Tang Fan feels the give of the tripwire on his ankle a split second before Sui Zhou’s hand fists the neck of his robe and yanks him backward. Shock tears a yelp free of him, and his vision whips blurred with the force of the movement. It happens so quickly; a scuffle of steps, the clatter-clang of copper, a slam. There is a rush of air, a strange floral smell. When Tang Fan can open his eyes, his gaze fills with Sui Zhou, arm still half bent over his head, white powder silting down his robes and strewing through his hair.

"Don't move," Sui Zhou says. It's short, clipped tense. He's holding his breath close to his chest. Tang Fan licks at his lips compulsively, then flinches back all too late. Some of the powder has flecked there, on his face; it feels heavy on his tongue, and sizzles like oil drizzled through a hot pan.

Tang Fan does not move— to his best manageable approximation of stillness. It is a difficult ask, a feat that burgeons on near-possibility as the seconds pass, but finally, finally, Sui Zhou lowers his arm and straightens out from underneath it, and Tang Fan takes this change as his cue.

"Must you always be so rough with me?" Tang Fan complains, brushing his fingers over his cheek to sweep it clean. It's a baseless beration, a swipe of levity at the suspended tension. He flits across the few steps Sui Zhou has put between them, hands fussing in his sleeves. That Sui Zhou is already angling away from him on his approach is tell enough that his touch is not yet a welcome thing. "Are you all right?" he asks, softer with sincerity. He thinks he is — Sui Zhou has certainly been hit harder in the past, and by heavier, than some copper pan full of powder falling from a rafter — but he would like to be sure.

Sui Zhou nods, huffing out a breath at the gout of powder that it shakes free of his hair to slap at his mouth. His boots scuff along the floor as he turns himself away, dusting a rough hand down his shoulder. Tang Fan glances past him, to where the kicked-up powder glints within the lone shard of sunlight that is splintering in from a vent overhead.

"He's not here," Tang Fan says. It's an unneeded observation; they'd both known that much the moment they had come through the hidden door. The workroom is small and sparsely furnished, its surfaces sheeted with dust. There is nowhere for someone to hide, and no one has been here for some time.

A waste of their time, then. Tang Fan hopes one of the others has had more luck. He tugs his stare away from the light and turns it back towards where they came from, to the dark, where the door has swung shut. There is no visible handle or apparent mechanism to reopen it nearby. It would be more of a concern if this was not the case, though, really, Tang Fan thinks to himself. It's simply more fool him — them — for triggering the trap in the first place. There's no call for panic yet.

Sui Zhou draws back up alongside him, now less worse for his wear. His eyebrows are specked with the powder. Tang Fan's fingers itch to reach up between them and brush it away. "Can you force it?" he asks.

Sui Zhou's mouth thins, making clear his disbelief that he can, but he does not give voice to that conclusion. He steps forward instead, circling back to the door. And under Tang Fan's quiet inspection, he braces his weight, sets his feet, and swings his weight forward at the shoulder, shoving the bulk of his hard body into the door.

It does not move. "Stop," Tang Fan says. This is unneeded, too; Sui Zhou has stopped for him already. But still— to be sure. "He wouldn't risk trapping himself here." That would be a fool's oversight. Feng Jizhou has proven himself to be many things, some more questionable than others, but he is neither sloppy nor shortsighted.

"The switch will be somewhere," Sui Zhou says. "To a wall, or near it." He rolls his shoulder, then shakes his arm out, loose, letting it drop back to a hang at his side. Tang Fan looks to it for a beat, almost instinctively, as though he can tell at a glance as to whether or not Sui Zhou is favouring it. He can't: that takes prying, and prodding, usually of the more palpable persuasion. He doesn't seem to be.

"Tang Fan?" Sui Zhou's voice has come closer, and he with it. Tang Fan blinks at him, back to attention, adopting a pout at the furrow in Sui Zhou's brow, the hard set of his jaw.

"What?" Tang Fan licks his lips, nose scrunching up at the sour sapour of the powder still lingering there. "Don't fuss at me," he chides, batting a hand through the air between them to wave him off. "Go look."

Sui Zhou's frown does not relent, but he turns away and goes as directed, so Tang Fan no longer has to look at it. His worry — or so seems to be the case — is misplaced. Tang Fan is simply distracted by thinking, that's all. There is a lot for him to think about. He is the least pressing concern Sui Zhou could have at this given moment.

Tang Fan sets about doing his part. It's not the first hidden room he's ever been trapped in, in some way or another. He knows his way around their fundamentals. He draws in close to the nearest wall, braces his hands on it, and tries to peer through the dim for… something. Anything that does not blend. There is not much room to cover, and any lived-in clutter that may have been here, before, is now long cleared away. The house beyond had still looked inhabited, merely left unattended for a matter of days, if that. The hidden room is different; apparently abandoned to unremembrance.

It should not take long, between the two of them, to turn everything over. Tang Fan is already starting to feel warm; sweat beading on his neck and chest, sticking his shirt beneath his arms, down his back. The air seems to be staling, too, run thin enough that it doesn't fill his chest out when he breathes it in. There is still no call for panic yet. If they cannot find their way out, someone will eventually find their way in to them.

A dissonant thud disrupts the dull percussion of their search soon enough. Tang Fan straightens at once from his low stoop, abandoning his sift-through of some stacked kindling, a relieved sort of satisfaction swelling through him. It lasts for but a split second before it is suffocated by sense: it's a full sound, yes, of a strong, sudden movement, but it is too fragile for all its heaviness, and it has rung out from the wrong direction.

"Sui Zhou?" Tang Fan calls out, though he is already spinning on his heel to see him, too impatient to wait for his answer. He looks to the noise and finds Sui Zhou, knelt to the floor, bent over himself as though he is walling around a gingerness, and Tang Fan does not think twice. He does not even think at all. Thinking would waste time that could be spent doing, and he is already tendering it to run to Sui Zhou, his bounds too quick for the room, yet his rush too slow for his dread.

"Wait—" Sui Zhou starts, but whatever caution or warning he means to give comes far too late. Tang Fan is already at his side with such a haste that the hand Sui Zhou holds up to ward him back skims up his thigh to flatten over his belly.

"Sui Zhou!" Tang Fan gasps out over him. His mouth has set out on its own, independent of his head. "Are you hurt? Stand up if you're not," he demands. "You can't frighten me like this." He is still not thinking yet; can't think yet, can't spare the pause to put himself together enough to think yet, not while he is poring over Sui Zhou.

"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou stresses, hoarse, "move back," and then his hand on Tang Fan shoves out to push him away. The force behind it is curbed in such check that Tang Fan only stumbles back a few steps, but it stings elsewhere, beneath the skin, slamming the breath out of his chest.

"Don't!" Tang Fan hurls back, reeling. His gaze snaps back onto Sui Zhou, and then he stops suddenly, going very, very still. He has been looking at Sui Zhou, but the added distance lets him see Sui Zhou; the heave of his chest and the sweat drenching his forehead, the red slowly creeping up his neck. The tremble in his arms and his slack-splayed legs; the hard line of his cock jutting from his lap, telltale even through the tamp of his skirts.

It is laughable, how immediately it all falls into place around that one lone piece. Tang Fan does not feel much inclined to laugh about it now, but perhaps he will in some due time. For now, it's a humourless revelation that has knocked him lightheaded, spurred a shivery heat to trail up the backs of his thighs, knotting low in his pitted gut.

"The powder," he says. The powder. They had known the magistrate had been poisoned; that much had been determinable from the coroner's report, from seeing the body for themselves. But Tang Fan had not thought— he had not thought about everything he had seen. Not beyond a passive acknowledgment that death's last acts on a body were often indignities.

