, or the salt, the garlic and flower pepper; he resists the chilli and anything else more flavourful.

This is, at least, steps closer to familiar. There are many recipes that Tang Fan has taken to— tweaking, when he is anything from observing to obstructing Sui Zhou in the kitchen. Sui Zhou has not and does not mind it terribly much, for all it can be, in its moments, irritating — he is, ultimately, a world more attached to Tang Fan than he is to any sacrosanctity to form. And Tang Fan does know a great deal about cooking, despite his improficiency in the practice. Typically, though, they will come to their verbal not-blows over some means or methodology that stands to make dramatic changes to taste or texture, not— this. Tonight's adjustments are uncharacteristically innocuous, comparatively unopinionated.

Tang Fan slips away while Sui Zhou is bringing the pot to boil, and returns with a basin of cold water. He sets it down, but does not move his hands from the lip, tsking at Sui Zhou when Sui Zhou lofts a brow at him. When the surface starts to roil, he lifts it up and splashes a lick of cold water out and into the pot, settling the edge off it.

It will not make a dramatic difference to the taste, but Sui Zhou has come to learn this of cooking, too, in the time since he first opened his house and it grew into a home: it is not only about the time anything takes to prepare, but what one does while they are waiting, and who they share this wait with. He did not understand this when he cooked for himself. He struggled to accommodate it as his rooms began to fill. Now, it is ritual that he cooks as though it is part of the recipe itself, that something will simmer slow to give breath and room to conversations; to free his focus to teaching Dong'er new lessons; to allow him the indulgence of pouring Tang Fan wine to temper another appetite between them entirely.

So, he lets Tang Fan slow their time to something ambling, here, too. He waits until Tang Fan tells him that it's enough, he has done enough, and to hurry, that he is starving. As though it is not Sui Zhou meeting his pace, as always, but a trying opposite. Only then does Sui Zhou act with any mind for urgency, plating the meat and drawing up a chair to the bench that Tang Fan does not sit in. And he waits.

The moment Tang Fan's mouth closes around the mutton, his face crumples in on itself, eyes starting to water. And, well: Sui Zhou is somewhat used to, now, perhaps, the crying that comes at his table, from eating his food. It is rarely not joyful. But this is — it does not seem as if it is joyful crying, for all it is not wracking, wept. Tang Fan seems frustrated, more than anything else; his shoulders stringing up tight to his ears, his lip wobbling as he pulls his chopsticks free and sets them back to the dish with a clatter. Even his chewing is agitated, his swallow strained. Sui Zhou does not know what he's done, or if he's even done anything at all. Sui Zhou does not know what to do.

If Tang Fan knows what to do, he does not show it. He does, however, do something, which steps him above Sui Zhou and his stillness — he huffs out, then flails an arm to his face to roughly scrub his sleeve over his eyes.

"Ah!" he snaps, voice tangled, sob-wet. He chafes at his face harder, almost punishing. Sui Zhou feels the urge to reach out for him flinch through his fingers; stutter the pulse in his wrist. "You mustn't get angry with me," Tang Fan mumbles, muffled. "You can't be angry at me."

Sui Zhou cannot imagine growing angry with Tang Fan for this, and not only for not knowing what this is. Frustrated, yes, perhaps, but this is neither quite a shortcoming of his nor a fault of Tang Fan's. Tang Fan, even in his best and brightest moments, can be an exasperation. Sui Zhou's fondness for him is not in spite of this, but in acceptance of it, an acknowledgement that Tang Fan would not be complete if he was without his catches.

"I'm not," Sui Zhou tells him. He knows that much. He can assure Tang Fan of that much.

Tang Fan's laugh is a brittle, bitter, biting thing. "Of course," he says, and it is not cruel, at least not outwardly so, but it is cutting in a way that Sui Zhou finds he is uncomfortable with. "Of course you aren't." Tang Fan swallows. "You don't know," he says. "You don't understand."

Sui Zhou does not. He does not know where to begin, where to try, where Tang Fan even is so that he can go looking for him. It pricks at him sharply, this hot simmer of irritation, that he has been— he doesn't know. Left behind. Expected to follow Tang Fan to a place where he has not been shown or told to go.

Sui Zhou cannot let it boil over in him. Sometimes he does, when Tang Fan needs roughness, or because he is only a man, and men can only take so much. But here, it would be— it would not be good. And so he is thinking of how best to approach asking Tang Fan to explain, that Sui Zhou might come to understand, and then Tang Fan is moving his bare hands to his face, and he is no longer thinking at all. He is reaching out to catch him before he wipes the mess on his fingers there, smears it through his tears.

Tang Fan makes a small, strange sound as he's seized, low in his throat, breath whistling out through his nose. "Sui Zhou?" Sui Zhou flinches at his voice, fearing that he has gripped him too tightly, that he's hurt him unthinkingly, but the pitch is not pained.

