By the time Sui Zhou returns with breakfast, Tang Fan has expended every effort to do nothing more than roll over in their bed, putting his back to both the door and the day. The blankets have been drawn back up tightly from where Sui Zhou remembers leaving them, spilled down Tang Fan’s slim shoulders by Sui Zhou’s reluctant parting of himself from the warm bed and the warmer bundle of Tang Fan tucked to his chest.

Sui Zhou adjusts his hold on the tray so he can balance it one-handed, leans down, and plucks, prompting, at the blanket where it has nested in the valley of Tang Fan's waist. "Up," he tells him.

Tang Fan gives out a morose moan, and clutches the blankets more tightly around himself, the claw of his fingers peeking out from underneath.

The day that they had arrived in the village, Tang Fan had taken one look at the small one-room mud-brick house — with its drooping thatched roof overhang, earth-tamped floor, and narrow tacked-on kitchen — sucked in a breath, and devolved into a ceaseless tirade of complaints as to their accommodations that could not be stemmed. When he had seen inside, spying the kang which took up all but a few shuffling steps of legroom, he had been inconsolable. Had promised, injudiciously, never to let Sui Zhou know peace or rest again, for inflicting on him such an unrightful wrong; had threatened, irrationally, to throw himself down a well so he could haunt Sui Zhou bitterly for the rest of his days.

There had been a brief moment of mollified levity when Sui Zhou, with all the serenity of a man who knew to do no more than half-listen, had simply told Tang Fan that those days would be few because Sui Zhou would throw himself down the well after him. Then Tang Fan had realised he was indeed only being half-listened to, and swiftly recommenced his throat-cut wailing as to the indignities he was so suffering by Sui Zhou’s hands.

Sui Zhou had fed the kang with wood from the pile stacked in the kitchen and fed Tang Fan cuts of red cooked pork belly from his fingers while he prepared the rest of dinner, biding through the bombardment. By the time the latening hour had draped itself dark and heavy over their shoulders, Tang Fan’s temperament had sweetened with his appetite sated, body pliant with contentment underneath the fire-baked blankets.

Tang Fan has waged war every morning since, undeterred in his course despite his every campaign against both the sun's rising and Sui Zhou's rousing being a resounding loss.

Today will be no different, it seems, by all appearances. Tang Fan has his predictabilities, in that sense, now Sui Zhou has learned the manifest of the madness. It has been a strange thing, to come to know that things can cease being new yet not grow old. It has been a wonderful thing, to learn there can be safety in complacency when it comes coupled with companionship.

“A bed is the counterpart to wives and concubines,” Tang Fan recites, “so a wife or concubine should always be companion to a bed.” It’s well-argued, sound; he’s clearly elected to rehearse for this round out on the field.

“And you are neither,” Sui Zhou counters cleanly. He straightens back upright in preparation.

Tang Fan makes the most affronted sound, and is clearly aghast enough at this that he wriggles back around in a fumbling fling of arms and legs to face Sui Zhou, a glower affixed to his features.

“How could you?” he sputters, scowling stormily. “How dare you?”

Sui Zhou sets the tray down on the shelf headrest of the kang, lining its corners up to the brick so it has the least chance of being clipped if or more likely when Tang Fan’s limbs start flying with scandalised intent. Then, he folds his arms across his chest, tilts his head, and cocks a brow.

That utterly incenses Tang Fan, as intended. He scrambles up on his hand and elbow in a flurry of floppy, fluffed-up hair and a flash of a glare. “Sui Zhou! You cruel man, you, you— impossible unromantic! That you would say that, to your xingan xiao Qing’er— doesn’t being your most important person make me your wife in so many other words?”

Tang Fan is right, but it will defeat the purpose and ruin the attempt to tell him that. And so, what Sui Zhou says instead is, “Breakfast won’t keep warm for much longer.”

“So let it cool!” Tang Fan squabbles. “There are more important things at hand here at the moment than food!”

There are three things of highest importance to Tang Fan, Sui Zhou knows, that compete with one another at any given time to be the object of his drive and focus. If not food, and likely neither sleep, given his animation, then that leaves only the one other possibility.

“Are there?” Sui Zhou asks him. All for the sake of having certainty in confirmation, of course, and for no other reason than that.

Tang Fan’s sharp eyebrows point in with the scrutinising furrow of his brow, before his countenance smoothes over again with assessing confidence. Then, he moues his mouth, hoods his eyelids, lofts his chin, and— throws the blankets back from the lithe lean of his body. His inner robe is mussed, fallen all but completely open across his chest and the skirt rucked up high over the rise of his thighs, slinking silk furled back from the pearl of sprawling leagues of barely blemished skin.

Sui Zhou has his answer, with that. Tang Fan seems to deign an elaboration worthwhile, though, nonetheless. “Guangchuan-ge,” he whines, the drag of his drawl obnoxious, carefully curated to incite incredibly expedited annoyance. “Hurry, the bed won’t keep warm for much longer.”

