It’s the second night he is back that Tang Fan invites himself to Sui Zhou’s bed.

After he has been gone so far, only to return so close, Sui Zhou has no heart left to send Tang Fan back across any distance, be it even mere footsteps; a room over. He thinks— again, maybe, perhaps. Maybe he can have this, since he is being given it, anyway, no matter his say or hand in it. Perhaps he can’t hurt Tang Fan more than he’s been hurt, if only for a dearth of want for trying.

There is room in Sui Zhou’s bed for the two of them to be together without touching, and Tang Fan sleeps stilly enough, at rest being the quietest he ever gets. Sui Zhou manages a relative sleep for some hours that night; close to the same for the next.

It secures him in the false hope of possibility. The night after next does not go gently, nor does it see fit to spare him. Long after the candles are doused, Sui Zhou is awake, ill-at-ease, listening. His mind turns the soft sound of Tang Fan’s breathing jagged; closing his eyes against it merely whets it keen to piercing. He can’t find peace enough between it and all the other sounds a night makes.

Sui Zhou does not spend long in the dark with that ghost before he commits to letting it lie. A watched grave will not dig itself any deeper, so he leaves his bed to Tang Fan, thinking— thinking it will be best. He can return closest to morning. He can not return at all, and play the part of earliest riser. Anything else but this.

He is used to moving through his home with no more than the moonlight to illuminate what it will of his way. He takes himself as far as the steps to the hall; close enough to the gate to watch it for his mind’s sake; far enough forward in the shallows of the siheyuan to not feel crowded in at his back, on guard. The seep of the evening’s cold to his skin through his sleep clothes is a distant care; the lope of the long minutes a far consideration. Sui Zhou thinks, and he doesn’t. There is so much in his head that it drowns itself into an uneasy serenity, washed out flat. He can give none of it any attention.

Sui Zhou hears Tang Fan coming long before he arrives, because he knows intimately, resolutely, the shape that Tang Fan takes in his life. The line of his frame and how it fills or splits a room. The gust of his breath through his nose when he’s thinned his mouth closed. The listing limp of his stride around his injury that is still lingering from his ordeal almost hides that he lost no great weight over the course of it. The suffering beyond his back, at least, not taken as toll like that.

He wonders, in this moment of opportunity to do so, whether or not he would have known Tang Fan had been tricked if he had been given his chance to take him home first. To hear him back where he belongs and to know, then, what was reset and returned wrong. Perhaps, and perhaps not. Estimations are always easier in retrospect.

It is still the least important thing to him, now, anyway. Tang Fan is here; what else will be will come and will pass with all the rest.

There is a scrape of dragging wood close by; a stumble; a bitten-over hiss. Tang Fan is not so adept at navigating the dark of a place where he often serves as the light of it; he has to feel his way past, fumbling. Even with expectation to prepare him for the blow of it, Sui Zhou still grits his jaw and holds his breath, tense, for a moment that strains out broad before it shudders loose.

“You could have woken me,” comes Tang Fan’s voice, in hushed-over whisper. “If I was disturbing you.”

“You didn’t,” Sui Zhou replies, because it’s a true enough lie to tell. If it was not Tang Fan, it would have been something else. He doesn’t meet Tang Fan’s eyes as he circles around to settle in at his side; just the glance of him in his periphery is reckoning enough for the hurt painting his face that he’s already heard colouring his voice.

Tang Fan folds his hands together and huddles forward, arms slinging over the rise of his knees as he gathers them to his chest. He’s had more forethought than Sui Zhou, at least, in his nocturnal venturing, to pull his beizi on over his sleep clothes. The drape of his body now makes the fabric curl around him like smoke; a gown. His mouth is still bruised fresh, the corner a tender red, staining his skin like smudged rouge. Even through the blur of his deliberate, aversive defocus, Sui Zhou can see how Tang Fan’s lips twinge, pained, around the slight pull of his small smile. It’s an attempt to soothe one of them, Sui Zhou knows, or perhaps the both of them as one, by reshaping over the hurt, recoursing it.

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” Sui Zhou admits. He looks to his hands; fixes on the idle hang of them in his lap.

“You did,” Tang Fan says. It’s not unkind. Not deliberately so. But it is a great many other things that sting at wounds that have not been left be long enough to heal over; that push its heft down on breaks that have not set back strong enough to take it. Reservation; hope; desire. “I was waiting for you to come back.”

Sui Zhou knows what he can say, to that, and they are all things he knows that he shouldn’t. They will serve no greater beneficial purpose. They will salve no hurts.

The silence falls out, stretches wide, spans thin; suspensive to the bolder build of Tang Fan’s frustration. The convolution of Tang Fan’s emotions have always been too big for the body they’re in. Even with all the courtyard for them to overspill into, there is no space for them to do anything but suffocate. Sui Zhou watches from the corner of his eyes as Tang Fan unspools his arms slowly; looks over, powerlessly, to meet his gaze when Tang Fan’s hand touches him, fingers mooring in his sleeve.

