Looking over the room that has been deemed — generously — their lodgings for the night, Sui Zhou finds himself agreeing with Tang Fan’s earlier assessment: the case in Kaifeng is cursed.

The rain had been the undeniable omen of it all, in retrospect. They had not been prepared for it — winters were a brisk but dry seasonal affair, from the trajectory of their journey down to their final destination, so little thought had been paid to its prospect. It had not simply rained, though, when the sky closed overhead, dark and ruinous, but poured. It was any wonder they made it to Guantao as safely as they managed, swept in and soaked through to the bone. Even if the skies had not cleared all too late, their horses were not fit to ride on further, and the peculiar predicament of the weather's tidings had seen to it that the imperial station was without any they could change over to.

Sui Zhou had filled his afternoon and evening with the busywork of avoidance. Now, there is no such luxury left. Without the distance of dinner out in the hall, there is only the sprawl of the night ahead, pinned down in a box of a one-bed room with Tang Fan.

Tang Fan, who had been especially unfortunate at the onset of the rainfall. Tang Fan, who had to be peeled out of his robes and bundled into a bath the moment they reached civilised landfall lest he catch cold. Tang Fan, who is now sitting in what is intended to be their shared bed, hair still damp where it is piled and pinned high atop his head, baring the sinuous curve of his delicate neck. Tang Fan, who had nothing to wear left after the storm had seen to it, and so has pulled the white inner robe of Sui Zhou's shed Baihu uniform over himself for the sake of warmth and modesty.

The case in Kaifeng may indeed be cursed, but Sui Zhou is doubting, somewhat despairingly, that he is going to survive long enough to determine just how cursed. Only so much of what a man experiences can be endured, after all, and this— this long past exceeds Sui Zhou’s sufferance.

“I will take the floor,” Sui Zhou says, because he does not know what else he can do, except what he should not — cannot — do. How many nights has he entertained this very vision of Tang Fan, all lean long lines and li after li of smooth skin? Most, in some shape or another, since Tang Fan first stormed into his life and made his home in what wreckage he found there. Too many, but so few. To have it now, real enough to see, too far from reach to touch— it’s agony.

Tang Fan lifts his chin from the shelf of his knees, drawn to his chest, arms slowly unfurling from their fold across his shins. “You can’t take the floor,” he protests, with a wide-eyed boggle and purling bottom lip, “Sui Zhou, there is— there is no floor to take!”

He punctuates this with a flapping hand towards the walls, as if to emphasise the truth of it. Sui Zhou’s sleeves hang even looser on his arms, and the motion rucks the cuff up all the higher, baring his thin wrist, a sliver of forearm. Sui Zhou does not need to follow the flit of Tang Fan’s fingers to know he’s right, but he glances after it, anyway, to spare himself a moment of having to take in the sight of the rest of him.

“It’s enough,” Sui Zhou replies. It must be. “I’ll make do.” He has to. “You need the rest.” Tang Fan does, but there is no escaping that it is an excuse. Sui Zhou folds his arms across his chest and tries to moor himself to the touch of his sleeve beneath his palm, the tight cinch of his fingers around his bicep. Points of pressure. Stakes in the mud. Something to wall him off from the whole unmaking that is Tang Fan in Sui Zhou’s clothes and nothing else. The collar hanging loose at his throat. The white fabric, dried sheer from when he had pulled it over himself while still damp from his bath, now giving too tantalising a glimpse of a taste of his slim chest, the dark peaks of his nipples.

“So do you!” Tang Fan persists. His thighs fall open as he turns over, hand propping the rise of his weight up from the bed, and Sui Zhou almost chokes on the sight of it. The slit in the robe rides so high. The skirt, trapped in the tangle of his legs, hides nothing. “There’s more bed than room. Come here.”

Sui Zhou feels himself lurch, hotly, with the urge to do just that: to come closer and closer still until he’s making a fit for himself between Tang Fan’s thighs, holding them open around the breach of his body. The sink of his dread is a bitterly cold counterpoint that only serves to make the scald all the more suffocating. He understands, now, how people can die from yearning, if all a want grown dire enough does is burn up from the inside out.