Shameless thing, Sui Zhou thinks, with no absence of absolute fondness, as he swiftly unthreads the laces of his bracers and undoes the clasps of his belt. He kicks off his boots and strips down bare, layers falling flat to pool at his ankles with the well-rote military efficiency Tang Fan has now long reappropriated for far more pleasant senses of urgency. Tang Fan’s stare is a red lantern beacon of his attentive appraisal, a tangible weight that brazenly bears down on him each and every second all the while.

Tang Fan giggles as Sui Zhou slides up onto the kang on his hands and knees, lush with his small and to-be-soon-shortlived victory. He makes a show of squirming the slightest increment back, as if to make room for Sui Zhou in the space already set out and aside for him. When Sui Zhou has drawn in and settled on his side, cheek cupped in his palm and elbow propping him up in a loose mirror, Tang Fan hauls the blankets back up over both their waists, then rests his hand on the rise of Sui Zhou’s hip, thumb circling lazily.

“See?” Tang Fan preens preemptively, expectant of praise. “Feel how warm our bed is still. I kept it like this for you — if I had risen it would be so cool and unpleasant!”

If he had risen, they would be progressing on with their day, which holds no pressing nor even present need for a warm bed. But: it is indeed still warm on Sui Zhou’s skin, ember heat held to linger after the fire burned out, first by their embrace, then, after, by Tang Fan’s purposeful sprawl.

“But don’t thank me just yet,” Tang Fan chimes in, punctuating his every word with a dainty drum of his fingers both to his own temple and Sui Zhou’s side. “I have been carefully considering our case, as well, since we spoke to the remaining jiashou. Though, if we are so pressed for time, I suppose my thoughts can wait…”

Tang Fan trails off, and his fingers trail after the taper of his voice, walking themselves to and fro across the hill of Sui Zhou’s hip. Then, he tsks, woeful, and pushes out his bottom lip in a quibbling pout.

It will not be the explanation that takes the time that must be made or found to spare, but what Tang Fan will expect in exchange for it. Sui Zhou has risen earlier for three days, now, to stretch out their morning to better fit Tang Fan's quarrelsome hostility towards its very concept. There is time, always, to discuss matters of work. There will be time, always, for most if not all of Tang Fan’s whims.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Sui Zhou says, in lieu of any admittance to and so admonishment for all the rest. Tang Fan, eyes aflare with both delight and devilry, edges in closer, until he’s crossed the bridge of his outstretched arm between the both of their bodies. His elbow folds back to tuck into his side, his hand stroking up to nestle high on Sui Zhou’s ribs, brush-calloused fingers finding the divots between the laddering bone and twilled muscle.

“The four-column register," Tang Fan dives in, straight to the deep end point. He shuffles just that slightest bit closer, then sinks down, turning his other arm over and flattening it to the bed so he can nuzzle his cheek into his forearm, glance cast upward to Sui Zhou. "We know there has been tampering somewhere, but what if this is not the first occurrence?"

It's something they considered, in abstract, at the beginning. The jiansheng at Lake Houhu had pored through the other pertinent registers in the Archive, though, and found nothing notable. Tang Fan must have a reason, then, to want to revisit the possibility.

“They found no others.” The reminder is not an undermining, but an invitation for Tang Fan to continue. A hum would also do. Silence, even. Tang Fan knows he is being listened to.

“Don’t be so hasty, Guangchuan,” Tang Fan chastises, then, “or so far away! Come, come,” he pauses to tap his fingernails against the bed, “down here, with me, you’re hurting my neck to look at you, you know, looming so high up there.”

Sui Zhou lowers himself, as bidden, until he is again Tang Fan’s mirror, his head resting on his arm and his chest angled towards the bed. Tang Fan’s eyes crinkle; his hand ambles higher, over the incline of Sui Zhou’s shoulder and down into the gully where it hinges into his neck. His fingers tangle in the loose strands of his hair that have swept over from his back.

“There,” Tang Fan approves. “Now, I am of some minds about this, Sui-baihu, so be gentle with me.” He twirls his finger through a tress of Sui Zhou’s hair, then rubs it between the pad of his thumb and forefinger.

When am I not gentle with you, Sui Zhou thinks, faintly exasperated, except when you ask for otherwise?

“Tang Fan,” he hastens, voice roughening.

“So hasty!” Tang Fan chastises again with a huff. He detangles his fingers from Sui Zhou’s hair to brush the fan of it back from the column of his throat. “One prospect is the first modification was done further back than we looked. But I suspect it runs deeper. I don’t think the register itself was modified at all. What it draws from, however…”

“Deaths, marriages,” Sui Zhou finishes for him. “Loaned labour between villages, the movement of all men-at-arms.”

"Precisely!" The brilliant blare of mischief in Tang Fan’s gaze has dulled, however fleetingly, overtaken by the knife keen gleam of his nimbly clever-witted mind thrust into the throng of a problem in want of solving, Sui Zhou at heel and side. "We need to see the original copies, and look more closely at the movement of people. For the surrounding villages, too. Any of the families that the head clan here has the closest dealings with, especially."

