Tang Fan’s back is still troubling him, though it has been some weeks, now, since the wound has — for the most part — scarred over.

There are times where Sui Zhou does his best to not notice it, or at least his best to be so small in his notice of it that it is not itself noticed. Times where he sees Tang Fan stutter in motion, his expression crumpling into a confused contortion, as though he has felt something pull discomfitingly beneath his skin that he is not yet used to shaping his body around. It pulls at a baring need in him that Sui Zhou must subdue to heel each time he witnesses it, but Tang Fan is owed the due of that privacy after being so forcibly opened and sifted through. And so: turning his face away from Tang Fan’s gradual, self-paced remaking is the least of all things Sui Zhou can do. It is the smallest of things he can give.

There are times, though, where Tang Fan does his best to have Sui Zhou notice it. Moments where he does not withdraw into himself with a stilted, unsubtle quiet, but instead blooms up boisterously loud, his yearning to be seen and so to be found yawning widely out.

Tang Fan finds him in the kitchen, at an hour that the wiser have long been sleeping, because that is, often, where Sui Zhou is to be found. The night is a still one, but Sui Zhou’s head is flurrying movement, a displaced disquiet. So, he is cleaning. Or he is, at least, doing something with his hands. Busywork has its way of tempering out the thundering advance of whatever has decided to encroach on him at any of its given time. Usefulness has its way of stalling the build of adrift panic.

He sighs out by way of announcing himself. Sui Zhou, who had heard his shuffling footsteps down the courtyard, looks up now that there is a sight to see for the effort. Tang Fan’s hands are laden with sheaves of paper; the case for his inkstick. His brush is tucked behind his ear, half tangled in the loose fan fall of his dark hair. He is dressed for bed; barely covered, boots toed on in apparent afterthought. Sui Zhou is in no place to call chastisement to it: he is in much the same state of borderline discomposure; barely dressed, seized by directionless disturbance.

Tang Fan makes the disarray look so gentle, inviting. The sprawl of his smile does not further light the dim-lit room, but it makes Sui Zhou feel sun-warmed all the same.

“What are you cooking for me?” he asks, voice awake with a sly delight that only shades the softly tired set of his features. It is a pronouncement of pretence: his hands would not be so full if he came to Sui Zhou to eat instead of perform.

Still, Sui Zhou indulges him, with the same gladness he always has, however the form. “What would you like?”

Tang Fan hums, casting a glance overhead, as if to reach for inspiration. He steps over the threshold and into the kitchen with the same grace of surety that he has thrown wide the door and encroached into every other facet of Sui Zhou’s home; Sui Zhou’s life.

“Ah, I’m not hungry.” Tang Fan circles to his oft-usual place at the head of the bench, and sets down his holdings in a neat enough arrangement that they will be easily gathered up again. The chair he had drawn up when Sui Zhou and Dong’er had been preparing dinner is still in place, and Tang Fan settles into it as though it was never once left. He props himself up on the bench by his elbows, folds his hands together primly, and tables his chin atop them. His gaze is cutting keen; his interest in Sui Zhou nude bare. Sui Zhou feels opened up and held down beneath it, shaken yet steadied.

It is one of the latter times, tonight, then. Tang Fan wants Sui Zhou to see him for what he is, in this fleeting moment: he wants to be known. The pain must not be so terrible; the ache more irritating than intolerable. He is brave enough, in this vulnerable dark, to be needful.

Sui Zhou takes a breath. He returns the knife in his hand to its block; sets away the waterstone he had been idly sharpening its blade with. It leaves his hands empty, after. He tries to fill them by flattening his palms to the benchtop, by pressing the pads of his fingertips into the grain. He thinks about what Tang Fan must want, and he does not say a word on it. The moments where there are no foes to fell are not the ones where he is himself courageous.

It is Tang Fan’s stage, here. He can act enough for two. “I’m tired, you see,” he continues, with all the ease of the absence of pause, head tilting with a flutter of his hooding lashes. "But I can't sleep."

Sui Zhou nods, prompting Tang Fan along.

"I am—” Tang Fan snorts out, and jerks his head towards his papers, as if to fill the space his voice has left out with an explanation. “My desk is uncomfortable.” He tsks. Then, “So I thought to rest, but my bed is so large, and so cold…”

Tang Fan trails off, letting it fall away, the drop punctuated by the loft of his brow. Forthrightly admitting to anything is not part of the manners of these engagements, after all, but he has still given Sui Zhou all he needs to know and more.