"Your hands," Sui Zhou explains. A mind to the hour cannot alone explain as to why his voice is so low; the exertion of cooking and this conversation as to why it is rasping.

"My hands," Tang Fan murmurs. "My…"

They fall limp at the wrist, submitting, resistless, to Sui Zhou's grip. He does not so much as flinch when Sui Zhou begins to draw them in low, to his lap, nor does he recoil when Sui Zhou gently gathers the skirt of his robe around them. Instead, he melts into it, a trusting weightlessness, his fingers curling against Sui Zhou's as Sui Zhou dabs salt and fat from between the webbing, from over his knuckles, from beneath his nails.

This is work. This is merely work. This is the put of something wrong to its rights, as Sui Zhou does and has done before, with innumerable things infinitely less precious than Tang Fan to hold.

When Sui Zhou releases his hands, they fall out from between them to collapse at his sides. He watches Tang Fan's fingers slip between the split in his robes to curl, slowly, into his trousers, but it seems to be an absent thing, indelicate in its severance. And it is this— it is not this. This is not why Sui Zhou allows what he gives himself over to next. There is no excuse of vulnerability in the night or to what has passed before it or anything else for how and for why Sui Zhou takes Tang Fan's face between his hands. The explanation is desire; the catalyst is foolishness. He moves out from underneath the spectre of his senses like a wild animal that has slipped free of its snare, and then Tang Fan's exhale is brushing his wrist, and it is over.

Sui Zhou's breath suspends somewhere aloft in his chest. He watches the drift of his own hands as he gently strokes the pads of his thumbs down the drying tracks of Tang Fan's tears, charting his compulsion to its conclusion. Tang Fan's skin is still flushed red, hot to Sui Zhou's touch with his own simmered frustration. Time does not move, however much Sui Zhou does. Tang Fan does not seem to move, either, as the liminality of everything yawns out and trembles taut.

It must end, eventually. Sui Zhou must end it. He realises this much. It is when he tries to draw away, though, of this mind that he should, that Tang Fan comes back to, springing alive beneath him. He seizes Sui Zhou by the forearms, nails biting into his sleeves, his lean biceps coiling tense. Sui Zhou stops still.

For too long a moment, they only clutch at one another, interrupted, the marooned finding a mooring. Something abjectly unreadable flickers across Tang Fan's face. Sui Zhou feels as though he is held by it and he is holding it in turns of inequal measures. That he can do nothing more with either but wait until the catch meets the tipping point of the ledge out to freefall. Then, Tang Fan looks away, and the weight on Sui Zhou's chest unspools enough that he can breathe around what's left of it.

"You should eat," he finally manages, voice hoarse with the relief of the relent. He should do something, at least, and that is the safest something left for either of him that he can do.

Tang Fan's parted lips flutter around the sharp, narrow shape of his inhale. "You've cooked for me," he says. Distanced; faint. To himself, Sui Zhou thinks, more than to him. His eyes rise up from where they've settled to rest somewhere on Sui Zhou's chest, though they don't quite surmount the climb to meet Sui Zhou's, falling a shy short at his jaw instead.

Sui Zhou does not tell him I did, does not remind him, You asked me to. He does not say anything at all, even when the silence encumbers, the weight encroaching the thin line that borders aching.

Tang Fan swallows, the noise of it loud in the quiet. Piercing; welcome. "I should eat," he agrees, soft. This time, when Sui Zhou tries, Tang Fan lets him let him go.

Sui Zhou could have kissed him. He thinks of how he could have kissed him as he starts to busy himself with cleaning; how little he would have needed to move to draw them together, how open Tang Fan was to it, to everything. He thinks of how he could have kissed him as he watches, out from the corners of his eyes, Tang Fan watching him.

It is not as if the moment is gone; it is that the moment was never there to begin with. To have taken such an opportunity would have been only in a spirit of thieving. But— Sui Zhou is not a stupid man. He is not so disinclined to hoping that it routes him blind. He recognises the turmoil that comes with wanting when he sees it rendered as clear as his own, mirror-reflected.

Tang Fan can become so besotted with his own thinking that he forgets, at times, that the rest of them do not also live in his head with him. He forgets that he is not the only one of the two of them who understands certain things. The only one who can arrive at certain realisations.

He is not subtle, in this searching of his. Whatever it is that Tang Fan is looking for, be it the sense or sign or surety that he cannot ignore accepting as his answer, Sui Zhou will be here when he finds it. Sui Zhou does not know what he is meant to do with this understanding himself, yet, but having it must be more than the half of the whole; the zenith of the journey, the unmaking that leads on home. He will not lose this progress between now and whenever the time will eventually come for him to meet Tang Fan at its crossroads. He may not always be the most patient man, but Sui Zhou has come to be good at waiting. He has taken well to the lessons Tang Fan has taught him.