Sui Zhou regards this and Tang Fan both, though in not so equal measures. "You suspect the village elder?"

Tang Fan nudges his thumb up beneath the jut of Sui Zhou's jaw, humming. He flexes his fingers down against his neck, almost idle, considering. "It's too early to draw that conclusion," is his diplomatic answer, "but this is a matter of wealth."

"And he has the most to lose," Sui Zhou agrees. "The runners have already left for the yamen. You will have to ride with me."

"Mhm." Tang Fan's eyes flutter shut for a beat as he nods, dismissive. When he opens them again, his focus has receded, and the playful flare has resurged back to the fore. "You may now thank me," he advises, with a prim, grandiose flourish.

Sui Zhou swallows, then exhales, slow; feels how the work of both pushes down into Tang Fan's thumb, more pointedly than the jostling brushes from mere talking. Tang Fan's gaze flicks to his thumb, then catches on Sui Zhou's mouth on the climb back up to his eyes.

"Tang-daren's insights are invaluable," Sui Zhou remarks, recitative, resisting the reach of his smile past a shading of his tone. One might assume this is a matter being investigated by the Embroidered Guard, based on Tang Fan's self-styling as benevolent benefactor, and not his own punishment parading as casework with Sui Zhou in accompaniment as minder. Tang Fan's expression pinches into a glower, grumping at the teasing.

"How should I thank you?" Sui Zhou adds, before the storm starting to roll in across Tang Fan's features can make landfall.

Tang Fan's budding bluster relents, though he does swipe his thumbnail across Sui Zhou's chin for recompense, scratching at his stubble.

"Hmm." Tang Fan draws out every note of the considering sound, as if it could ever be believable that he does not know the name and form of his every momentous desire. "Properly," he concludes, succinctly wry.

It says to Sui Zhou little, but tells him all he needs to know. He kisses Tang Fan, there and then, as called for. Tang Fan hums against his lips, satisfied, and tips his hand back from Sui Zhou’s face to follow Sui Zhou’s as it cups his neck. His palm clasps down over Sui Zhou’s knuckles as he collars him, and he goes an easy, languid sort of soft-limbed as the leash of Sui Zhou’s fingers leads him in even closer, thumb rolling at his jaw to guide the press of their mouths into something deeper, wetter.

"Insatiable," Tang Fan breathes out when he at last deems it needful for them to part. As if it is Sui Zhou's starvation that sees Tang Fan scrape his teeth down Sui Zhou's top lip after he speaks, then chase the breeze of Sui Zhou's laugh between their mouths with a lave of his tongue. There is no letting Tang Fan have anything, truly, when everything is already his, but Sui Zhou gives over the victory he's seeking, anyway, pulling him back in to mouth at his bottom lip as proof of his so accused greed.

“Oh.” Tang Fan’s smile curls boldly, beautifully, impossibly wider. He thumbs along the swoop of Sui Zhou’s hand on his neck, arching his back, spine a bowstring drawn taut under Sui Zhou’s touch, and he pushes his knee into Sui Zhou’s thigh until Sui Zhou shifts his hips and spreads his legs enough for it to slide in, through. “Oh, there you are.”

His chattering makes Sui Zhou's kisses clumsy against his mouth, clipped. He pitches forward into Sui Zhou sharply enough that their teeth clack; his laugh frays into a moan when Sui Zhou's grip goes tighter around his throat, just enough, just so.

"Give me your hand," Tang Fan demands, fingers already hooking around his palm to tug it from his neck, "here, here, look."

Sui Zhou’s hold unlatches, and Tang Fan begins to guide his hand, slow, trailing Sui Zhou’s fingers over his collarbone, then the soft swell of his pectoral. Sui Zhou takes his fill at the pace of Tang Fan’s behest, head tilting with the hood of his eyes so he can watch, between the narrow twine of their bodies, how Tang Fan threads his hand in the gape of his robe. How he flattens it, first, over the shallow dip of his belly, before his course diverges from Sui Zhou’s expectation; splintering off to drag across the jut of his hip instead of pushing lower to fit Sui Zhou’s fingers around his cock.

Tang Fan nudges his hip up into the slack fetter of Sui Zhou's palm as he lets go, then again, more insistent, impatient, as his hand smoothes up Sui Zhou's arm. Sui Zhou feels Tang Fan's thigh flex between his own, and takes the hint and lead to push his hand further beneath his rumpled robe. Tang Fan’s breath pants out against his nose as Sui Zhou parts him; his wilting, fluttery laugh follows when Sui Zhou’s fingers rub against his hole, slick, already, with oil. Sui Zhou presses the tip of his finger in, feels the rim give softly to the pressure, the twitching cling of tight heat around him as Tang Fan rocks down.

"Tang Fan." Sui Zhou exhales his name, exasperated, enrapt. Like it is still a revelation to have it on his tongue. Sui Zhou draws his hand back; Tang Fan's emptied out gasp at the loss still has the tang of his laughter to it when Sui Zhou noses their faces back together and kisses it from his mouth.