“It’s fine,” he grits out. It is, it is, it will be. He simply needs to sleep through this night, like he’s slept through so many others. None of this will follow him into morning save in the quiet place he locks down everything that breaks him open and apart anew. Tang Fan’s grievance at being denied and defied will last only as long as it takes for something else to attract his ephemeral attention, as always.

“You’re being foolish,” Tang Fan bites back, because it goes against the very grain of his nature to leave well enough alone. He twists himself again, managing to get his legs underneath him to kneel up. “What are you afraid of?”

Sui Zhou watches as Tang Fan’s back straightens; as his shoulders slope. How the thin fabric cascades down his thinner frame, pooling between the junction of his thighs, snaring between the bed and his bony knees. Flight coils taut beneath the wings of his shoulder blades, but he cannot run away. There is nowhere to run away to, here; were he to try, anyway, even Tang Fan would be able to catch him.

You, he thinks of saying. You, he cannot ever dare to admit, either aloud or in absence. He swallows, instead, scrambling in the silence for something to speak that’s acceptable.

Tang Fan is quicker than he is. “Is it your nightmares?” he asks, pointed, his eyes narrowing beneath the furrow of his brow. Then, “Guangchuan, when was the last time you had a nightmare? A bad one,” Tang Fan adds emphatically, preemptively steering him down a stricter course of consideration.

Yuanxiaojie, Sui Zhou knows at once. It had been the firecrackers, for Sui Zhou, and he suspects it had been the same for Tang Fan, too. They’d found one another in the kitchen, two ghosts haunting a restless in-between during the dead of the night, and had forsaken any pretence of propriety to sit together and drink wine. Tang Fan had fallen asleep mid-word, sunk against Sui Zhou’s arm where they sat drawn up close at the bench together, and Sui Zhou had meant to wake him; had reached for it; had never quite made it. Dong’er had found them like that, the morning after. Another thing kept in the deep abscessed pit of him, never to be spoken about.

Before then, the last— that had been when they’d shared a bed, too. Sui Zhou had woken with his arm pinning Tang Fan down by the throat, their lips a breath apart. Tang Fan’s fingers had been tangled in his hair, but no throb had ached across his scalp to show that Tang Fan had tried to fight him, had put his grip there to do anything with it but comb the strands back from Sui Zhou’s face while his words heaved out of him, clipped and choking. Sui Zhou's cock had been so hard against Tang Fan's thigh, tangled up between his own, that he’d almost spent himself when he eased his weight off enough for Tang Fan to suck in a shuddery breath. Another thing, down, still. Sui Zhou must be full to overflowing, now, with these foraged scraps of things he takes and swallows in the hopes of satiating the ugly thing his desire is. To salve the love he’s let fester in brotherhood.

“Tang Fan,” he tries. He sets his jaw around it, puts his back into it, pours out every last drop of his desperation parading as determination. Tang Fan will lance at a passive bulwark, but he tends, often, to forfeit in the face of active resistance. For a tentative moment, Sui Zhou thinks this will be what he's graced, here, tonight: that he’ll be spared and sent forward on another snatch of borrowed time.

It’s not. Be it the storm, be it the case awaiting them in Kaifeng, be it the noose of tension first looped around their necks years ago now finally threading too taut — whatever has led them pales when held up to where they’ve been led. Something steely glints through Tang Fan’s dark eyes, something dangerous hems in his hard-set features, and Sui Zhou knows that he’s not going to back down before he even staggers forward, finding his feet, then the floor, then Sui Zhou in a flurry of scrambling steps.

“No!” Tang Fan snaps at him, his hiss barely leashed. “What does this serve?” He’s imposing himself on Sui Zhou in an instant, imperious, hands fisted at his sides, his shoulders squared back. Tang Fan’s anger has always been like a flash flood when it rears up and wrecks through; sudden and violent and gone again. The wonder is less where it comes from and more where it disappears to when it’s done.

