Ding Rong should have suspected scheming the moment he saw Wang Zhi in red.

It is not his once-familiar, since-discarded red, ornately embellished as it was. To Ding Rong’s discredit, in the swim of the perpetual lantern light his vision has long begun to blur, its pace kept with the warp of his awareness. It is a traditional tactic to disorient; typical. A more determined man than he might seek to alleviate it by keeping a relative gauge on hours lost as to the burn of the candles, but Ding Rong is a dying man, now, and dying men have no need for the particulars of knowing when their time will so come.

Wang Zhi has the cell door unbarred and unlocked. That is what gets Ding Rong’s hackles to slowly rise, subdued as they are. This is what gets his feet underneath him, too, and drags him up from the hay as Wang Zhi toes over the sill and into limned view. With flame at his back, it is easier to take in the grand whole of him, as Wang Zhi is always so meant to be taken. The wooden case in his hand, which he sets down on the table strewn through their middle ground. The white collar of his middle shirt, sitting high on his throat. The red of his robe, ripe as fresh spilled blood, instead of the ombre of a second sun courting a loosed arrow. Burning, blinding bright.

A guard brings in a washbasin and sets it down on the table alongside the box. Another, unarmed, steps within range of him to hold out an Edict, rebound. He recognises neither of them. Ding Rong wonders what Wang Zhi hopes to accomplish by it; if he is complacent enough in the loft of his perch to not care that Ding Rong can weaponise a body. If he’s convinced that Ding Rong has no fight left in him to squander. If he thinks it a waste to be the Emperor's voice, here, when Ding Rong has shown that he will not listen to it.

It is not as though his sentence requires such ceremony. Ding Rong unravels the scroll. Against better judgement and deeper desire, he lowers his head, and narrows his gaze to the script. Wang Zhi’s name is what he first sees. But of course it is; how else could it or would it ever be?

In recognition of his exemplary service, eunuch Wang Zhi shall be installed as governor of Hetao. Well, Wang Zhi has always wanted to spend time in the borderlands, accumulating military merits. Had his circumstances been even a shuffle of a sidestep towards different, he might have squandered his accumulated good by lingering back in Liaodong with General Chen. At least until such a time he had no excuses left, only the choice to crawl back to the capital and again claw his way up from his knees. It is easy to forget Wang Zhi is but a boy perched tall playing a man until and unless the brief moments that his childishness shines through.

“Congratulations to Wang-dujun,” Ding Rong says, because he is yet in possession, still, of his pithy tongue and its paired pathetic head.

Wang Zhi has struck men for less, but, “Continue,” is all he says. It is not biting cold, but nor is it well-humoured warm. A middling indifference; bitter idle.

There is the click of a catch unclasping; the creak of hinges. The rasp of silk. Ding Rong reads on.

It is not the only reward Wang Zhi has been given for playing the game on the winner’s side, though it is the most overtly ostentatious: leave to hold a humble acreage of private land and to marry does, understandably, pale comparatively. It is, again, more fool him, though, that Ding Rong takes the moment he does to realise the profundity of their devisal when he sees his own name; his own sentence.

Eunuch Ding Rong is exiled no less than two thousand five hundred li north.

Hetao is far-flung, to the north of the capital. Further than two thousand five hundred li, by his recollection.

Ding Rong looks up. Wang Zhi does not. He seems to find his hands all the more interesting as he lays out a plain green yuanlingshan overtop the inner dress layers he has already unfolded and set down with due care.

“Congratulations to Ding-gongong,” Wang Zhi says. There is not a celebratory note to be found in the lilt of his tone at all. He thumbs at the collar of the fabric, then straightens back upright, hands folding away into the small of his back. At last, he lifts his face. His features are shuttered carefully, tightly guarded. If he is in any way amused by these circumstances, he is showing a rare and unfamiliar restraint in not readably lording over the court of Ding Rong’s cell with it.

“Congratulations,” Ding Rong repeats, dry. The corner of Wang Zhi’s mouth twitches, the twinge bitten short by the grit of his teeth; the set of his jaw. Ding Rong thinks if he can be forgiven anything it is this: his delay at comprehending the utter entirety of what is happening.

“For your spared life," is Wang Zhi's elaboration. Much like his congratulations, his explanation is more than somewhat lacking. "No fengguan, or xiapei. But, well. We’re already disregarding the etiquettes.”