“I had to take myself in hand,” Tang Fan shapes more than says against Sui Zhou’s lips, breath rattling ragged behind his ribs. “Woe me, Sui Zhou. If you had done your duty last night, I would still be wet and open, yes?” His bottom lip quivers in its purse when Sui Zhou’s hand pins him at the hip, and he makes a frustrated sound when he can’t buck free of it, expression crumpling.

“You fell asleep,” is Sui Zhou’s defence. Which, Tang Fan very much had. Between one slow kiss and the next, he had sagged into Sui Zhou’s chest and gone serenely still, and Sui Zhou had lacked the heart and heat to stir him. He did somewhat expect this, nonetheless. Tang Fan does contrive slights between them, at times, both contrary and contradictory, solely for the sow of claimless conflict and the resultant reap of resolved reward.

"Does that excuse you from your word?" Tang Fan counters, pouty and a little too quick to play at unaffected. Sui Zhou feels heat spark through him at the implication; has to close his eyes to regather his sharding senses. Tang Fan, kept in his bed; Tang Fan, held down on his cock; Tang Fan, used for his pleasure— Tang Fan, using him for his pleasure, lines undrawn, in turns of equal measure. This is the shape of Tang Fan's desire, this time, then; the face his want wears.

Tang Fan, his Tang Fan, with his lascivious appetite for obscenity, persists onwards with barely a pause for Sui Zhou to ponder protest. "A man should not take more wives than he can satisfy," he continues. He bucks up again to punctuate it, whining out when Sui Zhou pins him all the harder to the bed, one-handed. His cock twitches where it is already leaking steadily against Sui Zhou's thigh, slicking every slippery, slivering grind of it across his skin.

"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou says again. Tighter, threadbare.

"Oh— Sui Zhou, you,” Tang Fan's voice starts to shake; he breaks it off, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. Then, "What does this say about you,” he resumes, sturdier, when he’s had his seconds of reprieve, “that you can't even manage your one?"

Sui Zhou swallows dry. Something rears, ugly, out from underneath the tangle of his thoughts. It's an unwieldy thing. It's not a gentle fit to what Tang Fan wants. Sui Zhou turns it over for a beat, two, then, unsure of its entirety, "That I am only one man," he tells Tang Fan, "and perhaps this wife needs two."

For all the filth that fills Tang Fan's head, there is very little that they have not done together that extends past theory, for him. Whenever something new and inspiring so springs up, he delights in tempting Sui Zhou into putting it through its paces of practice. Sui Zhou had, once, mistaken this adventurous confidence for experience, and it had been unmaking to be caught in the storm of a Tang Fan swept up in the pursuit of new and novel pleasures. Even now, reshaped to weather it, Sui Zhou still often finds himself disarmed beneath Tang Fan's captivation and care.

It's rare that Sui Zhou is the one to catch him so unawares instead. There is always worry, for the first split second of it, like now, where Tang Fan startles and stills, disrupted. Worry that he's taken too much; worry that he has at last shown over something that has made Tang Fan afraid. They are foolish fears, he knows that now, but insidious instinct ingrained is an abrasion that never quite mends. Tang Fan’s eyes are wide and black where they are peering into his own, but the fear skirting the fringes of his features is only an intrigued one; excited trepidation for the unknown.

"Well," Tang Fan hurries out, "well. I will give this husband one more chance?"

"One more chance," Sui Zhou prompts.

Tang Fan licks his bottom lip, a nervous little flick of pink. His fingers tighten around Sui Zhou's arm. "Yes," he answers, faint with distance, as though he's still too taken aback by the abounds of it. "Yes, to— prove yourself. Of course."

"Of course," Sui Zhou repeats back. It is difficult not to smile, so he does not try not to. Underneath the heady pulse of his slow-thrumming arousal, there is the tightness to his chest that he is most used to, the sense of his heart feeling too full for his ribs to hold. If only Tang Fan could be so reliably deft a politician outside of their bedchambers. “Onto your back,” Sui Zhou tells him, parting his thighs so Tang Fan can wriggle free in an eager semblance of obedience.

Tang Fan goes with a graceless flail of his legs and a flutter of the sheets, and Sui Zhou follows, kneeling up in the space made for him between Tang Fan's spread thighs. He bows forward, hands skimming up Tang Fan's sides to part him from the rest of his robe, until the petals of silk and sheer have bloomed out from beneath him like the ink-dark whorl of his hair. He is beautiful, Sui Zhou thinks, as he combs the fan of his hair aside enough to brace his hands in place without tugging on the strands. But Sui Zhou always thinks Tang Fan is beautiful, be it like this, splayed out beneath him mid-ravishment, bare and blushed pink, his slender cock swollen ruddy and curving up to drip wetly against his belly; be it like anything and anyway else. He is not the writer, between the two of them. It's the only word he has for it that comes close to adequate.

“Guangchuan,” Tang Fan coaxes, croaky, his slender fingers scrabbling for Sui Zhou's shoulders, “always so far away. How many times must you be told?”