“I am tired,” Tang Fan presses on, scowling, and Sui Zhou’s head spins with the hysterical snap-retort thought of Tired of what? that he has to swallow dry to wet his mouth and keep tamped down behind his tongue. He does not want to know. He dreads the confirmation that it is him who trials Tang Fan so.

Tang Fan’s nostrils flare around his exhale, whistle-sharp pitched, and Sui Zhou feels it gust against his upper lip. It’s a slap of a reminder as to just how close they are, how close Tang Fan has seen fit to bring them.

“Then sleep,” Sui Zhou says. It’s blessed, how sturdily his voice holds around it. How sure it sounds to even his own ears, underneath the faint, stunned ringing, the surge of his blood. “I’m not stopping you.”

“How can I sleep like this?” Tang Fan argues. His hand jerks jankily between them, and the unfan of his fingers clips Sui Zhou’s thigh sharply, the stripe of contact burning brand hot even through the cotton of his own robe. “You must be tired, too. There’s room, and you know I won’t move all that much in the night if I’m between the wall and you. Don’t be foolish. Come to bed.”

Sui Zhou breathes out, then breaks off from his composure to run a hand over his face. Fine, he thinks, Fine, he is about to concede helplessly to saying, but Tang Fan, too riled to do anything but wildly blaze his trail, interjects ahead of him here, too, first.

“Is that all it is?” he asks, more to the presumptions in his head than part and parcel of his conversation with Sui Zhou, now, perhaps. “I’m not afraid of you, Sui Zhou. You’ve never hurt me.”

That is a falsehood. That is such an utterly, laughably disprovable falsehood— “I have,” Sui Zhou corrects impulsively, stupidly, "Tang Fan—"

"Don't I get to decide that?" Tang Fan retorts, volume veering close to an all-out shout. Any louder and they might bring half the station to them, nosy nearby locals in tow. If there was any way for this night to get worse, it would be by that outcome. "Don't I— whether or not it's important is my choice, isn't it?"

This was all out of Sui Zhou’s control before it started, and it’s only grown worse from there, but it is incredible how Tang Fan can so expertly make him feel as if he’s rapidly losing something he’s never had. How he can flip the ground out from underneath Sui Zhou’s feet when Sui Zhou is already adrift somewhere weightless, suspended. He’s making no sense. How can it strip back to a matter of importance, of choice, when the overlaying fact of it is that Sui Zhou has hurt him before, and almost certainly will, again, whether or not he wants to?

“Tang Fan,” he tries again, again, and it’s pleading, this time, without holds barred. If they are going to have this conversation, if they absolutely must, they need to be having the same one.

It happens quickly, all at once: Tang Fan reaches for him, and Sui Zhou shies out from underneath his hand in a flinch that seems to ricochet back into Tang Fan's own surprised recoil. The blare of his temper sputters, for a moment, before it finds the air to burn again, incandescent, his neck mottling a flustered rash-red as his face crumples.

"What is wrong with you?" Tang Fan accuses more than asks, aggrieved, as he obstinately reaches for Sui Zhou again. "You have been— brooding, since Qingcheng—!"

Tang Fan’s face washes out a sickly sallow pale, his eyes watering as they widen. His mouth hangs ajar around the words that have left him as if struck loose, for a breath, two. Sui Zhou’s blood slows to a sluggish, dying ebb, chilling over. “Qingcheng,” Tang Fan repeats, frail. “It’s me. You will not because it’s me?”

Yes, Sui Zhou thinks, and, but, no. Qingcheng had been… no. Qingcheng had been too much, of him, of him hoping and wanting and coming too close to taking too much, but Qingcheng is not why he doesn’t want to. It’s not why he can’t.

If they had simply been speaking past one another before, well. They are as severed solitary and separate as jade sea and blue sky, now. For all appearances at distances to be one, but for all the roam of the world to not be found even close to touching. Tang Fan starts to skitter back, drawing up into himself, on guard, and it’s Sui Zhou that chases, encroaching in paces to grasp him by the arms, stopping him still.

“I know that you don’t, that it’s not the same, for you,” Tang Fan is babbling, tongue tripping frantically over itself as he casts around for an escape, some sort of retreat into a more breathable space. “Qingcheng was an, an incaution, yes, but it was for the case, and it worked, didn’t it? I thought better of you, that you were not the man to hold an inconvenient heart against me.”