“I will finish here,” says Sui Zhou, “then I’ll help you.”

Tang Fan’s lips part. “Such a generous landlord,” he lauds, all breathy coquette, as he rises back to his feet with a drawn on, suggestive elegance. “Whatever did this humble boarder do in his last life to deserve you?”

For a moment, Sui Zhou’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth around the catch of his breath. “More than he’s done in his present one,” he says. The tease is stilted for his hesitation, but Tang Fan reaches across to bat at his arm all the same, and it is as though it was never awkward to start.

“Have mercy on me,” Tang Fan complains, pouting. “Be kind. My room, yes? My room. Don’t keep me long.”

He gathers up his things, with great clatter to fill out the lapse in his chatter, and then he is gone, dispersing in much the flurry he first deigned to enter. Sui Zhou, left, does not think much on his own kindness in the silence, and less on how the steps he’s taken forward to draw them both together closer often still feel like retreating back.

It does not take long to finish what he has started and does not want to leave until proper morning, but Sui Zhou takes longer with it. He clears his bench; he pulls back the chair so it will not be tripped on in the daylight. He douses the few lanterns left lighting the courtyard. He gives Tang Fan time, and himself time with it.

Sui Zhou remembers having left a candle lit in his room, but it is extinguished, now, casting the northern wing into dark. There is a deliberateness to it; he does not think it could have burned so low on its own as to douse itself. Without it, there is only the soft warm glow of light that is winding its way out from underneath the drawn doors to Tang Fan’s room. Sui Zhou finds his way; knocks; and lets himself in before Tang Fan’s beckoning hum even reaches out to him.

In the time they have been separate, Tang Fan has waited for him, as though Sui Zhou is worth his waiting for. There is deliberateness, too, here, to how he is standing in his room, more towards his bed than not, more turned from Sui Zhou than to. He looks over his shoulder, lifting his chin. His narrowed eyes glint black where they settle on him after a flick of an assessing glance.

“Come help me,” he whispers, gesturing to his back, where the ties of his sleep shirt are still laced. Quiet as an invitation, complacent as an expectation.

Sui Zhou steps forward, closer, in. Tang Fan shivers as the backs of his knuckles brush the small of his back, then stretches around, blind, until he’s found Sui Zhou’s wrist. He grips it, firm, then tugs, urging Sui Zhou to slide in until they are all but pressed together, Sui Zhou’s hands snared between the crowd of their bodies. Satisfied, Tang Fan releases him to reach for the wave of his hair, gathering it up to spill it over the slope of his shoulder. The high collar of his shirt has slid low, baring his nape. He shivers, again, as Sui Zhou’s breath grazes over his skin. Sui Zhou does not fumble, but it’s a near enough thing.

“Do you mind if I talk?” Tang Fan asks, the end of it tapering into a soft gasp as the ties at his back give. He gives a roll of his shoulders, shrugging the slackened fabric from them; Sui Zhou’s hands rise to meet with and strip the rest. “If I hear it, I think I can make sense of where I’m caught.”

“I don’t mind,” Sui Zhou answers. He enjoys when Tang Fan talks; he likes the sound of his voice. He eases Tang Fan’s arms from his sleeves, gentle, and folds the fabric in his hands for want of something to do with it and himself while he thinks. A moment passes, two. He does not look high on Tang Fan’s back, not yet. “Is it, the,” Sui Zhou struggles with it, lapsing into pause. Tang Fan has so many stories, filling his heart and his head, shaping him root to tip. “The magistrate’s advisor,” Sui Zhou finishes. “The older bachelor.”

“No, no,” Tang Fan says, “though I am caught there, too. It’s grown—” He cocks his head, and Sui Zhou watches the shift of his bare arms as he combs his fingers through his hair. “It’s grown. I’ve moved on to something simpler— well, I thought I had moved on to something simpler, but…” His fingers catch on a snag, and the note of airy pleasure to his voice is lost in a hiss as the jerk rebounds across his shoulders.