At least once more, Sui Zhou thinks, quiet as kept. Then again, to be sure. He leans down low, lower, until he can brush his lips to Tang Fan’s own; to his cheek; down his throat. Tang Fan’s hips hitch up his thighs with a gasp as he tries to rub their cocks together, hands flitting across Sui Zhou’s broad back, fingers tangling in his hair.

“Oh,” he moans, arching sweetly, burying every line of him up into the brace of Sui Zhou, “oh, please. There, that’s it. More, now. Hurry with me.”

Sui Zhou laps at the hollow of his throat, tasting salt. Tang Fan’s chin bumps against the crown of his hair with an urging whine, and Sui Zhou indulges him dutifully, one broad hand fitting around his slim waist, the other curving down between his legs. He strokes his finger down, through the drying smear of oil, then pushes in, feeling the reluctant give of Tang Fan’s body around him, the dazing heat. Tang Fan bucks under his hand with a keen, trying to fold his legs in to snare Sui Zhou between the pin of his knees.

“Oil,” Sui Zhou husks against Tang Fan’s throat. He lifts his head, then kneels up to follow the flow of it, until he’s bearing down on Tang Fan overhead. “The oil.”

Tang Fan fights his eyes open with a flutter of his long lashes, teeth sinking into the reddened kiss-bruised swell of his bottom lip. The look he sets upon Sui Zhou is a glare. “Have I not prepared myself to your satisfaction?”

Sui Zhou crooks his finger, twisting his wrist awkwardly between the clutch of their bodies so he can rub his thumb against Tang Fan’s rim. Tang Fan shudders, full-body, with a scraping rasp that rings through Sui Zhou’s ears and rolls down his back like a wave to shore. He’s tight, even slicked with the oil he’s eased into himself with his own fingers. He is always tight, no matter how often and how thoroughly Sui Zhou fucks him open. It’s a dangerous combination, at times, the narrowness of his body and the rigidity of his tensity coupling to his inherent impatience and unbounded hunger. One that Sui Zhou must navigate with the rare counter-compromise of giving Tang Fan what he needs instead of what he wants.

“The oil,” Sui Zhou repeats, gentling the rough edge of his voice with a slow circle of his thumb, a slower thrust of his finger. “Or my mouth.”

Tang Fan’s mouth flattens into a determinedly stubborn line, his jaw setting stiff. The fierce furrow of his features starts fraying, though, when Sui Zhou pulls free and grasps the backs of his thighs, folding his knees to his chest in one practice-smoothed motion. If his choice is an obstinate none, then Sui Zhou will take the road easiest travelled with him.

"Sui Zhou!" Tang Fan's bark breaks off into a pithy whimper as Sui Zhou follows his arched frame, bowing his head to gently nose at the wiry thatch of hair between his legs. Tang Fan kicks futilely against the shackles of Sui Zhou's hands, scrabbling to scratch at Sui Zhou's knees where they've slid in to frame his raised hips. Sui Zhou mouths behind his balls; lets his breath gust damply against him when he exhales, chin tipped so his stubble scuffs across sensitive skin. Tang Fan kicks again with a torn-out wail, nails biting deep into the corded muscle of Sui Zhou's thighs where he's found his precarious ground.

"Sui Zhou— oh,” Tang Fan breathes, whisper-thin, He gives one last watery-weak kick at Sui Zhou’s hold, thighs trembling, before he shudders slackly and goes utterly loose-limbed. Sui Zhou presses a kiss against him, hard, and feels the answering coil of Tang Fan’s frame as he tries to buck desperately away from it, a bitten-off whine whipping out of his mouth. Sui Zhou slips his hands further down the backs of Tang Fan’s thighs, clenches the cinch of his fingers, hooks his thumbs to spread him wider; feels how his muscles judder and flex beneath his touch. He lifts his head just enough to see how Tang Fan is trying to brace himself, even held open and bared as he is, for what Sui Zhou is promising; the blurred twinge of his fingers, the twitch of his hole as he tightens around nothing.

For all the front of his protestations, Tang Fan is suspended on a thread of eager anticipation, now, all placidly pliant. Sui Zhou does not hold him aloft all too long in the empty space that waiting makes. He never does. He closes his eyes, drifts forward; follows the sharpened sounds of Tang Fan’s shallowing breaths and the path his body has beaten out for him through judicious repetition. All worship can be taken blind, after a while, if one makes a matter of going to their knees at its altar the same way each and every time.

Sui Zhou knows this like his hand on a blade. He knows he is good at it by the sounds Tang Fan makes. By the way Tang Fan's fingers flutter and fall on him, directionless, everywhere. His knees, his shoulders, his hair; as though Tang Fan cannot decide what best to hold, how to fit Sui Zhou within his hands.

It is transcendental, to find purpose in pleasure; to learn that pain need not be followed by bane. He is good at this. He is glad to have been shown that it is something he can be good at. Sui Zhou lifts his face from his prostration, mouthing his balm into the innermost crease of Tang Fan’s thigh when Tang Fan protests their parting. A moment without his mouth on Tang Fan is two moments too long for them both, so Sui Zhou is quick to keep the separation at its briefest. He folds Tang Fan’s knees all the sharper to his chest, braces his arm beneath their bent hinges, and pins him back down tightly in place, one-armed. His other hand, now freed, smoothes up Tang Fan's shaking back as he bows back between his thighs to lick into his hole, soothing the cruel arch of his spine.