Sui Zhou can barely catch more than a third of the words flung free of Tang Fan’s mouth, and follow absolutely none. All there is running rampant through his head is the same and inconvenient heart, wrapped up vice-tight around Qingcheng and how Tang Fan has somehow drawn himself to the conclusion that Sui Zhou holds it as a regret and a blemish against him. It couldn’t be further from the truth. It couldn’t be more misconstrued.

He shakes Tang Fan by the arms, once, then again, harder. “Tang Fan,” he tries to interrupt, “Runqing. Runqing!”

Tang Fan stutters to a stop, biting down on his bottom lip as his chin dips to his collarbone. He looks up at Sui Zhou, wary, through the ink dark swoop of his long lashes. His arms are shaking beneath Sui Zhou’s hold on them, roiling aftershocks from the seize of his chest as he tries to take in air.

Sui Zhou swallows. Takes a breath so that he can pretend, for a stalling moment, that he’s steadied himself with it. “I don’t understand,” he admits.

Tang Fan blanches impossibly paler. “What?” he blurts, watery, then, with a fresh flare of panic, “If you don’t understand, then— then forget I said it at all!”

There are few things Sui Zhou would not give to have this night undone, these last few minutes if not hours, and the most treasured of them is before him now, in his hands. He’s not meant to be so fortunate, though, and so Tang Fan cannot be so fortunate, either, for their inextricable interwind.

“Speak to me,” Sui Zhou urges. He knows the irony of the request on his part, all considered. But he cannot help it: it is in the nature he wants for himself to nurture Tang Fan. “Tell me what you meant.” And then, “I won’t know without it.”

Tang Fan’s expression tells Sui Zhou very plainly that he would much rather Sui Zhou never came to understand it, if that is so to be the case. But Tang Fan is willful, and stubborn, and there’s the grim determination edging the line of his mouth, now, that Sui Zhou is well acquainted with. The one that often portends a gloriously damning display of foolhardiness.

"You know what I meant," Tang Fan tests, terse.

“I do not.”

The assurance serves to make Tang Fan look more maudlin; more grimly determined. “But you must,” he presses.

“Tang Fan.” Perhaps he could guess, if so pushed. But that is— a dangerous way for Sui Zhou to so stray. Comes too close to ground that could be fertile; to land that might have opportunity. Dangerous enough, that he still has Tang Fan between his hands. Dangerous enough, that he gives himself over the urge to squeeze down; to circle his thumbs, slow, gentling.

“You’re a learned man,” Tang Fan justifies, roundabout, then, “and I have been overt.” And, “I know you, aside.”

More than anyone, Sui Zhou thinks, but not well enough for this. It is much the same for him with Tang Fan, too. There are things he simply does not look at or upon, lest their reality become unignorable; lest their light turn him blind. In cowardice lies survival, however hollow.

"You're speaking around this," is what Sui Zhou dares to say.

Tang Fan bristles. "And what if I am?" he snaps, a flustered flush flooding high on his cheeks. "How can you need it said, after all this time— how can you not possibly know? That I— care for you."

"Care for me," Sui Zhou repeats back. His voice sounds distant. It does not sound like it is his own.

Tang Fan shrinks in on himself, the downturn of his mouth poignantly glum. "Yes." If Sui Zhou's voice is distant, Tang Fan's is a shimmer of faint; an unreachable mirage on the water. "Deeply. Much."

It leaves little room for Sui Zhou to spin doubt. And while he knows that there are things he should not hold in his hands, he knows that if he is to be so handed them, then he must hold them with due tenderness, utmost care. With Tang Fan, this requires, especially, a bravery he simply does not possess. But he can call on a shade in its image, for service of this.

"It is the same for me," Sui Zhou shares, quiet as now unkept. "I care for you."