Feng Jizhou had washed him, after. Tang Fan had thought it a curious attempt to hide evidence, for all that was left behind. They couldn't determine the whole of what the poison did to a still-living body, yes, but in the dead—

It had looked like there had been a fight. That the poison was brute sabotage, an assurance for success. Seeing Sui Zhou now is an arrival to a far more grim perspective. Tang Fan no longer suspects the magistrate simply fought for his life, but that he had burned so mad and so bright with the powder that he'd tried to claw his way out of his own smouldering flesh.

Tang Fan takes a step. "Don't," he preempts, when Sui Zhou stiffens rigid at the sound. He knows what Sui Zhou means to do, but it is too late for that, too. And even if it wasn't, Tang Fan would never accept it nonetheless. He would help him. That's what they do. "I am— as well," he explains. Not as much as Sui Zhou, and not as badly, but it has touched his bare skin, he has swallowed what he has licked from his mouth.

Sui Zhou folds in on himself in understanding, full body, fightless. Tang Fan swallows around the tightness tying his throat, then intrudes on the last of the space that Sui Zhou has acceded, regathering close to his side. He looks down at him for a moment, unsure of what to do, what he should, or what he even can. Then, he lifts a hand from his side and bares his wrist to the prod of his fingers. He charts the river of his veins, wading over the froth of his pulse, into the seethe of wrongness. He can do this much. He has not known Lao Pei for all these years without learning some of his trade, taught and watched. It's too muddied for him to tell, though, past that, the shape of what is shadowing the shallows of himself. But then, he doesn't need to, does he, when the preconditional proof is in the presence.

Feng Jizhou is neither sloppy nor shortsighted. He would not have made a poison and left it without a cure. If the antidote was once kept here, he has since taken it away with him. Even if he knew what comprised it, he does not think he could determine its remedy, and help will not find them within their now-borrowed time. And so: if the effect is arousal through excess, they may be able to alleviate its affect on them through traditional methods.

Tang Fan can only hope it will be enough. He reaches for his waist. "Undress," he says, his voice blessedly steady.

He hears Sui Zhou's ragged inhale, a warning for his coming protest. "Tang Fan—"

"—Sui Zhou." Tang Fan does not quite look at him. He does not think he will manage to hold firm if he meets his gaze, not when he is already struggling to press on. "It needs to— we need to. So we should." He unwinds his belt; wraps it around his pendant, his chopsticks. When he tries to lower himself down to rest them on the ground, his knees buckle, and he drops them the rest of the way before staggering back upright. He can't hide it from Sui Zhou, and he does not try to.

Sui Zhou's silence needles the tender skin of his nape; scrapes down between his shoulder blades. He can feel his hackles rising beneath it. Can you not remember what it looked like? he thinks furiously. How can you just accept it without fight? You'll pay with your life? Mine? He knows his frustration is unearned, that it is the lash-out of his panic from where it has been crowded up and cornered. Neither of them deserve it. "So we should," he repeats, instead of voicing that, or worse. "It's warm." Tang Fan dusts his hands down his thighs, dabbing his palms dry. "It's— it's getting to be too warm."

Tang Fan turns his head, at that, pointed. It does not have to sit with Sui Zhou long. "All right," he cedes, and then he is moving. Tang Fan can hear the rustle of his pleated skirts as his weight tips forward, the coarse chuff of threaded hemp chafing over leather as his gloves are unknotted.

"You have to hurry on with it," Tang Fan tells him, rattled breathless by the relief blossoming in his chest, too much and too soon. He feels too finely narrowed to the blush on his cheeks, the violent wobble of his legs where he is still shaking his way through trying to hold himself upright. He dredges a hand up from his side and futilely fans at his lit-up skin, willing the relief of cool as he turns away all the further, impossibly, from Sui Zhou.

It's foolish of him to look away while Sui Zhou strips, truly. It is nothing Tang Fan has not seen before. No part of him and this is a revelation. He has watched Sui Zhou undress with his selfsame military efficiency countlessly in the past. No wasted motion, no lingering indulgence. Time spent as needed with not a second more spared. It is not unlike how Tang Fan has imagined Sui Zhou would undress for— for someone. For this, if it was not like this, and Tang Fan could— could look. If Tang Fan was part of the intimacy instead of only privy to it.

So he does not try to look upon it all too closely, however perfectly he can envision it from memory, anyway: the sheen of sweat on Sui Zhou's skin where it is pulled taut over the corded coil of his muscles; the veins in his arms; the speckling scatter of his storial scars.

Tang Fan's throat scrapes dry when he swallows. For all the spit in his mouth, he can't seem to wet it. He sees the tremor in Sui Zhou's arm, out from the corner of his eye. He follows the line of it compulsively, from the slope of Sui Zhou's shoulder all the way down to where his knuckles are paling pressure-white from gripping his own thighs ironclad tight. The way his fingers are twisted draws the thin fabric taut, casts a stark frame around the bulge of his cock where it is straining against the seam.

Tang Fan jerks his head away so quickly his jaw clicks, teeth clacking together. He has known this of Sui Zhou, too, for quite some time. Ever since those glimpses in the Northern Administrative Court, during the first tumultuous days of their converging cases, at least. A garnered impression later confirmed through glances in the bath, that first night after Sui Zhou had taken him in. Tang Fan had stared his fill brashly, even for him, but he hadn't known, then, that he had come to be where would become home. That he had actually met who it would become home with.

This is not even the first time he has seen Sui Zhou hard, at that. Sui Zhou is too often hindered with injury, and when he is stripped down, just as now, so that Lao Pei can get to some bend or break or rend and mend it, it is— impossible, not to notice the primality of how he reacts to pain. There is an immensity to Sui Zhou's presence that towers him, a statured prowess, but his very physicality is well matched to it. Tang Fan likes to think he's been very good at not gawping, though, each and every time. But he has never had to face it when he's felt like he's about to drown underneath the drumming flood of his own fever, either. There is no blood or bruise to bound him, now, from sinking into a kneel, drawing him down to heel level, too, with Sui Zhou. From pressing his hands over Sui Zhou's on his thighs as he noses into his lap and breathes in the deep scent of him, the heat.

The extensity of that thought and the enormity of its appetition are unwarned for, unbidden. Tang Fan makes an awful little sound, a flustered tell. "You do not have to wait for me," he says, breathy, to try and distract from it, stare fixing on his own fingers where they are tangling with the ties of his robe. "You can— you can start."

His hands will not work for him, even pressed by observation, and he struggles, for a moment, before his legs give way out from underneath him. Tang Fan goes to his knees too heavily, almost as if portended, with a shock that reverbs to the quick and a yelp that echoes. He hears Sui Zhou's nails scratch down the cotton in his grip, somehow, impossibly, over the dirge of all his own noise. Dizzying heat thrills through his belly, the rolling fog in his head growing thick. Tang Fan whimpers, he thinks, or it sounds as if he does, when he finally, finally manages to part the ties. He shudders and jerks, as though struck, eyes squeezing tightly shut, when his hand dips beneath his shirt and meets the shock of his own skin.

He can hear Sui Zhou's breath catch, so hot and damp, the swell of the sound filling out the room. It makes plain how— how affected he truly is. How soon his arrival will be to some, some precipice. One where he might not even have a hold over enough of himself left anymore to do much else but give in to the shadow of a suggestion that Tang Fan can barely make out. He can guess at it, though, in obscene detail, just from the sliver of a glimpse of what he can see, what Sui Zhou cannot stop him from seeing. The rapid ruinous run of his imagination more than capably fills in and out the rest.

Still. Still Sui Zhou does not come closer, he does not touch himself, and that must change. Tang Fan must change it quicker than he has so far managed.

"I'm not— precious!" Tang Fan protests. He can hear the waver in his own voice, disturbing the pond surface of his petulance. The ripples give way to what is lurking beneath, something all wound up in and on itself, too akin to fear. Haplessly unconvincing. But he must still try. He must keep trying, for Sui Zhou's if not both their sakes. "I have been intimate."