Tang Fan gasps jaggedly, and one of his hands, skirting Sui Zhou's side, darts away. The next whimper he makes is wet, palm-muffled. His legs hook down viciously over the brace of Sui Zhou's arm; the flex of his hips pushes him harshly into Sui Zhou's mouth.

Sui Zhou works Tang Fan open, with the single-minded graduality of the thoroughly reverent, until his chin is smeared with oil and spit; until every shift of his jaw brings a well-used ache; until he can slide his thumb in alongside his tongue. Until sweat is stinging a blur into his eyes where it has dripped into his lashes; until his head is a fog and his cock is so hard between his legs that he feels he'll spend on himself with every little clench of Tang Fan around him. Sui Zhou lifts his head to take a breath, to pray steady himself, and then Tang Fan's hands are in his hair, tugging at him with inspired urgency.

"Sui Zhou," he is panting, "Sui Zhou, please," and, "I'll come, I'll come, and then what will you do?"

Sui Zhou eases his arm back, letting Tang Fan’s legs fall back open around him. Tang Fan hisses as the heels of his feet dig into the bed, and Sui Zhou watches the twinge frisson up the insides of his thighs as he slants his hips, sliding himself up into the splay of Sui Zhou’s lap.

“Come here,” Tang Fan says, and while Sui Zhou does not need to be told, he takes to the instruction. He kneels forward to brace himself overhead Tang Fan’s body, hands flattening at his sides. His gaze drags up the plains of him; his hard cock, flushed a desperate dark; his precome smeared belly; the red welts that his nails have raked across the soft swells of his chest; the bitten ripe red of his lips; the pleasure-mussed sprawl of his dark hair, an ore-black frame to the blush pink staining high on his cheeks, bleeding mottled down the column of his thin throat.

Tang Fan frees his bottom lip from between his teeth, mouth parting around a gasp that Sui Zhou can see his tongue curl around more than he can hear, not from within his head, not out from underneath the roar of his blood and his own trembling tension. Tang Fan’s hands sweep up his sides, then his chest, charting the astrological drift of his tapestry scars, grazing over his nipples. He parts the curtain of Sui Zhou’s hair, pushes it back from his face, laces his fingers through it and lowers the wreathed pin of it all flat to Sui Zhou’s nape.

“Kiss me,” Tang Fan says, and Sui Zhou does not need to be told to do this, either, but he has waited for the command, and now he concedes to it. He leans in, spurred by the press of Tang Fan’s hand to his neck, and takes Tang Fan’s lips between his own, pushes his own grunt into his plush warm mouth when Tang Fan rocks up in his lap, rubbing himself firmly against Sui Zhou’s cock.

“Take me.” Tang Fan rolls his hips again in one slow, supple slide that stutters with his sigh when Sui Zhou reaches back between his legs to stroke his thumb over his hole, teasing it. He is still tight, but this close to the edge, he becomes so easy, every drip of tension swept out and set over with a craving so profound it begets the despair of the starved. He takes the sink of Sui Zhou’s thumb into him so well.

“Sui Zhou,” Tang Fan does not plead, but the beg is there, laid out in the sharp way he says his name, “after all that— is your plan to waste me? Give me your hand.” He’s breathless with his need, fraught. Sui Zhou surges to assuage it by animal instinct, shifting his weight to pool down into one palm while he holds out the other for Tang Fan to snare at the wrist. Tang Fan brings it to his mouth and licks his palm, sloppily unfine.

“There.” He unclasps Sui Zhou’s wrist, breath panting out hot against his skin. “Must I push myself down on your cock and see to my needs on my own?”

Sui Zhou bows low, kissing the obscenity from Tang Fan’s mouth. He reaches between them, wrapping his spit-damp hand around Tang Fan’s cock, chasing the gasp that tears out of his mouth with his tongue as he strokes him. It’s sweet, but swift, lingering only enough to tempt Tang Fan back to the uttermost edge of spilling over; enough to wet his palm slippery slick with Tang Fan’s precome. When he takes himself in hand, he has to take a breath in, with it, heat washing down his back to pool between his legs, clotting up thick in the back of his throat. Sui Zhou strokes his shaft, rough, then vices his grip at the root, steadying. In his lap, Tang Fan folds his legs out impossibly wider, cocks his knee so he can draw his heel around to dig, spurring, into the small of Sui Zhou’s back.

“Hurry,” Tang Fan commands him, lofting imperious even when his voice splinters into a high whine as the head of Sui Zhou’s cock snubs against his hole. Sui Zhou gentles him with a pet of his hand down his slim side, before he pins him at the bony hip, harsh, and starts to thrust in, feeding his cock into Tang Fan in one long, sure shove.