When Ding Rong does not move, not at all, and so certainly not at an uptake considered quick enough, Wang Zhi cocks a brow. The customary imperiousness spurs some sudden steps out of Ding Rong as the trained animal part of his mind instinctively comes to heel by old rote. Then, well. He has nothing left, after that, but to cross the rest of the cell, at much the same meandering pace that Wang Zhi backs away from him, their tandem played away as casual, coincidental.

When he reaches the table and resumes his standstill, they have reoriented in such a way that there are two men between him and Wang Zhi; Wang Zhi between him and the ajar door. Three bodies and a threshold between him and a flight to faux freedom. Ding Rong ghosts the flat of his palm over the green silk, not quite touching it. It is not the nicest thing he will have held or had in his life, but it is more than what he is wearing now and beyond what he could have expected. It could even be called a courtesy: Wang Zhi could simply have him bow and call the farce of it done if he so willed it.

The fetched water is still lukewarm when he skims the tip of his finger over its surface, rippling it. It is fogged milky with a decoction; something inoffensively odorous, floral but bland. He reaches for the ties at his waist; begins to undress.

He is not to be afforded privacy for this, it seems, but privacy has always been something loaned to him, at best, never owned. It is less dire, then, its absence, for knowing the certainty of its coming and going by way of whim. That it would not stay with and keep him.

Ding Rong washes the filth of the cell from his skin. He dresses with the haste he considers appropriate. He is not corrected. There is no comb; he cups water in his palm and dampens his hair with it enough to tamp it down flatter; a semblance of neatening.

He hears the footsteps before he casts his glance over his shoulder to watch the movement; he smells the longan and red dates before the tea is held out to him by the unarmed guard to take. It is a laughable thing: they are being wed, and Wang Zhi will not so much as stray near him.

Ding Rong takes it, as bid. He does not laugh, though he considers it, as one might consider a distant impulse; a dull flippancy. Wang Zhi, at least, looks similarly unmoved as he presses his own proffered cup deeper into his palm.

It is sweet to the taste. But of course: bitterness is inauspicious for marriage; poison, similarly misfortunate. It does not scald Ding Rong’s mouth. It does not do much for the tacky dryness of his tongue and the blurry staleness on his teeth, either.

When it is drained done and the clay confiscated, Wang Zhi bows to him so swiftly and so shallowly that he all but misses it, save the flutter of his draping sleeves. Ding Rong does him a similar discourtesy. It may be hard to square his shoulders from the slump that he is used to hewing himself into to make himself deferentially small, but the severer stoop of his back has been spent up on Wang Zhi’s fake death and his real betrayal.

“Why?” Ding Rong asks, when he has straightened. He does not expect an answer, but exercises the futility nonetheless. Why not? He has leave of a life to again waste at his leisure, for however much longer from now it sees fit to last out.

He had not given Wang Zhi an answer when Wang Zhi had asked him the same. But then, that had been a why of a different question altogether. A why that Ding Rong does not want to satisfy aloud with any manner of reply. His actions have already spoken all he has to say on it. Wang Zhi's actions offer no such comprehensibility or closure.

“I cannot live without you,” Wang Zhi says, without so much as looking up. From his hands, the floor, any and every elsewhere but him — it is all apparently more deserving of his greater attention than Ding Rong. “So, I won’t.” As if it is so simple to him, after all the turns of his thought. As if that is all. As though that can be enough.

Spite, then. And Wang Zhi has allowed himself to become stupid with it. Ding Rong thought him smarter than that. No man is irreplaceable. And no man, certainly, is worth Wang Zhi cosigning himself to being unable to hold office again within the capital for the foreseeable future.

But he thought Wang Zhi many things, once, before he lost sense and track of what and who Wang Zhi is at all. Now, he hasn’t the surety. It does comfort him somewhat, though, however coldly, that he has contorted himself to much a same shape of incomprehensibility within Wang Zhi’s estimation. That is something that can be his.

It is not, even, that Ding Rong wants to die. He has seen and brought death to enough to doubt that many do. This is not life, however, not for either of them. This is waiting.

Wang Zhi’s expression, however minutely it has opened with his words, promptly shutters closed. Rescinds, retreats. “You’ll be sent for,” he says. He takes the handle of the emptied case, closed and relatched, in hand. He waves away his men with the other.

He goes, much in the same way he has come. Soon, then, Ding Rong must and so will follow. He has no choice in the matter.

But— when he can again be wholly honest with himself, Ding Rong will remember he has never has had choice in this matter. Not once; not even when he held a blade to Wang Zhi’s throat and thought himself unshackled, finally, at long last, from the travesty of his infatuation, suppurated in service.