It is vague enough to stand truer than a lie. He need not elaborate further, and Sui Zhou need not know any better. There is no time. There is— it does not matter. Tang Fan would simply rather that they survived this. That's all there need be to it.

For a stilling moment, a terrible breath that rattles on and rasps out, Tang Fan thinks that Sui Zhou will never speak again, that he will stay kneeled where he is until he kills them both there. When he does, relief brings the sound too close to Tang Fan's ear, close enough to touch, not close enough to reach, not anywhere near what he wants.

"Tang Fan." His name sounds so heavy in Sui Zhou's mouth, like it hurts, a bit, to hold. "Your— on your back."

Tang Fan goes down as directed, scrambling and shaking. His eyes slide shut until he can only make his way by feeling to it. He hears the knobs of his elbows smack against the ground, the flutter of his robes fanning out beneath him. His sleeves are still twined around his arms, tying them fast to the slip of his body. He sucks in a breath only to pant it back out in a gasp when he draws his knees up to his chest; his cock snubs up where his thigh hinges to his hip, tip leaking wet. He dips his fingers beneath his waistband; latches them there.

There is a dull scuffing; a thud. Tang Fan's eyes fly open, tear-bleary, to take in the sight of Sui Zhou kneeling up after him in pursuit, biceps flexed taut as he fists tighter at his thighs. His face is angled just slightly, just so, keeping Tang Fan from being pinned underneath his stare. Tang Fan knows without the need of the confirmation that would come from checking over Sui Zhou's shoulder that Sui Zhou has placed himself in such a way that Tang Fan will be hidden at first glance, should anyone find them. It's a small thing; a care for his modesty, however misappropriated. It touches Tang Fan somewhere that sinks in too deep, given their circumstances.

He can see Sui Zhou like this, too, and Sui Zhou can see him. More of him than he would, were he to be turned over onto his hands and knees. Tang Fan takes a breath; another. He feels so— so hot. So dizzy that he's sick with it, head swaying off his shoulders, body splintering to follow. He scrubs a sweaty palm over his sweatier face, shakes it out, then drops it back, all too heavily, to his waist.

"You can," he says foolishly; left half undone and cast out aimlessly. "You can, you can— touch." And then, before he can stop himself, because all Sui Zhou does is clutch at his own thighs even more tightly, his mouth thinning pale, Tang Fan blurts out, "It looks like it, that it hurts." It does. Sui Zhou looks— he looks— Tang Fan is not hurting yet, not like that. Will he be soon? Or, or will it be okay, if he starts touching himself when it sparks up? If he keeps going, and going, and smothers the scald and sting of the flame before it can kick up?

Sui Zhou's tongue clicks sharply when he parts his lips, like his mouth has run dry, too. His eyes are blown dark, his cheeks flushed red. It is how he looks, sometimes, in the courtyard, when he is running the drills he does; sun-warmed and sweating, exerted, a wildness bleeding through his focus. When Tang Fan is only half pretending that he's not watching, as enamoured as he is entranced. As he's done for many, many yearning years now.

"It's all right," Sui Zhou says. "It's all right."

It does not look all right. It cannot possibly be all right. "It looks like it hurts," Tang Fan insists, desperate. "That it— that you are hurting. Please."

However much his thoughts keep meandering, out and out and away from him, Tang Fan notices how Sui Zhou tenses, as if he is bracing for a blow, as though he is fighting it. Tang Fan's breath burns where it blooms in his lungs; knots in his throat when he exhales.

"Sui Zhou," he forces out through it. His tongue has gone so thick in his mouth that he feels like he is about to gag on it. "I want it." He shivers; startles. That's not— that's not what he should be saying. That's not what he wanted to say. But now, now the dam of his mouth is open and his words are all flooding out from somewhere else, a fount deep in the pit of him that streams past his senses. He can no longer get a thought around it edgewise; he can only plunge in and try to swim through.

Sui Zhou shivers and startles, too. His head snaps up, and he finally looks at Tang Fan again, his mouth pressed even more tightly together, nostrils flaring around the shallow pants of his breath. He is holding back, Tang Fan thinks, or he thinks that he thinks, anyway, and he doesn't like it. He doesn't like that. Sui Zhou always hurts himself for Tang Fan's sake, or at least for what he thinks is Tang Fan's sake. Tang Fan seems to get little say or stake in his sake when Sui Zhou is set in his way. But he is— Sui Zhou is not going to hurt Tang Fan if he touches himself. He's not going to hurt Tang Fan if he touches him. He'll do anything but.

Tang Fan shifts his hips, and pain lances through him, white-hot. He soothes it over by shoving his hand down between his legs with a flimsy, scrambling yelp, digging the heel of his palm down into the base of his cock. He feels himself drip against the crease of his hip, slicking a sticky smear along his smouldering skin, leaking through the thin cotton of his pants.

"I want it," he tries again. It is still not entirely what he wants, but his head is a little clearer with it. His consciousness is a knife in his hand, cutting through the addling fog, so long as he keeps pressing on his cock where it is swollen thick and twitching against the cup of his palm, hips hitching up to meet it. "It, it hurts?" So it does. "I want— I don't want it to hurt," Tang Fan professes, urgent, "I don't want you to be hurt, please, let me, I will—"

Sui Zhou's hands slide from his thighs to slap down against the earth; a thunderous clap of sound that cuts clean through the room. It catches the forward sway and sag of his body before it folds him into himself, if only barely. "Tang Fan," he hisses, strained.

He doesn't say anything else. Tang Fan does, instead. "Come here," he begs. "Come here, let me touch you." Must he keep asking, when there is no such time for it? Sui Zhou never does seem to listen to what he most wants to hear. Tang Fan does not— he wishes he could stop begging. But it is begging, with Sui Zhou, that always seems to serve best.

So seen before, and so proven here again: Sui Zhou does. He crawls the very last of the way up and he takes what's left of the room he needs that Tang Fan hasn't yet made for him, until his thighs are tucked beneath Tang Fan's legs and Tang Fan's knees are hemming in his hips. Tang Fan gasps at that first long scrape of contact, all but bared skin to skin, and starts to tremble cold from how hot Sui Zhou feels. He burns, he's burning, blistering to bone, blaring brighter than fever.

"Yes," Tang Fan babbles, "yes, here, Sui Zhou, that's it." There is more, welling up in his mouth, and he tries, he tries, but he can't— "I want to feel you," he grits out, forlorn, "I want—" He chokes on the rest as another flare of pain surges through him, barely blunted, now, by the heady knead of his hand against his cock. So soon, it's too soon for it to be almost not enough, anymore, already. It's intoxicating; it aches; how can Sui Zhou stand it?

"Do you want my hands?" Tang Fan whines at himself, helpless, wide-eyed. "My mouth? My—" Sui Zhou's hand finds his arm, then starts easing it from the tangle of his sleeve, and Tang Fan moans, blood singing crescendo, when Sui Zhou's callous-roughed fingers nudge over bare skin. It helps. It, it hinders the hurt, to be touched.

"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou interrupts, terse. "Tang Fan." Every word sounds like it is severing through his sinew to be torn free, bloody. It's bracing; like finding a stone underfoot while submerged in a pond. It gives Tang Fan leverage enough to push his face to the surface, if only for a stolen moment.

"It's like," Tang Fan gasps, "ah, a five stone powder chunyao." Almost: disorienting, ruining, compelling. Arousing. Terrible and amazing and worse. So he's heard of either, at least. So he's finding out now for both, even.

What a damning concoction. What a horrific way to have to die alone. At least they are not alone. They may yet die, though. Tang Fan can't— he won't let them. He mustn't.