Sui Zhou’s gaze flinches upward, inexplicably and inevitably, to the wellspring of Tang Fan’s aggrievement. Even in the loured light and the play of the flame’s hue over Tang Fan’s skin, Sui Zhou can see how the broadest sidestroke of his scar is inflamed, flushed red with hot irritation.

"Yes," Tang Fan intercepts, a step ahead of Sui Zhou's chastisement. "I know, yes, yes." He turns himself, slow, to better face Sui Zhou. His other arm lifts to press over his chest, as though to shroud the slim span of it for his modesty’s sake; the fingers of the first stay snared as they are in the swept-over strands of his hair.

He is not at all contrite. Tang Fan is a terrible patient, and the instance of this will bear repeating. They both know this. Sui Zhou is similarly disobedient when it comes to due care. They both know this, too.

The jarred salve that Pei Huai prescribed is on the nearside table, as is the flat case where the needles are kept. Sui Zhou sets down Tang Fan’s shirt to take these into his hands instead, and the push-pull of them both sees Tang Fan guide himself back and into the bed with each of Sui Zhou’s own encroaching steps.

“Come, come here.” Tang Fan folds his knees up to his chest with a slow drag that traces them up Sui Zhou’s sides. He shuffles back, angling himself artlessly, caught between the throb of his back and the tangle of his own gangling limbs. Sui Zhou feels himself lurching forward, instinctual, at the first grunt that slips free of the tight purse of Tang Fan’s lips, but he catches himself. Waits, in place, until Tang Fan has finished arranging himself face down, belly to bed, his hair pinned beneath his chest.

Sui Zhou slides down to his knees; settles in a sprawling straddle high across the backs of Tang Fan's thighs, jar and case put to the curve of his furthest knee. He is conscious of the set of his weight, and how Tang Fan shivers beneath him, the ripple reverberating through Sui Zhou to pool low and easy-warm between his legs. With Tang Fan now low-set to the climb of the candlelight, Sui Zhou can better see the state of his back; the sheen of sweat painting it, the beads peppering between his shoulder blades.

"This will sting," Sui Zhou warns, because it will. Tang Fan's nails have split the skin. The raked welts are still red ripe, raised up and swollen stark.

"Then go gently," Tang Fan says. Sui Zhou feels him tense, though, around his inhale. He watches his arms flinch in their slack fold, the turn of his hands against the bed, the graze of his fingertips to his own bobbing throat. He relaxes, again, on his exhale. “Gentle. Gentler.”

Sui Zhou uncaps the jar. He hears Tang Fan’s sniff over the rasp of fabric as his legs rub together between his own, and he can picture the way the bridge of his nose must be crinkling at the waft of pungent herbs.

“Brace.” Sui Zhou slicks his fingers and bows forward, fettering Tang Fan at the hip with his left dry grip.

Tang Fan whines, the sound breathy, struck out, when Sui Zhou stripes the salve swiftly over the hottest part of his back. It’s not-quite pain, not-quite anything; an indecisively greedy in-between. His fingers claw down at his pillow, the bed, his own neck.

“Ah,” he croaks, voice strained sob-wet. Sui Zhou thumbs at the jut of his hipbone softly, indeliberate. Tang Fan takes a bracing breath before he swallows, the motion lapping down his back. The indignity of lingering pain is not one Tang Fan need bear here with mannered grace, and so he doesn't, especially, move himself to do so. It is only Sui Zhou who can see, and so there is no-one to judge.

It is better to rapproche harsh and recede kind. Sui Zhou shifts back to dip into the salve again, and Tang Fan sighs out, eyes slipping shut.

“The general,” Tang Fan mumbles, breath hitching as Sui Zhou sets his hand to his back again, the other tightening down on his side. He sniffs again. “It’s always the generals that give me trouble.”

“Tell me about them.” Sui Zhou needn’t ask, but he does so, anyway, letting his voice fade into the distraction of the talking. The next smear of salve doesn’t tease over anywhere inflamed, so, save for the slightest of quakes, Tang Fan gives no rejoinder.

“He has been on the borders for years,” Tang Fan starts, shuddery, drifting languid, “ah— but he was injured quite gravely in an ambush. So he has returned to the capital, to, well. I don’t think it can be said for him yet. He will survive, of course, but he may never recover.”