“Oh—!” Tang Fan chokes on his exclamation, his heel falling from Sui Zhou’s back. His knees crook as he flattens his feet to the bed, bracing himself for the breach of Sui Zhou’s cock as he takes it, and takes it, and takes it, until every inch is sheathed to hilt within the white-hot perfect cling of his body. He’s so tight, still so tight that Sui Zhou has to stop, there, with a grunt, has to stroke Tang Fan’s flanks and suck in breath after breath so he doesn’t start rutting feral before he feels Tang Fan settle against and around him, adjusted.

“Go, go,” Tang Fan finally rasps, raw, “you have to move, Guangchuan, or I will die.”

Sui Zhou has to squeeze his eyes shut and grit his teeth down on a hiss as Tang Fan throws his knees over Sui Zhou’s shoulders and writhes down on his cock. Sui Zhou braces himself over him, bears down, folding Tang Fan back in on himself until he’s halved, trapped between the bed and the cage of his own body. He rams into him with a bruisingly hard thrust, then another, clipped short and slap sharp, as brutal as Tang Fan would order him to if Sui Zhou dared to be anything but ungentle.

“That’s it,” Tang Fan praises. Sui Zhou feels one of his hands stroke down his hair to settle, brand-hot and bruise-heavy, against his nape. “Oh— yes, you’re so good.” Sui Zhou’s hips stutter, and Tang Fan laughs, breathless and delighted, as he winds his fingers in Sui Zhou’s hair and tugs at it, the flaring throb of the sting soothed by the way he tightens down so very beautifully around him.

“Look at you, Guangchuan,” Tang Fan drawls, voice honey pleasure-thick, blurring slurred, “look at you, if you could see you— you were meant for this. You were made for me.”

Sui Zhou groans out like he’s been struck down at the neck, broken, and forces his eyes back open. Tang Fan’s gaze is dazed, tear-blind and unfocused, and Sui Zhou can feel it in the trembling tension of Tang Fan around him that Tang Fan is close. So, so close, so close that it will take next to nothing more, and he’s babbling mad with it, scratching at Sui Zhou’s throat, fucking himself down on Sui Zhou’s cock to clumsily meet every slam of his hips.

Sui Zhou spreads his thighs out wider, kneels up, and the moan that Tang Fan makes as the strain of having his knees tucked almost touched to his chest abates snaps off into a shrill whine as Sui Zhou pulls out then fucks back in, dragging every thick inch of his cock along the innermost place he knows makes Tang Fan’s toes curl and his nerves light up lantern red.

“Oh— good.” Tang Fan's sigh is sodden, sob-like. Sui Zhou has to close his eyes again for a long, long moment. The way Tang Fan feels is threatening to push him over; the way he looks, face crumpled with a pain-streaked pleasure, is too much. "Good, good, good— your hand, your hand, Sui Zhou—"

Sui Zhou scrabbles to reanchor, clawing down on Tang Fan’s hip to keep him seated in his lap while he reaches out between them. Tang Fan snatches up his wrist, then shoves Sui Zhou’s hand down low, shaping the flat of his palm to his belly.

“Do you feel it?” Tang Fan husks. Sui Zhou fans his fingers; pushes down, at Tang Fan’s insistent pressing, groans out from low in his chest. Tang Fan hooks his knees down tighter, cants his hips, pushes inexorably up, in. “Do you feel your cock inside me?”

“Tang Fan,” Sui Zhou hisses, choked, “Runqing.” He’s going to die before Tang Fan does, swept out to sea and drowned, bled out by every fractured fragment of filth that Tang Fan’s quick tongue is driving into him past the break of his skin. “Your voice,” he barely manages, “it’s carrying.”

“Catch it, then.” Tang Fan releases his wrist, so Sui Zhou does, dragging his hand up from Tang Fan’s narrow navel, the faint imprint of his own cock flushed heavy and sunk deep into Tang Fan’s body still seared wretchedly into his palm as he fits it tightly over Tang Fan’s mouth.

Tang Fan comes with a wail that he bites off into the gag of Sui Zhou’s hand, jaw jerking in his hold, spend splattering up his chest. Sui Zhou pulls out with a gutted grunt, cupping his hand down tighter to muffle Tang Fan’s own yelp as he fills the absence his cock has left with three of his fingers, crooked mercilessly, the tip of the fourth and the pad of his thumb teasing at his rim where he’s stretched wide to take him.

Sui Zhou rides him through it, a narrowed-down patient, his chest vicing tight and his cock throbbing against the inside of his wrist, until he feels Tang Fan settle beneath his hand, the punch of his breath along the backs of Sui Zhou's fingers slowing, evening out with the settling rise-fall of his arched chest. Only when Tang Fan’s hands have unfisted from the sheets and his knees have slid from Sui Zhou’s shoulders does Sui Zhou unhand him, leaning back on his heels, one hand falling low to pet blindly at Tang Fan’s flank, the other gripping the base of his cock, staving the fever-pitched build of his own want.

Tang Fan sprawls out wider, slack-limbed and fucked out, with a shuddery, satisfied sigh. His smile softens, debauchedly indolent; his eyes hood as he traces a hand down his chest, running his fingers over the swell of his pectoral to tease his fingernail around his nipple in a circle.