"It addles the mind," Sui Zhou agrees, or perhaps he affirms. Tang Fan can't be sure. Sui Zhou is shaking so much. Every time they touch, skin to skin, Tang Fan feels a trickle of pleasure down his spine, followed in close quarters by a plummeting chill at how Sui Zhou flinches back from it, cowers in. "Heats the body," he adds, after a moment. "Rouses the blood."

"I know! I know, I know," Tang Fan bites out, whimpering. He does not know what he knows, only that he knows it enough to protest his knowing it, to use the claim of the knowledge to make Sui Zhou stop. None of this is comforting. None of this helps them. And so long as Sui Zhou stalls with speaking, they cannot, they will not—

Tang Fan slips; sinks back underwater. "Do you not want to touch me?" he chokes out. "I want you to, I want, I want to touch you."

He tries to take his hand out from between his legs, but the moment that pressure alleviates, it's as if— it's indescribable. It's agonising, yet not quite; something worse with a promise of something wonderful behind it. Tang Fan hears a keening wail cleave through the air, and it must be his, because it's so close. It must be his, because it does not sound like Sui Zhou at all, and Sui Zhou's mouth is not moving, even as the rest of him does. Sui Zhou bolds and blurs and then his hands are on him, one to his arm, the other cradling the back of his head, catching him when he throws himself back into a writhing arch. It feels good. Sui Zhou's hands feel good on him, palm to skin, fingers dipping through Tang Fan's hair.

"I do," Sui Zhou rasps. Broken, and small, and just for him. "I want to."

It sounds torn out, like all the rest. Taken unfairly. But it is Tang Fan's, now, to have. "More," he pleads, "then do it more, do it properly." Please and Sui Zhou and I want are all tripping tangled on his tongue — he wants to say all of them, and so he cannot get his mouth around a single one.

"All right," Sui Zhou concedes to him. He sounds ruined, already. Endurant of every past sufferance only to bend the knee and break to this: Tang Fan and his folly, of all things. "All right. I have you."

His hands find Tang Fan's hips. Tang Fan sighs reedily as his fingers slide beneath his waistband, the backs of his knuckles stroking softly over his skin. His eyes drift shut as he feels the fabric loosen and drag, Sui Zhou's unsteady hands slowly stripping it down his thighs, his knees, his calves. He does not have to move at all; Sui Zhou moves him for himself, however much or little he needs, until Tang Fan is finally laid back out bared.

"You'll take care of me," Tang Fan says. Sui Zhou presses in over him, hesitant, hedged. The rest of his clothes have fallen away, somewhere. Somehow. Tang Fan doesn't know when. He did not see him undress. He gasps aloud when Sui Zhou's cock nudges against his own. He's so. He is so—

"Yes," Sui Zhou promises. "Yes."

"I'll take care of you," Tang Fan says. He must. He will.

Sui Zhou bites down on his bottom lip, nostrils flaring. There is sweat at his temples, fogged milky white from the remains of the powder he did not manage to dust from his hair. When he blinks, it is a slow shuttering, a hazy unfocus, as though he is trying to shake free the last clings of a long sleep. His hips stutter forward, sliding him in tighter between Tang Fan's thighs, dragging their cocks together in one long, aching slide. It is almost certainly unintentional. Tang Fan feels, with a cold, roiling shiver, how his cock leaks against Sui Zhou's, how his precome smears over their skin and strings between their shafts even after Sui Zhou has slid back into another shallow thrust.

"Oh," Tang Fan moans out softly, trembling, his toes curling. "Oh, Sui Zhou, yes, would you?" Sui Zhou's own gasp is piercing as he brings them together again, again. "I have been thinking about this for so long," he confesses uncontrollably.

Sui Zhou cants his hips, too rough, too hard, the force enough to surprise them both. He makes a noise that Tang Fan doesn't understand, but feels the need to apologise for, anyway. He should apologise, really. He doesn't mean to. He doesn't mean to say these things. They're terrible things to give to Sui Zhou, here of all places. They're terrible ways to become known.

"Sorry," Tang Fan amends, maudlin. "Sui Zhou— ah, sorry. Gently," he coaxes next. "Gently." Sui Zhou's thrusts stagger, slow, his weight easing back off, up. His control is remarkable. "Good," Tang Fan tells him, sighing. "Oh, good, yes, there you are."

It would help if Tang Fan could explain, perhaps, how he means it when he says— when he says anything. It's not making a liar out of him, this powder, only loosening his tongue enough to make his muddled thoughts leave his mouth unchecked. But surely Sui Zhou has thought the same things of him before? They have been together for so long. It does not have to mean more. It does not have to mean anything at all. It certainly does not have to mean for Sui Zhou what it does for Tang Fan. He asks for a lot from Sui Zhou, too much, really, but he would never ask for that.

Tang Fan cannot help but wonder if it would be better if this compelled one to claim falsehoods instead. At least if they knew they were both lying, then, perhaps— "Why is it only me?" he can't help but ask. "Why do I have to, I can't, I can't stop talking, but you won't. You are fighting it so much." Tang Fan can't stop himself, yes, as much as he wants to, but perhaps it is not helping their case and cause to resist it so much. Perhaps Sui Zhou would feel better if he let go. "What is there you can't have me know?"

"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou gasps tightly. "It's not." What it is not, he does not say.

"It's only me," Tang Fan presses. "Only me, Sui Zhou." Yes, there must be things Sui Zhou cannot divulge, secrets he has been shaped to die for the sake of keeping, but Tang Fan cannot accept that. Not here. And if it means they survive— he wants to tell Sui Zhou, show him that he is safe, here, that all will be well, but Sui Zhou moves against him in such a way that is— he cannot think. He simply cannot think of it anymore.

"Oh," he whispers instead, stunned. "Oh, Sui Zhou, you are so— you really are so big, aren't you?" The slide of Sui Zhou's cock against his own is so smooth, now. So loud. "I don't know how I will take you," Tang Fan admits.

Sui Zhou makes a wretchedly familiar sound, at that, something miserably clutched around startled pain, and Tang Fan's breath stops cold.

"Sui Zhou!" He reaches for him in a blind panic, hands fleeting over vague hills and valleys of his skin until he can gather up his grip's fill of his hair, his wrist. "Sui Zhou, are you hurting? Is it getting worse?"

"No," Sui Zhou grunts out, winded. "I— no."

Tang Fan breathes in shakily, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment against a sharp pang of damp pain. "Then don't frighten me like that!" he snaps. "You know I, I have told you this already." He does not— he does not like how weak his voice is, of a sudden, and how watery it sounds.

"Only this," Sui Zhou promises softly, in lieu of any apology.

"What?" says Tang Fan, faltering on the uptake.

It takes Sui Zhou a moment's struggle, his face crumpling, teeth baring as he breathes in. "I will touch you only as much as needed, when it is needed," he says, finally. "Not— no further." He speaks it so quietly, in that low low voice of his that makes Tang Fan want to bite through his bottom lip. If he did, it may explain away the pained sound that is trying to tear out past his teeth.

As little as he needs, and only when he needs it. So not— not inside, then. Sui Zhou will not have him.

"I know," Tang Fan says, instead of, thankfully, anything along the lines of a betrayal to his thoughts on that. Small mercies in grave slights. "You won't hurt me," he assures him. "You can't hurt me," and, "you're so good." Sui Zhou shudders, the circle of his hips snapping short, grinding their cocks together in a too-rough scrape. Tang Fan moans, a terrible, strangled sound, and clutches at Sui Zhou all the tighter.