Tang Fan's face crumples, an ugly, contorted crush. "It is not the same!" he retorts bitterly. He twists within the clutch of Sui Zhou's hands, but Sui Zhou allows him little give to do more than tire himself. "Yours is—!" He takes a sharp, shrill breath, then sinks in small again with the exhale of it, fought out. "You— care. But it's not enough. I want more, than— I want you to love me back!"

He wrenches in Sui Zhou's grip again, trying to wrest himself free, and it takes all of what is now not punch-drunk blurred out within Sui Zhou at the blow of Tang Fan's confession to hold on to him, to keep him within reach and in place.

"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou tries.

He goes unheard. "And you don't," Tang Fan rushes on, voice a watery tremor to match the quake in his frame. "But you keep giving! When I take!"

"Tang Fan."

"And you make me hope!" Tang Fan is verging on wailing, now. He squeezes his eyes shut, tight, and Sui Zhou aches wretchedly to see the welling tears that catch in his lashes. "I hope so much I'm miserable with it, and now I've pushed you too far—"

Tang Fan yelps as if struck when Sui Zhou gives him a shake, one that’s on the side of ungentle enough to make his teeth clack and rattle him to silent, eyes flying back open, wide. “Tang Fan!” Sui Zhou cuts in, carving into the space such a trepid quiet makes. Any louder and it will be him that draws the interruption of uninvited company to them. After a moment, he yields to a kinder restraint, and continues. “It is the same for me. As it is for you.”

They are not good words, if words can be measured as such, here. But they are more than he has ever said with his voice, and Sui Zhou can do no more after their speaking but watch as they sink in. As realisation is stirred up from the depths of Tang Fan and dredged to his surface.

Tang Fan makes a pained sound, tears spilling over hotly onto his cheeks. “Sui Zhou!” He slaps at Sui Zhou’s chest, disjointed. But it is all sound and frustrated furore, nothing like when Tang Fan has struck him before and meant for the sting to be sung. “You are— if this is some showing of pity—”

“It is not,” Sui Zhou assures him, with all of his honesty. “I would not.” He could not.

“You would not,” Tang Fan agrees. How quickly he does so makes something soft shudder in Sui Zhou’s chest; something tight unravel from his neck. Tang Fan pulls in a shaky, whistling breath. He works his sleeve far enough into his palm that he can fist at it and dab his face dry. Then, he slaps at Sui Zhou again.

"You! How could you leave me to say those things? You've made me out to be so— so foolish!" He squirms in Sui Zhou's hold a final time, and Sui Zhou takes the chance in lapsing his grip enough that Tang Fan can free himself. As he hoped enough to dare expect, Tang Fan does not venture out past the bounds of the lax press of Sui Zhou's touch, or skirt back from the bulk of him still crowding them together.

“We are very stupid men,” Tang Fan declares at last. He purses his mouth, clearing his throat with a rough work of it that Sui Zhou’s gaze drifts to follow.

Sui Zhou is quiet in his own semblance of agreement. He circles his thumbs again, tentative, tracing the creases pressed into the sleeves; the rucks of the familiar fabric where it falls strangely on a foreign frame. Tang Fan’s hands flit up from their swaying hang they’ve returned to between them, and his fingers pluck at Sui Zhou’s collar as the heels of his palms smooth down where the chest of his robes has crumpled.

“I gifted you jade, Sui Zhou!” It’s a fair grouse; Tang Fan indeed had. And it was such to the nature of the gift and its giving that there was an undeniability to its meaning; a clarity to its intent. Still, Sui Zhou had found his way, and set it aside somewhere that it was more kept than treasured; understood to be undeserved.

“I did not want to presume,” Sui Zhou confesses. A concession to a part of a most-truth.

Tang Fan ducks forward, tucking his face to the back of his hand, still laid out flat on Sui Zhou’s chest. It is an awkward thing, for his height, and does little more than bare the shake of his slim shoulders; resile the resound of his clotted sniffle. It makes Sui Zhou’s throat vice with a pain that displaces him, drawn up and quartered between the urge to give comfort and the understanding of the cause for it. He rubs at Tang Fan’s arms in what can amount, from him, as gentle, finding his compromise in coveting.