Sui Zhou makes a sound that he barely feels his tongue curl around, and hears even less. It’s mindless acknowledgement, audial absentness, nothing more. He finishes coating Tang Fan’s scar with another swipe; runs his blunt thumbnail beneath his other nails to clean the grease and grit left behind out from underneath them.

“His position is precarious,” Tang Fan continues. “He, there is a political arrangement that has been made, between him and an official, high ranking. Neither of them are positioned to be able to refuse it. There is a complicated history between them, intimate, but not quite close. Now the general is vulnerable and alone for allies, save for this official, of whom he is at best not friendly with.”

“The needles, now,” Sui Zhou speaks up into the pause, and Tang Fan’s eyelashes flutter as he nods his head, cheek crushed to his pillow. His brow furrows together when he hears Sui Zhou open the case, and the tension threads over his back, tugs at his skin, already drawn taut over the plains and valleys of his frame.

“This is where I am,” Tang Fan keeps on, as though uninterrupted. His lips thin and his throat bobs again around his swallow as Sui Zhou pulls out one of the needles, his grip again clasping tight to steady Tang Fan at the hip. “Right now— the official is tending to his wounds."

Tang Fan's tone lilts with a note of humour that swiftly gives way to a stung hiss when Sui Zhou lances at his abraded skin through the still drying layer of salve. His back rises sharply with the pull of his breath; what has dried over of the paste starts to crack and crumble. Sui Zhou pets at his side again, blind, and that seems to soothe the fray of Tang Fan's edges, sands his jagged discomfort smooth again.

"You're rough," Tang Fan grumbles, anyway. It's throwaway, toothless; nothing that Sui Zhou need defend himself against, because he knows well that Sui Zhou doesn't mean to be, and that's enough. "I can’t place how they feel about one another yet.”

If this was one of Tang Fan’s stories, perhaps there would be something to say on the similarities between this general and this official and he and Sui Zhou. A layer to that fiction and this moment. But this is not one of Tang Fan’s stories. Sui Zhou cannot say with confidence if any commonalities are intended.

Perhaps if Sui Zhou read Tang Fan’s books for himself, he would better understand the lines Tang Fan may draw and the distinctions he may make. He would better know how much Tang Fan possibly borrows, or brings forward and reshapes anew. It is not as if there has been no opportunity, but it is— the steps to take to do so each feel like an intrusion. An encroachment into where he has not been welcomed.

These moments where Tang Fan invites Sui Zhou into this part of himself result in an honesty between them in the one way that does not yet endure beyond the immediate lines of it. Anyone in the capital or elsewhere can read Tang Fan’s romances or spring books, but none of them are privy and privileged to this.

When Sui Zhou leans back, this time, Tang Fan makes— a sound. It’s a raspy thing, raw; past pain, washed and wrung out. He is soft and pliant underneath Sui Zhou’s thighs. The idle, squirming shift of his hips is rhythmic, like a wave beat, a breath. Sui Zhou thinks if he slid a hand beneath his belly and worked it down between his legs he would find Tang Fan's cock hard for him, just from this. From the small almost nothing of Sui Zhou's weight pinning him to the bed and Sui Zhou's hands pressing into his back.

It would be nothing at all to unwrap the rest of him, to part his legs that fraction more. To bare him and stroke salve-slicked fingers against his hole, to work them into the tight hot cling of his body. To fill Tang Fan up with blunt pressure until he's gasping, to take him by his hip and fuck him down slow on his hand until he spills, messy and wet. But he does not. The desire is there, a constant, but the want is heatless. And he needs Tang Fan to be still for this.

If Tang Fan was to ask, Sui Zhou might just give, and that is just as dangerous here as it always has been in erstwhile predicaments; elsewhere places. As it rests, though, Tang Fan seems more content to simply lie beneath him, arousal a dull hum through his blood. To have the amendful attentions of Sui Zhou’s touch set to the higher task of the ugly, burling scar that stripes down between his shoulder blades.

Tang Fan would not shy from ensuring Sui Zhou knew it if he did so think, at any one of these given moments, that a baser chase for pleasure was anything but unurgent. He’d coax with his words; he’d command with the spurring buck of his hips, ceaseless, until Sui Zhou stayed him for a moment’s respite by fitting himself all the more hungrily over the long line of him, bearing down. But he poses no question; he moves with no desperation. Sui Zhou can narrow into the monotony of his own focus, and pay no heed to anything past the bounds of the steadied pinch of his fingers and the delicate sink of needlepoints into Tang Fan’s skin.