He wants to put his lips to Sui Zhou's temple, to, to, to make him feel better. To remind him that he is here, enduring. To lap at the sweat there, the salt. Tang Fan wants to taste him. He wants to— oh. He wants to slide his lips down Sui Zhou's cock and swallow him into his throat, he wants to open him up on his tongue and fuck him on his mouth until he comes. He wants Sui Zhou. He wants Sui Zhou to touch him, and he wants to touch Sui Zhou, as much and the same. He wants everything, and now, and forever, but not here, not where and when Sui Zhou looks a torture away from hilting a dagger in his own ribcage.

He wants because he has wanted, and it is such a foolish thing, a tragically timed reminder, and it does not matter. It does not mean a thing. Seasons pass, passion tempers, and he and Sui Zhou will shift again and grow around one another anew. Change is the world's only constant, its sole immutable truth.

"Sui Zhou," he gasps. He can barely get his name off his tongue; it trips, and slurs, and scatters. It hurts, it feels good, it hurts, he's burning, his chest is so full. "Sui Zhou, Sui Zhou—"

"Tang Fan," he thinks Sui Zhou might say, maybe, he cannot be sure, and then Sui Zhou is bearing down, pressing in, heavy and heady and everywhere. It is so much, it is too much, and there is nowhere for Tang Fan to go, there is nowhere he would rather be.

It is so sudden. Somehow, it is so sudden. He comes, and comes, and comes, and it shudders and screams on and on and out rent-through him until— until it stops. Everything finally stops.

For a moment, Tang Fan is wiped clean to nothing. Snuffed out. Refined pure. He is not in his body. He is not of his body at all. His tongue presses to the roof of his mouth. His chest caves with taken breath.

Then, then—

Then.

He reactualises in fragments. The fire, once-doused, rears back up under his skin, reigniting his blood. Burns hotter. Blinds brighter. It hurts. He thinks, it— it hurts. But there is more underneath it for him to reach out for. A mooring; a noose. There is a wetness trickling down his neck; another, dripping into the hinge of his shoulder. A scratch of teeth cinching with a clack; the scrape of cracked-dry lips; the slap of damp breath. There is a wetness— Tang Fan is soaked down underwater lake-dredge drenched already, with the sweat slicking the backs of his thighs and his temples and sticking him to the tamped earth floor bare skin to surface, with the spend splattered up his quivering sucked-in belly. But there is a wetness, and it is none and neither of those and that.

There is a wetness on his neck and his shoulder, but when Tang Fan tries to twine his fingers around and tether it, it’s too slippery sharp. It sieves through the meat of his palm and splits the bone and slithers free of the snare of his head. His neck is cold; like a breeze; like the plunge into a river in autumn; like being followed in the dark by something that can and will harm you. His shoulder is hot; like a fire; like wood that has been left to bake beneath a sunbeam; like the bloom that bursts up from the garden bed of your ribcage when you are suffocating to death.

Tang Fan can taste the smell of blood on the roof of his mouth. Sui Zhou has stopped still, stagnate. That’s no good. That’s no good, Tang Fan knows, as much as anything can be knowable, here, right now, or anywhere, later. Sui Zhou is still hard, still so very hard, his cock thick and twitching hot where it is tucked up tight between Tang Fan’s thrown open thighs. They can't stop yet.

His hands are held— his hands are held by holding, one tangled in the tugged loose tresses of Sui Zhou's hair where it has matted sweat-damp to his nape, the other circling his wrist. It is very important that Tang Fan does not let go. He can remember this. If he does not hold Sui Zhou down on him, Sui Zhou will get up. If he does not hold Sui Zhou's wrist, he won't be able to find what he is looking for, or he'll lose what it is he is supposed to be finding. Something like that.

It is very important that Sui Zhou keeps moving. Tang Fan turns his face into Sui Zhou’s until he is nosing through the fall of his hair, matted over his cheek. Until he can see how tightly shut his eyes are; the glint of the tears flecking the clump of his dark eyelashes. Until he can hear the sound that Sui Zhou is biting down on making; some wet sob choke, strangled thin.

“Oh.” Tang Fan’s voice sounds very strange. Hears dry. But it feels sodden in his mouth, spit-slicked. “Oh, don’t cry.” That is him begging, too. Bereft. He tries to pet down Sui Zhou’s nape, but the swoop of his fingers catches in the threading of the strands of his hair, and he feels the tug on Sui Zhou’s scalp reverberate through his hand. Feels it brand the hinge of his throat, with a collaring lash of hot breath, out from where Sui Zhou’s mouth has come to lie.

“Don’t cry, Guangchuan, I can’t bear it.” It cuts cruel to say, that truth; stings his tongue. He doesn’t mean to. He doesn’t want to wound. But the words are filling out his mouth. He can’t stop saying them. If he does not speak their peace, he cannot breathe through the space their absolution leaves. If he cannot breathe, he cannot hold on, and then Sui Zhou will be gone, and the sum of his parts will have been tendered for naught.

Sui Zhou sucks in a terrible, shattering breath, and then stills, a little more. Quietens. Tearfall drips onto Tang Fan's face, slowly trickling down into the catchment of his jaw, his ear, his neck. It comes with all the brevity of a summer shower, and so goes having given little relief. Sui Zhou is trying so much for him that he is trembling into shreds around the ask.

“There.” Tang Fan breathes in through his leashed teeth. His sigh tastes sweeter to him, now, for its praise. That’s good. That’s better. But Sui Zhou is still not moving. Tang Fan really has to do something about that. He pets at Sui Zhou's hair again; thumbs his wrist; presses a whine of an exhale into his cheek. Pushes his throat into Sui Zhou’s mouth until he feels the hint of his teeth against it.

“You’re so good,” he babbles. “You feel so good.” He hitches his hips; rolls them up. It feels— it feels. But it ruts Sui Zhou’s cock against his thigh, too, and that’s good. That’s what is needed. Sui Zhou grunts against his neck, coarse, clotted. Tang Fan feels his hips twitch against him, leashed in, all quivering restraint. Almost, just—

“I’m sorry,” Tang Fan gasps, and then he whimpers, face scrunching up. No, no, no— “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I— please don’t be upset with me. I can’t. I really can’t take it.”

"I'm not," Sui Zhou says. It bleeds out into his neck, stymying the resurge of his sob. It seems like it hurts him.

He is such an obedient man, Sui Zhou. So acquiescent to the demand that is Tang Fan. Tang Fan cannot remember a time that Sui Zhou had not— flowed, so easily, for him. A time when he did not pour so much.

"It's my fault," Tang Fan says. "It's my— you know how clumsy I am." He thumbs, again, at the thread of Sui Zhou's pulse. That it is there still comforts him; its timbre does not. "It should have been me."

"No," Sui Zhou hisses, the word pulled out. His lips draw back into a snarl, breath whistling wet. Tang Fan can feel the work of his jaw as he tries to force out whatever it is that is stuck fast in his throat.

"Don't speak," Tang Fan says, when he has waited, and waited, and all that has come forth from Sui Zhou is a sickening, spluttered retch. "You don't have to speak. You just have to— you only have to—" He pushes up, keening miserably when the jut of his hip finds Sui Zhou's other hand, the fetter of his fingers forcing him back flat. The whole of his hand could span Tang Fan's waist if he set it there. If he held him with both hands, his fingers could belt together. Tang Fan's head spins around the thought of it, the tactual imagining of Sui Zhou's grip digging in, engulfing him. "Please," he begs, "please, more."

He does not think Sui Zhou has come yet. It does not feel like he has. It's been so long. Surely it's been so long already. It won't do.

"What do you need?" Sui Zhou dredges out. It seems that is an easier ask to speak than whatever held court in his head a moment before it. "From me?"

"You," Tang Fan says. That comes easily, but not the rest, to move and to come and to do something swept away at their cusping. "You," he tries again, to no greater success. Ah, well. He does not need to clarify it. You is a simpler truth; an adequate instruction. You is more than enough.