“You never said,” Tang Fan berates him, muffled. When he lifts his head again, his eyes are red-hemmed, tear-hewed, but there is a giddiness to it all; a forbearing relief. “But you’ve shown, haven’t you? You’ve always shown.”

“Yes.” Sui Zhou can attest to that much aloud. He does not think he could follow it back to its start, but he’s never been a subtle man. He’s not built for such.

Tang Fan’s hands start to roam, guideless and guileless both, up from the planes of Sui Zhou’s chest to the rolling hills of his shoulders. “Well,” he says, “I suppose I never said, either. Before now.” It’s a concession of his own, contrite. His eyelids hood as his gaze dips to watch his hands, but Sui Zhou does not miss how he lingers along the way and all the while on Sui Zhou’s mouth; his jaw; the hollow of his throat.

“You’ve shown, as well.” Sui Zhou can attest to that much aloud, too. He wants to touch; burns with it, as he always does, but blisteringly, now, beneath the flame of confirmation. He does not know, yet, though, what is allowed. What he could be allowed; what he might or will be. It is all too new, like the yet-coalesced clarity that follows a sudden waking. His mind is not clear enough to differentiate where this long dream is ending and his unmaking is beginning. It is safe, in the receding dark, to lie still. To simply keep his hands on Tang Fan’s arms, and wait.

“Not so well as you,” says Tang Fan. “We are truly very stupid men. But you!” He claws his fingers down, tight, squeezing at Sui Zhou’s shoulders as his mouth pinches down around the curl of his smile. “Sui Guangchuan, you are the stupidest of us both.”

Sui Zhou cannot — and so does not — deny it. Tang Fan’s expression softens back out, his mirth mulling. “Who could not want you?” he muses. Then, impossibly softer, and with excruciating devastation, he sinks the dagger of his adulation in to hilting. “Who would not love you?”

It is not knowing but what knowing carries with it, Sui Zhou can’t say. It is the inability to bear the sight of the whole when it is walked out from the dark. It is the submission to the understanding that you do not deserve to feel the sun on your back and see into a world that looks so bright.

“Tang Fan,” is what he can say. Purposeless; adrift. Even that feels like it is an exertive overstep. A greedy excursion.

Tang Fan has a hush for him in answer, having, apparently, heard his fill of enough. “No,” he murmurs, soft as a suggestion, but as undefiable as a command, “no more from you. And no more of that.”

His hands drift higher, until they are circling Sui Zhou’s throat, thumbs sliding beneath the jut of his jaw. Sui Zhou can feel the tremor of his pulse through the clammy collar of Tang Fan’s palms. He holds his breath.

“Let me kiss you, now.” Tang Fan’s neck is mottled a bright, blotchy red that Sui Zhou knows stains lower, will be splashed across his thin chest. He is allowed to know this, surely, now. It is something he can have, just as mapping it with his eyes is something he can do. His hands. His mouth. Still, he does not move, even as Tang Fan inches ever, ever closer, tilting his chin, until their noses are brushing; their lips almost touching.

“Please.” The gust of the exhalation presses hot and desperate to Sui Zhou’s mouth. “Please, I’ve waited. I may well die if I don’t have it now. If we don’t do it properly.”

“Runqing,” Sui Zhou gasps. His Yes is as unheeded as it is unneeded; it is lost and gone to the harsh, hungry crush of Tang Fan’s mouth to his own. It is graceless and it is gorging and Sui Zhou can only hold on, give in, be subsumed. He lets himself touch; smoothing a hand up the slant of Tang Fan’s throat to fetter him by his nape, to guide the tilt of his face, the angle of his mouth. He lets himself take; setting his teeth into the swell of his bottom lip, swallowing the shivery whine off Tang Fan’s tongue that the sting of it pries loose.

Tang Fan defies any neatening. He is stumbly and sloppy and he will not stop speaking against Sui Zhou’s mouth, trilling nonsense Sui Zhou can hardly hear but has no doubt Tang Fan does not hear himself, either. It makes their kisses too rough, and wet, and fumbling, and still it is revelatory; it is ruining. Tang Fan is the most beautiful thing Sui Zhou has ever held or will hold again in his hands; what he will have against and beneath his body. He kisses every shape and shade of sound off Tang Fan’s lips and from his tongue and knows with all of the certainty that he can clutch together in the crumbling temple of himself that kissing Tang Fan is how he wants to spend the rest of his life.