"Aren't you going to come?" He hums. "I want you to come, too, Guangchuan. I want to see you come for me."

It’s the permittance Sui Zhou takes to start moving his hand, stripping himself, chafe-rough, precome blunting the edge off the glide. It takes nothing— he’s burned up so close with it already, but the nudge of Tang Fan’s foot against his thigh and the swipe of his fingertips across the backs of Sui Zhou’s knuckles as he gets himself up on his elbow and reaches between his legs to seek out Sui Zhou’s cock sends Sui Zhou over with a whimper, shame-hot. Tang Fan’s crooning cadence mulls the intoxicating white fog static in his head with muted praises as he spills messily over his fingers and stripes Tang Fan’s belly.

“Yes, yes,” Tang Fan murmurs contentedly, thumbing at Sui Zhou’s fingers as his grip on his softening cock relaxes. “Very good. You’ll do. I’ll keep you. I need only you.” Then, “Don’t test my grace, Guangchuan,” he adds, voice lilting with his own laugh when Sui Zhou, still addled, can’t help but snort, “you’ve made a mess of me as it is.”

Sui Zhou leans forward, following the lean line of Tang Fan and the bridge of his outstretched arm, and, gaze flicking up to meet Tang Fan’s eyes, he lowers his mouth to his chest, licking a broad stripe up his sternum. Tang Fan yelps, tumbling back against the bed as he snatches at Sui Zhou’s face with both hands.

“Beast!” he giggles. “Brute!” He pushes up at Sui Zhou’s jaw, thumbing his cheekbones. “The basin.”

He bars any retreat with the steely steeple of his hands behind Sui Zhou’s neck, though, reeling him forward and up to kiss at his mouth and chin with chaste little pecks that Sui Zhou can scarce retaliate against with kisses of his own. Finally, Tang Fan’s grasp on him frees, and Sui Zhou slips from the bed, knowing well that Tang Fan will seize him again and recommence a renewed assault if he hesitates.

Tang Fan makes an utterly morose moan of a sound, a mirror of his first monosyllabic complaint, as Sui Zhou leaves his arm’s reach. He toes over his shed clothes; across the few paces of floor to the low-slung table that has become house and host to every joint accoutrement and subsequent acquisition. Sui Zhou carefully shifts away a sheaf of parchment that has crept too close to the water in one of Tang Fan’s flurries, then wrings out the cloth, dabbing himself down face to mid-thigh, routine, listening all the while to Tang Fan’s fumbling out from behind him, the heavingly dramatic grunts of his apparent exertion.

When Sui Zhou has rinsed and wrung out the cloth again, he turns, and is met, unsurprisingly, with Tang Fan’s brazenly appraisive stare. He’s draped his body, half-cocked, against the back of the kang, with his arm propped so that his cheek is resting on the furled backs of his fingers.

“I’m sticky,” he whines, appropriately aggrieved, sweeping his other hand down his side to articulate the true severity of his apparent torment. “I’m— drying. Everywhere.”

He props himself further upright in preparation as Sui Zhou returns to the kang, reaching for a youtiao on the tray to tear at it between his hands as Sui Zhou leans down to wipe his chest clean.

“Here,” Tang Fan prompts, bumping a piece of the youtiao against Sui Zhou’s lips, “here, here, here—” refusing to relent until, at last, Sui Zhou pauses to take it into his mouth. Tang Fan ducks his head to kiss the crumbs from his lips, then leans back, absently pushing his hip up against Sui Zhou’s hand as he swipes the cloth lengthways across his belly.

“I’m done with you, now,” he says, breath hitching airily around it when Sui Zhou’s fingers scrape down the inside of his thigh.

“As you say,” Sui Zhou says.

“As I say.” Sui Zhou bows his head, easing Tang Fan’s legs wider apart, and Tang Fan wriggles against him with a huff, toes curling. There’s a clatter, wood to porcelain to porcelain, and when Sui Zhou glances up through the drape of his hair, he sees Tang Fan’s still reddened lips close around the spoonful of congee, watches the work of his jaw as he chews, his throat as he swallows.

“It’s still delicious, even cold,” is his critical assessment. “My Guangchuan is so good.”

Tang Fan taps the spoon against Sui Zhou’s lips expectantly. Sui Zhou simply opens his mouth for it without brokering any argument, then steps back, returning the cloth to the basin and gathering his robes back up to dress while he chews slowly. Even this stalling does not spare him from being beckoned over by Tang Fan to eat more. He persists in feeding Sui Zhou while idling bare in the bed throughout the course of Sui Zhou dressing, then Sui Zhou combing the both of their hair, and finally, with much vocal complaint and flailing resistance, has to be wrangled up onto his feet and into his own robes.

Owing entirely to each of these impeding distractions, of course, it is well into midmorning by the time they do, at last, set out for the yamen. But, to Tang Fan’s due credit, he only whines at and to Sui Zhou about all his myriad hurts for most of the ride there.