"I've not hurt you?" Sui Zhou whispers. He moves, he does, if barely, if only just. Clipped circles of his hips that nudge his cock bluntly against Tang Fan in a way that he cannot seem to help, to his apparent distress. "Tang Fan." Tang Fan steels his drifting focus with a sharp breath, and Sui Zhou takes one, too. "I'm not hurting you?" he asks again, quieter.

"You would know," Tang Fan swears, convinced. If Sui Zhou has not taken his last answer to heart, be it he can't, or he won't, then Tang Fan will give him this one instead. "If you hurt me— I would tell you. I can take this. I can take more," he urges, whining. "You've barely given me anything at all."

He sweeps Sui Zhou's hair over his shoulder, baring his nape to the clammy compress of his palm. Sui Zhou moves against him, the shift of his weight deliberate, now, desired. Tang Fan does not know when he became hard again, or if he even became soft at all after he came, but the heft of Sui Zhou atop him drags it back to the forefront of his awareness. Reminds him of how his cock is pressed between them, the hot line of his shaft pinned to the flat of Sui Zhou's belly, rutting against soft skin and fat drawn over hard muscle, slit leaking precome in steady ebbs into wiry hair. He is close again, he realises, with a chilling spike of panic. He is close again, and Sui Zhou still seems so far.

"You need to come," Tang Fan tells Sui Zhou. He claws at his neck, breath gusting hot against Sui Zhou's cheek as he tries to, as he tries to— something. He needs to do something. He tries to inhale deep, but it tears out of him jaggedly, midway, as he pushes his hips up only for his feet to skid out along the floor, losing him what little purchase he's managed to gain. Sui Zhou grunts against him, and Tang Fan can feel the power held back in check throughout the trembling line of his body as his hips flex down, chasing friction, slamming them back together. His head keeps swaying out and away from him in sinuous, sickening waves. He can feel the heat building in his belly peaking at the fever-pitch where it will break him.

"Sui Zhou," Tang Fan stresses. The way his name fills out his mouth is familiar, but the sound of his voice carrying it is not. It is as if someone else is speaking, someone desperate, afraid. "You need to come for me," this estranged not-him says. "You need to, you need to—"

Tang Fan abandons the pulse in Sui Zhou's wrist to reach blindly between them, hand scrabbling across his belly, smearing his setting spend. He reaches and reaches and reaches again until his fingers find the hot velvet heat of Sui Zhou's cock, throbbing against his own, pulsing wet. Sui Zhou's groan is so thick against his throat it's tangible, as blunt as the trail of his teeth that follows it.

"Is it good?" Tang Fan can barely close his fingers around the breadth of him; he can't imagine trying to get a hand around them both. Sui Zhou could manage it, though. His hands are so big, broad as all the rest of him. It would be easy, like nothing. Tang Fan shudders just at the thought of it, that touch; how it would subsume him, how it would make him out to be so small. "Sui Zhou," he husks, "my hand on you, is it... do I make you feel good?"

"Ah," Sui Zhou stumbles out against his neck, ragged, as Tang Fan drags him through his fist, short strokes that stutter on his shaft, the pad of his thumb swiping at the tip on each clipped upstroke. "Tang Fan," he rasps. "Tang Fan. Yes. I— yes." And Tang Fan is given no chance to have that settle over him, can only catch it without hope of holding or keeping, because— because. Sui Zhou is lurching up and over him in a rush of a blur, and there is nothing left for Tang Fan but the sight of his face above his own as it breaks open around the blow of his rapture. Nothing but the red of his mouth; the curl of his tongue around the low, breathy rumble of his moan; the tremble through his jaw. He fucks up into the sleeve of Tang Fan's palm, forcing his fingers to fan apart, his wrist to fold into an ache, and then he is coming, spilling over Tang Fan's fist while he strips him from root to tip, painting his skin from throat to hip.

"Oh," Tang Fan whispers, and then, "oh, Sui Zhou," as Sui Zhou shudders and grinds into him, hard. The slick squelch as his cock shoves through Tang Fan's grip makes Tang Fan's chest clench choke-tight, his eyes burn with fresh tears. It's so much. He should cringe small and close his eyes to the tide of it, but he can't. He can only stare up at Sui Zhou, unseeing, gaze glazed over to unfocus; seized, too, for the unending seconds that Sui Zhou's release fills out and spans through.

"You're coming so much," Tang Fan murmurs, faint. Only seconds must have passed, but it feels longer than that, then shorter, all in turns. Sui Zhou makes a noise in his throat that will haunt Tang Fan's every waking night for the rest of his life, a welcome ghost to his guilty company, so long as they both survive this. Tang Fan scrapes his teeth over his bottom lip, shuttering his own whine. "Sui Zhou," he breathes, dazed, "you're, you're making a— a mess of me." Sui Zhou's cock jerks in his palm, and they gasp together as another spurt of spend dribbles from his slit to wet Tang Fan's knuckles, his wrist.

Sui Zhou blinks down at him, all wide-eyed and slow, a strange furrow knitting his brow. It does not seem pained, not quite, but without that, Tang Fan does not know what it is. He should know what it is. He means to ask, but Sui Zhou is quicker than him, and quiets his every thought with a hand to his cheek. His thumb strokes over his bottom lip, the heel of his palm kneading his jaw, and Tang Fan's breath hiccups sharply out of him when he feels the touch smear, feels Sui Zhou's hand come away wet. Sui Zhou's mouth parts around a few words, soft-spoken, expression fracturing into something apologetic, but Tang Fan can't hear him over the slap-stunned ringing in his ears. Sui Zhou really— he really— on his face, and it is all Tang Fan can feel sticking to his skin, can smell thick in his nose, can taste on the roof of his mouth even before he licks out to chase it on his lips.

He is— Sui Zhou is still so hard and so heavy in his hand and Tang Fan can't even ask him if he's all right because it dies in his throat the moment Sui Zhou's hand falls back away from his face, slick fingers grazing the slope of his ribs, tracing the line of him along its downstroke. "Wait!" he doesn't say, because it comes out all wordless and wrong and then Sui Zhou's hand is closing over his cock, holding it to his belly, and it's too late. Tang Fan comes with a wrecked, wrung-out wail, head thrown back against the floor, hips twisting up to meet Sui Zhou's hand, to trap it there between them even as the fabric of his body screams to unravel and escape.

There is no refinement, this time; no remaking, no relief, no repose. It only hurts. It does not simply hurt, but Tang Fan does not know how else to describe it. Pain is inadequate for the foreign, gnarled excruciation besieging him, for how it beats the whole of his body bruised, for how it strips him open bloody, but pain is the only name he has. He can't stop making noise, terrible throaty whimpers that are loud more for the absence his mouth forces itself around than any semblance of sound. He can't think and he can't breathe and it keeps going and going and going and there is nowhere for it to go, neither with him nor without. It has to cut through.

Tang Fan struggles to gather himself through the aftershocks of its aftermath. He doesn't know where he's been strewn to, where to start reaching for. Sui Zhou is the safest harbour. Tang Fan palms shakily for his hip; fits his hand there. He feels like his throat is closing around his own tongue; that his pulse is about to push out of his skull through his eyes.

The agony recedes slowly, with an ambling slink, but it does not subside. Tang Fan tries to breathe around it, to pull recomposure over his brittling body like a silk screen. It hurts, and he cannot let Sui Zhou know that it hurts. Sui Zhou will stop if he learns that it hurts, and he cannot stop until this is done.

"After," Tang Fan gingerly rakes out, "it eases, after the first. It's— it's quicker." So seems true for him, at least; he hopes it will be the same for Sui Zhou. There is black streaking across his vision; silver glinting. It fractures the sight of Sui Zhou's face for him, mars it to unintelligibility. He can't afford for Sui Zhou to be difficult for him to read, not now. "Is it better?" he asks, aware of the honest answer.