He has thought such things before, in the abstract of underneath the loft of too-towering desire. Now, he is sure.

Tang Fan breaks them apart only to sigh out, rasping raw, against the corner of his mouth. “Sui Zhou.” It is chiding. “Sui Zhou, you are not touching me.”

Sui Zhou supposes he is not; not enough, if Tang Fan sees righteous cause to complain about it. He lets his other hand fall far from its mooring perch on Tang Fan’s shoulder, led by the tempting of Tang Fan’s ragged breath to fit it to Tang Fan’s hip, thumb curling into the high-risen slit where the cotton parts to silky-skin. Tang Fan’s warm kiss-bruised lips drag against the scratch of his stubble as he gasps, arcing, full-body, as though Sui Zhou has plucked him taut. His cock is stiff against Sui Zhou’s thigh, twitching. Sui Zhou thinks if he reached between his thighs, he would find him wet.

“If I cannot have my hand or my mouth on you,” Tang Fan husks into his cheek, “I will surely die.”

It is a brief and it is a brutal overcoming, the actuality of being so wanted, and so much. Sui Zhou can only find it in himself to laugh with it, dazed by disbelief. “So you keep claiming,” he murmurs. His voice is a well-worked grate. He feels so full to bursting with fondness he might well soon die from it himself.

“Because it is true,” Tang Fan whines. “I am wasting!” He presses himself more tightly to Sui Zhou, rutting himself up into the crease of his hip with a stuttery sway. “I am without.”

It seems an insurmountable feat, to draw back from the warm press of Tang Fan bleeding into him, but by the grace of something deific, he does. Sui Zhou curls his thumb in on Tang Fan’s hip, kneads his other behind Tang Fan’s ear where he is still holding him at the nape. Tang Fan sinks back into it with a slow hum, eyes fluttering shut before they fly back open in delayed realisation.

“Oh, no,” Tang Fan mutters, troubled. His brow furrows as if he is greatly pained. “I know this look of yours.” His hands scrabble to secure their grip on Sui Zhou, where they can best reach, as if he does think it feasible Sui Zhou will pry him free. “I do not like this look of yours.”

It would be too easy, to simply give Tang Fan what he and they both want. It is the ease of it which means it is not what Sui Zhou should do, here: a starving man would sooner burst his belly feasting on the first meal plated before him than pay mind to his limits. “It is late,” he says carefully. Apologetic. As if he holds court over the hour and that they must rise at an early one to leave.

“You have killed me,” Tang Fan moans. He fists at the shoulders of Sui Zhou’s robes and gives them a punitive tug. When he tries to rock forward, Sui Zhou holds him fast at the hip, earning a grunt. “You are killing me!”

“I would take my time with you,” Sui Zhou professes quietly. It rings too loud in his ears; feels struck too heavily from his mouth. But the Heavens don’t fall with its utterance. Nothing grander happens but a subtle softening of Tang Fan’s expression.

“You have taken it, already,” Tang Fan protests. “I can’t endure another night.”

“I want to do well by you.” The Heavens remain upstanding against the blow of this, too, though Sui Zhou is not so unspared. Something finally ungrounds in him to speak it. It’s in holding on to Tang Fan that he’s yet kept upright.

Tang Fan’s now-soft expression sweetens into something tender. It’s all-but unsurvivable to look upon, but Sui Zhou holds it and him in his gaze nonetheless. “It needn’t be more than perfect,” he rebukes, but it is heatless; a relent. He unfurls his fingers to pet them down Sui Zhou’s shoulders, then up his neck, meandering and circuitous.

“Take me to bed,” Tang Fan demands. It brokers no argument; it answers all questions. “If you don’t…” He pauses, pointed, to push in past the pretence of resistance in Sui Zhou’s hand to his hip. Sui Zhou lets him; lets himself groan out, gutted, when Tang Fan ruts against him in a slow, sinuous slide. “If you don’t soon, I won’t be able to wait, even if I did want to.”