“Will you come back, at least?” he asks, the prayer soft on his face and the plead stark in his voice.

“You need rest,” Sui Zhou answers. It is the answer Tang Fan must know is coming, or the hollow of where one should be, at least. It is the answer he has to give aloud now that he’s been asked with all the belief that in the trying, sometimes, things can change.

“And you don’t?” Tang Fan’s fingers claw down, tight, in tandem to the bite of his retort. “I didn’t realise—”

He cuts himself off, sharp, his brow knitting as his features draw in around his edged anger. It’s ugly, but it’s not unfair. Sui Zhou swallows, and waits. Tang Fan sucks in a staggered breath; holds it to breaking; then finally breathes back out around it, willing a calm. When he makes to rise back to his feet, Sui Zhou looks away, for a beat, to steady himself, without so much of a thought allowed as to why he feels the need for it. That way lies one of the innumerable dangers, coupled to Tang Fan, that he hasn’t the courage to meet in confrontation.

“I will go back to my own bed,” Tang Fan resolves. It’s blatantly begrudging, but Sui Zhou can hear he is trying, at least, to gentle it with grace. To not shift the shouldering to him of the entirety of its blame.

“You don’t have to,” Sui Zhou says, stupidly, before he can grip the means to stop. It’s not a terrible thing to say, but it is the wrong thing for Tang Fan to hear, and it shows, brutally, in the way his expression crumples back in on itself, a hurt thing.

“Where will you go, then?” Tang Fan’s shoulder jerks to follow the half-caught urge to gesture out with his hand; he draws his arms in to a tight fold across his slim chest to further stifle it, his breath gusting out in a harsh rush. “My room? Would you even bother to pretend?”

He looks, again, too perfectly, too well, the part of the beleaguered, bristling Sui-furen. It was a dangerous thought for Sui Zhou to first have then. It’s a damning thought for him to have now.

“I just,” Tang Fan starts, only to stop short with a scowl that spurs on a stung hiss when it strums the bruise on his mouth. Sui Zhou feels the vulnerable need to reach for his face and stroke the furrows and furls smooth itch through his wrists. That he is the contentious cause of them is what keeps his hands still at bay.

“What does it matter to me?” Tang Fan decides to finish, after a bloodied hung-on drag of an age. “A man should at least be comfortable in his own home. His own bed.” He sounds to all the world between the two of them as if the exoneration has emptied him out.

It is your home, too, Sui Zhou thinks. Your bed. “Tang Fan,” he says, quiet. It’s all he has. What else is there? The teeth of the beast that grips Sui Zhou are so deeply sunk in. He doesn’t remember what it’s like, anymore, to live without its breath at his back or its stranglehold on his neck. He doesn’t know what of the man would be left if it ever sees to retreat. How much of the picked-clean carcass that remains could be called him.

But he wants, anyway. Of course he wants. Of course he cannot say that he wants, because to admit it is to welcome Tang Fan’s next question, and it is one he has nothing for. The truth is that he wants to give Tang Fan the things Tang Fan wants how he wants them. The reality is that it’s not possible. The burden is the fear that festers in the potential of any compromise. It’s never something he means to take from Tang Fan, but the inability to give when all else has already been bequeathed can only feel like a theft.

“Sui Zhou.” It seems that is all Tang Fan has, too, at least until he sighs out, digs deeper into the space in him it has gouged out, and finds something else. “I need—” he stalls to swallow, easing the whisper-roughened scrape of his voice. “I need you so that you can help me right this.”

“You’ll have me,” Sui Zhou assures him. That’s a promise he can make, at least, in dark or daylight.

Tang Fan unfolds his arms, slow, then reaches down between them with only a momentary hesitation that Sui Zhou can do nothing but helplessly notice. His hand closes over Sui Zhou’s shoulder and squeezes down, tight; a shadow of reassurance. A repeat of old memory with no promissory retreading of its trajectory. It is gone as swiftly as it comes, between seconds, withdrawn with the rest of Tang Fan as he bids his leave with no further goodbye.

After, when Sui Zhou has listened out for Tang Fan’s picked-through movements in the back-forth between their rooms until the night has again fallen still, he rises, too, and returns to his still-dark room, to his now-cold bed. Even when he reaches, almost absently, across the mattress to brush the backs of his knuckles along where Tang Fan had slept, he finds no warmth left.

The quiet is all the louder, now, for Tang Fan’s absence. And so, Sui Zhou does not sleep, but he stays in his bed and waits until morning, taking a spectre of rest at Tang Fan’s behest before he rises again.