Sui Zhou sways, trembling, again, or perhaps he is still trembling, having never stopped. His head hangs low, matted hair shagging around his face, trailing over Tang Fan's cheek, down his neck. "No," he admits, barely loud enough to hear underneath the shame of it.

Tang Fan curls his fingers against Sui Zhou's hip, his nape. "All right." He takes in a bracing breath. "Again," he says. He sounds even less like himself than the stranger who wore him last, before. "I am— I can." He will have to. "Would you…?"

It falls away, left unfinished, as Sui Zhou takes them both in hand. Red blinds him as fire sweeps over his skin, and Tang Fan's sobbing scream breaks off bloody in his mouth as it consumes him whole.

He is reoriented upright when he stirs. Tang Fan knows this much at first. It takes time for the rest of his rived awareness to start restitching itself; time he knows by instinct that is not his to have. His back is to a wall, the slump of his weight counterbalanced against— against Sui Zhou. Of that he can be sure. Sui Zhou has arranged him in his lap, knees pushed wide open, set apart. He can feel the strain drumming up from his toes to the tip of his spine; the slow rolls of Sui Zhou's hips, the stutter of his cock along the inside of his thigh.

Tang Fan takes in a breath that tastes too cold in his mouth, and Sui Zhou makes a soft keening sound to meet it, hands brushing up the taut column of his throat to cradle his face. Tang Fan's head lolls, heavy, as he nuzzles his cheek to Sui Zhou's palm.

"Tang Fan?" Sui Zhou rouses quietly, his thumbs stroking at his cheekbones, fingers petting behind his ears, beneath his jaw. He sounds so very— Tang Fan does not want to call it scared, but the fact of it remains even left unthought and unsaid. Sui Zhou's voice is thick with an urgency that is unsettling in its familiarity. Tang Fan does not need to know the time that he was gone when he has the truth that it was too long.

He does not want to open his eyes, but he must brave Sui Zhou's fear in its entirety, and so he does. It is as terrible a reckoning as he expected. The fraught expression rending Sui Zhou's face apart and the clutch of his trembling body around itself, clenched with tension, is as familiar as the fear levying his voice. Tang Fan has seen it all too often in their time together; has been the fault and cause of it all too much.

Tang Fan swallows to unrust his throat. "You opened the door?" he manages to croak out.

"Yes," Sui Zhou answers. His hands fall away from Tang Fan's face, and Tang Fan moans frailly for their loss.

They may have been safer to stay in the workroom, at least until the effects of the powder have worn through. But he can understand Sui Zhou's need to get them out of there, away from here. Tang Fan feels it, too; this mortifying desire to burrow himself into the very marrow of Sui Zhou, where there is no hope left of crawling back out. Of being sunk so deep that they cannot surface again. The workroom was a lockbox coffin hilted in the belly of a tomb. The workroom was no good to them. Here is better. Here is closer to leaving.

Sui Zhou's hips still as he shifts between Tang Fan's legs, and Tang Fan blinks against the fogginess encroaching on the edges of his eyes. When Sui Zhou presses a cup from somewhere between them up to his lips, Tang Fan startles sharply, as though it's sudden. Sui Zhou's hand is shaking so terribly that most of the water sloshes out over the lip to spill down Tang Fan's chin, slopping over his chest. It joins all the rest of the wetness pinning him sluggish, leaden. He doesn't know where the water has come from, but it can't have been far. From somewhere within the battered adobe hut, surely. Tang Fan can't remember what it looked like when they entered, and when he tries to look around him to remind himself of it now, his eyes simply slide between smudges of colour, suggestions of shape. Sui Zhou is all and only what he can make sense of, what he can see clearly.

Sui Zhou— he doesn't want to think about what it took from Sui Zhou to find the water and get it to him. He is still burning through; it must have been ruinous, crawling grave agony however momentary the parting. But he is here now, again tucked tightly up against the backs of Tang Fan's thighs, fucking his cock so so slowly between the trembled loose fold of Tang Fan's legs.

Tang Fan sips once and it's soil graining his mouth; swallows and it's mud tacking his throat. He takes another; holds the third on his tongue as he palms at Sui Zhou's nape, claws him close enough to fit their lips together and force it into his mouth. Sui Zhou barely fights him beyond the shock and the splutter for the show of it before he swallows, wholly obedient.

"Good," Tang Fan croaks, "good, there you are." He swipes his tongue along the swollen sore swell of his bottom lip; feels Sui Zhou's shiver sprawl into his own strained hips and the twitch of his cock against his thigh. Tang Fan can't tell if he is even hard himself anymore. He does not think he is, but he is still so warm. He is so drenched in the sloppy filth of overuse that each of Sui Zhou's thrusts is breathlessly slippery, frictionless. He may never be clean again. But that's all right. That can be all right, because it's for Sui Zhou.

"Did you wait for me?" he asks. Gently, gently. Sui Zhou does not speak, but his silence tells Tang Fan his answer loudly enough. And so, "Again," Tang Fan whispers. Sui Zhou groans through his gritting jaw even as his hips snap forward, hungry-rough.

"We need to," Sui Zhou starts, despaired, "we need—"

"Again," Tang Fan insists, louder, harsher. He fists at Sui Zhou's sweat-sodden hair; tugs it. His head feels clearer, and all too heavy for him to think with it. He still can't keep it above water. "It's not finished. You need to finish."

"I can't—"

"You can!" Tang Fan tugs his hair again, panting against the little hitching gasp that it rends out of Sui Zhou's mouth. It is almost a kiss. It could be a kiss. He cannot make it a kiss. "You can," he repeats, "you can, I promise you—"

"—Protect you," Sui Zhou hisses out over him, lips brushed to Tang Fan's, "I can't, if I—" and then the devastation of it chokes him quiet.

The spoken silence that follows sits with him, and Tang Fan with it. He does not know for how long, but it feels like the life of an age, unspareable seconds spent suspending them somewhere with only the breath welling in their chests; the fescennine fuck of Sui Zhou's cock as his hips still move him between Tang Fan's legs. Sui Zhou's eyes have closed. His face is— Tang Fan cannot look at it. He closes his eyes, too, and in the dark it is somehow quieter in a way that lets him hear.

Tang Fan tips his face, inch by incremental inch, until their foreheads are touched together. Sui Zhou's skin is still feverish, clammy. His breath laps at Tang Fan's mouth when he sighs out; soft, startled. The circle of his hips slows, but does not stop. It's— good. It is good that he has learned.

He knows what it must be that Sui Zhou is so afraid of. It is something they had discussed, of the scene they had visited, where the magistrate had died. How it had seemed as if Feng Jizhou had returned, if not arrived, at some time or other, not simply to check that the deed was done, and to dispose of damning evidence, but to… watch the end, in itself. Some time has passed, now. But— Tang Fan thinks he can be sure that Feng Jizhou will not be back for them. They are not officials who have spurred his ire. They are not being punished. They have been left to die while he runs. They have—

There are simply not enough men with them in Meiguizhen that they can trust. It will take days for any more to come as sent for, and these were days they no longer had to spare. They had come here, seeking him out, knowing that they were moving when it was almost more than too late; trying to douse a fire that had burned up to their doorstep. Sui Zhou almost came alone. He was almost here by himself. What if that had happened? Had Tang Fan not been so insistent, he would still be back at the inn, leafing through useless-to-him papers, fluttering about in anxious wait, and, and— it does not bear thinking about.

"You can," Tang Fan gentles him. "You can." It tastes sour. It stings his tongue stale. Still, he believes it. Of course he does. In Sui Zhou, he has no doubt. "You'll keep me safe. You're keeping me safe now, aren't you?"

Sui Zhou sags in his grip, the last determined spark of his desperate fight snuffing out. Tang Fan gathers him in, lets him sink and sink until his face is tucked against his throat, hidden to all the world beneath the veil of Tang Fan's hair; the cloak of his arm.