When he tips himself forward again, Sui Zhou knows how to take it: with both hands meeting at Tang Fan’s waist, fingers almost touching as he lifts him. Tang Fan’s laugh is pure delight as his bare feet leave the floor. His legs twine around Sui Zhou with all the ease of being made for it; his arms drape around his neck with the similar quintessence of the always intended. He strokes, idly, at Sui Zhou’s back as he is carried; once, twice. He kisses his brow; his temple; noses into his hair. His weight is familiar in Sui Zhou’s arms, but this way of carrying it is new. It is better.

Sui Zhou knows how many steps there are blind to the bed. He takes them carefully; he sets Tang Fan down on the edge of the bed like glass, and sinks to his knees between his thighs as they fall open. He does not think much of it past how it feels so right.

“Oh, Guangchuan,” Tang Fan breathes, a heady rasp, and Sui Zhou blinks up at him as his hands cup his face, taking in his sight. And it is a sight to take: the blush blemishing his skin; the heave of his slim chest beneath the fall of Sui Zhou’s robe. The way it is clinging beneath his arms, tacky with sweat; how the cotton has gone sheer over the wet, ruddy tip of his swollen cock where it is jutting against his belly. “Oh, I could come from seeing you just like this.”

Sui Zhou has to catch himself on Tang Fan’s bare knees, dazed. Tang Fan, inconsiderate of his plight, ignorant of his own affect, continues frantically on, as though what he has in his head must be so exorcised aloud. “I’m close, I’ve made a mess of your robe as it stands, though it still smells like you. It was still warm from you when I took it, like you were holding me, for a moment—”

“Tang Fan,” Sui Zhou chokes, wrecked, and Tang Fan startles as though it is him that has been struck senseless.

“Sorry,” he whispers, “sorry.” He sounds, not to his credit, mindful yet utterly unrepentant. “Undress, quickly.”

Tang Fan releases him, and Sui Zhou bows forward, pressing his face into the inside of his thigh. He hides, there, between the cradle of Tang Fan’s knees and beneath the stroke of Tang Fan’s hands over his neck, through his hair. He strips himself, shaking, to the perduring touchpoints of Tang Fan pulling the pins and ties free of his topknot, of Tang Fan running the comb of his fingers through the strands. He gathers the sheaf of it together; twists and piles it into a bun that he pins back high to the crown of Sui Zhou’s head, righting and readying him for bed.

It takes Sui Zhou a moment to find his strength; another to return it to his legs to stand. Tang Fan drags himself back to give way as Sui Zhou rises to his feet. His eyes are blown wide when Sui Zhou meets them; a deep pooling dark he feels at once on the cusp of falling into. His stare is starved; bold in its blatancy. It takes Sui Zhou longer than will make do to kick his boots off, and longer still for Tang Fan to back himself further along the narrow bed and to the wall to make room for Sui Zhou to join him within the space they are remaking for two.

“I need a moment,” he rambles out, as Sui Zhou goes to his knees again before him, their folded legs knocking together. “I can’t look at you. You can’t touch me. I need a moment.”

He bundles himself up small, tossing himself over onto his side in a rush of a hurry. Sui Zhou lies himself down carefully, flat on his back. He feels the drum of Tang Fan’s heart thundering through his back where needs must press it to his arm. It is a match for his own, kicking frantically against the trap of his ribcage.

Sui Zhou closes his eyes. Bids himself to calm, first, then begs, as the minutes warp and wind out, precariously endless. Eventually, as always, Tang Fan comes back around to him, shuffling slow, weighed down with caution. They find one another, in the burned low candlelight: with hands, first, then the rest. Destined to reorient, each to his own lodestar, though the inevitably coalesces here simply, slightly, in the pillow of Tang Fan’s cheek to his shoulder, the pen of his arm around Tang Fan’s back.

He does not sleep, not for a long while, but he takes his rest, meanwhile, in the peace of Tang Fan, so close-by.