Sui Zhou was never made for precisive work with frangible things, but that has not once stopped Tang Fan from taking him in hand and seeing him put to that purpose. He must manage to succeed at some semblance of it, at least, for Tang Fan is yet to break beneath the bend of his touch, his care, his need.

Tang Fan knows he is done before Sui Zhou has finished hefting his weight back into his heels. “Don’t go so far,” he husks, voice roughed dry from his spell of quiet. He cranes his head, straining to seek Sui Zhou out from over his shoulder as he reaches down his side, fumbling, until he can clutch at Sui Zhou’s thigh, fingers twisting in his pants.

Sui Zhou has not gone far at all, but he comes closer, again, to make up for it. He bows low, then lower still, led by Tang Fan’s tugging grasp until he is all but braced on his forearms, bent over Tang Fan’s back. He has to arch, awkwardly, to keep his chest from brushing down on the needles. The closeness fits him flush to Tang Fan in such a way that he cannot hide that he is still half-hard; that he’s stirring as Tang Fan lifts his hips just the fraction more that he needs to feel Sui Zhou’s cock nudge him apart. He gasps; shakes when Sui Zhou twitches hotly against his ass. Sui Zhou holds his breath without much thought or sense, suspended.

“Your hand,” Tang Fan stammers, thick, “give it to me.” He releases Sui Zhou’s thigh, setting his arm back down at his side. Sui Zhou adjusts himself until his weight is pooled heavily into the arm braced deepest into the bed, his shoulder twinging, then reaches, tentative, to furl his hand along Tang Fan’s hip, his thumb stroking over his waistband, ridden low.

“Oh.” Tang Fan’s exhale is fluttery, staggered. He hitches his hips higher, rocking back gently into Sui Zhou’s lap. Sui Zhou is barely grounded in the burgeonings of the broadening of its horizon when Tang Fan presses back flat to the bed with a pant. His face crumples as though he’s taken on a heavy burden that is costing great exertion to keep his hold on. “Oh, Sui Zhou— you really, I— no, no, come here.”

Tang Fan takes Sui Zhou by the wrist, tempting his hand to trace up higher, charting across his flank, the flare of his ribs. Here is none of those places where Sui Zhou knows Tang Fan likes to have his hands, his attention. Here is, instead, the tuck of Sui Zhou’s hand beneath Tang Fan’s cheek, the lace of their fingers together as best can be managed between the trying angle and the awkward tangle of their arms.

“You are so.” Tang Fan sighs out, the gust of his breath warm on their joined hands. “You are so…” His eyes slip shut. “Do you…?”

“No,” Sui Zhou assures him. It does not matter enough to wait for Tang Fan to find words to put to what he means to say. Sui Zhou does not need for anything; he does not want for more.

Tang Fan’s shoulders sink deep on his next exhale, the tension of expectation loosening through the rungs of his spine. “Then stay,” he says. There is a nervous pitch of insistence to it, for a beat, that he clears his throat around. “Stay for a moment. I’ll need—” He shrugs, squeezing down on the twine of their fingers.

He does not finish. But the said is enough, here; the unsaid is superfluous.

“All right,” Sui Zhou says nonetheless, for the absence of a question still brooks the presence of an answer.

Tang Fan unthreads their fingers, and Sui Zhou feels the coil of his frame shift beneath him as Tang Fan cranes into the space he needs to press his lips to the inside of his wrist. “You’re heavy,” he mumbles into the thin skin there, the veins, the throbbing jump of his pulse. “You’re too heavy. Lie beside me.”

Sui Zhou feels as heavy as Tang Fan proclaims when he moves to obey; shambling and stiff, aged into place. He manages it without grace, head pillowing on his arm as he bites down around his grunt, skinning it in his mouth until the remnants are not so pained. Tang Fan turns his face to meet him, loose hair curling over his mouth, eyes dark beneath the swoop of his lashes.

“A moment,” he repeats between them.

Sui Zhou nods his acknowledgement, his assent, and the corners of Tang Fan’s lips quirk around something soft and private; satisfied. It is not a lie. A moment can be anything, after all; as brief or as long as can ever be desired.