"So safe," Tang Fan slurs, breath hitching haggard around a sigh as Sui Zhou mouths at his pulse. "You keep me so safe."

"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou gasps. "Runqing." It is everything. It is nothing at all.

Tang Fan pulls him closer, drags him impossibly in. Their lines have long bled over. He can no longer tell if he is caging Sui Zhou, or if Sui Zhou is cradling him. Exhaustion is eating a hollow into the pit of his belly. It feels like every shove of Sui Zhou's cock is opening him up wide, emptying him out. There is something wrong. There is something wrong beyond this wrongness. But Tang Fan cannot grasp it; he does not even care enough to reach out and try.

"Harder," Tang Fan says. "You can," he assures him, "if you need." He thinks Sui Zhou might. If not harder, then— more. He is so— his cock is so wet, slippery with their come and their sweat. And Tang Fan is so— Sui Zhou could push inside him properly, now, just with that, and Tang Fan is not so sure that he'd even be able to feel the pain of it beyond the blunt pressure, the rightness of being filled. Sui Zhou said he wouldn't. And yet.

Sui Zhou ruts up against him, an edge rougher, skirting frantic. Tang Fan feels a shivery scrape of raw sensation across his soft cock as they rub together; there for a moment, wisped gone the next. The drape of his legs around Sui Zhou's hips slacks numbly. He groans out too late for it all, and Sui Zhou slows again, trembling thin.

"No!" Tang Fan scratches at him, urging. "Take what you need, Sui Zhou. I want— I want to give it to you. I do." He does, he does, he will. No matter what it is; no matter what it costs; no matter what it means.

"I," Sui Zhou whimpers into his neck. His voice cracks apart to nothing for the rest, but Tang Fan feels the brush of his lips on his skin, the shape of his mouth around every cutting confessional consonant.

Oh. Oh. That was it, then. What Sui Zhou had to hide from him was simply and only that they are one and the same.

"Good," Tang Fan croaks back, clutching at him harder, holding him tighter than he thought he had left in him to do. "Oh, good. Thank you." Because does that not make it better, that this is the regard Sui Zhou has for him, what he has not before been brought to say? Does that not make it so much worse, that it is broken open between them now in this way?

It does. It does not. He cannot even say.

"I would do anything for you," Tang Fan tells him, because he can say that. It is only fair trade, and he cannot help himself from confessing it, anyway. "You know this, don't you?"

The sound Sui Zhou makes would be muting, elsewhere, but not here. Not for them. Tang Fan wishes— he wishes for many things. Then, he puts his hands tighter around what he does have, nails scratching Sui Zhou's bare sweat-slick back, his nape.

"Nothing is ever too much," Tang Fan says, pressed into Sui Zhou's temple, his hair; some secret, a whispered prayer. "I would— I would suffer this to death if it meant that you would be all right."

Sui Zhou whines, shuddering up against him, the slide of his hips stuttering. His cock pulses hotly as he comes dry, shaking and shaking until it has finally wrung him breathlessly still. Tang Fan moans softly, the heels of his palms digging in to hold them both up, together.

The seconds drag out again, crawling through their dying gasp. Sui Zhou's breath levels out against his neck before it breaks fresh around a sob. The pulse in his temple is still throbbing, hot against Tang Fan's lips. His cock is still so hard, swollen thick, twitching sorely against his belly. The smallest part of Tang Fan that has given itself over to defeat is spiralling rapidly to hysteria. He is really going to die. Sui Zhou is going to fuck him to death and it may still not even be enough to save him. Tang Fan wants to laugh the weight of his panic free of his chest, but he can't. He won't do that to Sui Zhou.

"I don't think I can stay," Tang Fan says, instead of— anything. Everything. He is so tired. His eyes have slid shut; he does not know when. The tears and sweat tacking his eyelashes together make them catch, leave them too heavy to reopen. It was dark before, he thinks, and now it is dark again.

Sui Zhou's whimper is a frayed-out sound, pitched high around distress. Tang Fan shushes him, stiff fingers pawing limply at his back, stroking through sleeting sweat to pet at bare skin.

"You have to keep going," Tang Fan tells him. It is the next most important thing he'll ever tell him, now that he knows the first. "Sui Zhou, you mustn't stop." And cruelly, kindly, needfully, "I'll never forgive you if you stop."

He crosses his arms behind Sui Zhou's neck, winding them tight with the strength he doesn't have left. Sui Zhou makes another noise against him, flayed, but struggles no further than that.

"Keep going," he demands. "Keep going, keep— oh—" Tang Fan's voice splinters apart as Sui Zhou starts to move again, cock dragging up the crease where his hip meets his thigh, a wave cresting to shore. Tang Fan doesn't know whether he is Sui Zhou's port or his storm. But then, it has never mattered much as to which he is — or what he becomes — so long as he is still where Sui Zhou comes home.

Sui Zhou is ungentle, now, without the need to be told. Each shove of his hips is brutal, blunted, breaching. Good. Good. Tang Fan draws his knees in to Sui Zhou's flanks, pinning him feebly. When he swallows, he can almost feel Sui Zhou's cock filling him up to the back of his throat. His bare back feels sanded down, scraped open raw. He has to wonder what will come first: him wearing through the wall, or Sui Zhou wearing through him.

This is what claims him, what lulls him off the precipice — the familiar weight of Sui Zhou's body, held over him; his nose full of his scent. The rhythmic rut of his cock as it fucks between the rubbed raw press of his plushed thighs. Again. Again.

Again.

Tang Fan comes again into his own awareness all at once, with great and sudden violence. There is a weight atop him that he cannot unshake or unshoulder, as though he is submerged deep underwater, waterlogged limbs wrapped together. The whole of his body is a coursing ache. He can't breathe, he can't breathe, he can't— and then he can, and he knows he is above water, that he has been washed ashore. It is a bed beneath his back, and blankets holding him down overhead. He is safe. He is safe.

He is alone.

Tang Fan's eyes are still too heavy for him to open, but he does not need to see to know. It is the worst in the registry of his tallied hurts, this absence that he feels and hears. If Sui Zhou was here, he would— Tang Fan would know. He would simply know it.

Sui Zhou has not left him; he would never do that. But he is not here, and so that leaves him far, and that is the worser fate for Tang Fan now that he is awake. He does not know how long it has been since— since anything. He can remember flickers, shapes and colours and sensations that glanced off him before he could reach out and grasp at them, could couple them to his own consciousness. Hands on his skin, his hair. Warmth. The pry of fingers between his teeth, water wetting his parched mouth, dripping down his throat.

Someone has cared for him, in the divining moments between then and now, ferrying him from one side to the other. Someone has waited with him, and kept him well. It can be no one else. Sui Zhou will come back. He must. He always does. Tang Fan needs him to, to— to tell him what he has missed. Then he can think ahead to work, and what can and will be said of it. What he will report of the day, in perfunctory script, and how it will be no less a truth for any abridgement.

Only so much of any detail is pertinent, anyway, and their particulars— there is no service in superfluous word. Whatever happened needn't be publicised in its totality. It is enough that it was endured. Only he and Sui Zhou need carry all the rest of it to keep.

Tang Fan takes breath after breath until the air that sticks in his chest no longer tastes wet. It is the most he can move when he is too drained for the rest. There is a strange emptiness, to the exhausted heft of the whole of him, as though something is… missing. Gone not for not having yet, or for any other lack save one where something once had has since been taken. He feels left without. Carved through. Unsure that he'll ever fill out the shape of himself again, or what that shape might even be, anymore, at all.

But if that is to be his fate, then he can accept it. He did say he would suffer anything; he does remember that. And he remembers, too, that he meant every promise it made.