Ding Rong, in his narrowed dagger-keen focus on his task, is unsure of the time when he is first made aware of Wang Zhi’s approach. He knows only by the dark of his workroom, dim-lit by his low-burned candle, that it is well into the evening. He knows only that it is no other visitor but Wang Zhi, circling into his periphery, portended by a flutter of draping fabric, because no other but Wang Zhi would dare to come unannounced.

He does not look up to acknowledge him. Instinct and ingraining are old dogs hard brought to heel, though, and so the urge to stand on ceremony still flinches through him all the same, even after all this time. But it is not what they do for these hours, anymore: now, deference is shed at dusk or whenever their last habitual duty of the day lies done. Wang Zhi has learned not to presume, and Ding Rong has learned not to prostrate. Neither of them answer to subtext, or what is otherwise left unsaid. Or so they tell themselves; or so they try. It is a line drawn up within themselves and between one another; a guide to adhere to even if only to disregard and traverse across as needed and necessary. So it is; so they are.

If Wang Zhi wants Ding Rong’s attention, he’ll announce himself. So, Ding Rong pays him minimal mind beyond what Wang Zhi always takes of his preoccupation by right of his proximity and presence. For a time, Wang Zhi does not speak at all, supposedly content to observe what it is that Ding Rong is leisuring with.

Eventually, something in Wang Zhi must fall through — his patience, perhaps, be it with either one of them, if not both, or even the night itself. “Ding Rong,” he says. His voice is quietened for the latening hour, and carries far despite their closeness.

When Ding Rong looks up, at last, to follow the prompt of his name, it takes him a long blink of a moment before his mind sifts through the shift from the work of his hands to the piecing together of the particulars of Wang Zhi’s appearance. Namely: that the fabric all but swaddling him is not sleep clothes and a cloak to blunt the teeth of the biting chill on the air, but two of Ding Rong’s own inner robes. The thick material is pleated over itself; bunched, awkwardly, at the sleeves and skirts, gaping at the chest; misshapen along and amongst all the lines where Wang Zhi is too small and too slight to fill it out.

It is still not enough to keep him warm — Ding Rong can see the little roiling trembles rippling his frame even from here, even with Wang Zhi cast into shade by the flamelight. It is not one of the colder nights that Hetao plays host to, but Wang Zhi runs so cold of his own accord, and a glance down between them confirms to Ding Rong that he has carried himself here bare-footed.

Ding Rong empties his hands, making to rise. “Wang Zhi,” he says. It skirts awkwardly off his tongue, but it’s an ill-fitting intimacy in his mouth only for the leaden disuse of his voice.

Wang Zhi’s head tilts, and his brows lift with the dawdling rise of his gaze as it meets Ding Rong’s, now overhead. “It’s late,” is his scarce explanation for whatever has possessed him to don Ding Rong’s clothes and seek him out in his workroom at a dead hour.

Ding Rong glances over Wang Zhi’s shoulder to his candle, making note of the notch that the wax has melted down to. So it is, then, after all. “Have you come to persuade me to bed?” he asks, because he well can, because he is so allowed.

The corner of Wang Zhi’s mouth twitches against the tug of his smile, held checked. “Are you not already persuaded, Ding Rong?” he asks, wry.

“I am,” Ding Rong admits. Unlike Wang Zhi, he does not while time with the wastework of subduing his own soft smile. “You’ll catch cold, left as you are.”

Wang Zhi’s snort is punctuated by the tangling furl of his fingers in his pooling sleeves. He tips his weight ever-so-slightly forth to the balls of his feet and then back to his heels, the hems of his pilfered robes tracing over his toes. “So I might,” he says. His breath hitches around it, teeth clacking in a chatter.

Ding Rong unfolds his hands from the clasp they’ve fallen by idle habit to in his lap, fingers twitching with the beginnings of a motion to reach out, but it is Wang Zhi who moves first, sliding himself into Ding Rong’s space until he has tucked his head beneath Ding Rong’s chin, nuzzled his cold nose into Ding Rong’s neck. His hands find Ding Rong’s hips, thumbs looping lazily through his belt; his breath gusts damp-hot against where Ding Rong’s collar meets bare skin, and Ding Rong feels his eyelashes flutter against him as he closes his eyes.

He lifts his arms, wrapping them around the slim span of Wang Zhi’s shoulders. A hand finds Wang Zhi’s nape, and a thrill of something teases through him as his thumb rubs against the familiar fray of the collar of the outermost robe — his robe. It’s a taste and a threat of latent possessiveness that Ding Rong has to force back to kneeling dormancy, leashed deep within the pit of his gut. Though Hetao has interwoven them in ways that would have been incomprehensible, once, back in the capital, there is still proper places and purposes for things. Desires that must be bidden to the fore with a courted deliberateness, not simply untethered to rage and run wild at the first glimpse of the hare in the underbrush.

“You may have caught it already,” he thinks aloud, smoothing his other hand down the swooped wing of Wang Zhi’s shoulder blade, the broad flat of his palm tamping down the worst of the wracking shivers. He’s chilled down to the marrow, it seems. Ding Rong has to wonder at what madness has taken him by the head, but such ponderance does not spur any want for an answer. The body, warming melt-slow in his grasp, is satisfaction enough for him.

Against the column of his throat, Wang Zhi’s expression crumples. By the brush and press of it alone, Ding Rong imagines it is much like the furrow his features adopt when he’s drawing several concurrent conclusions on some matter or another. Wang Zhi is rarely unguarded enough even in his station here that he bares such a process for perception, but those exceptional allowances are most often made in instances such as this, where it is only them, curtained by twilight. Perhaps it is in regards to whatever convoluted line of thought has led him to Ding Rong, or the same if not similar one that is now ushering the two of them, together, to bed. When he moves within the wreathe of Ding Rong’s embrace, Ding Rong relaxes it for him, but not a needlepoint’s breadth more than what he needs to lean back and look up.

“Then you will have to remedy that, won’t you?” Wang Zhi decides. At long last, he lets himself smile, too; a pleased curl of his plush mouth to complement the wide dark of his eyes. “I have some ideas on how you may start.”

There is an unassured edge hemming his voice, even as he speaks with sound confidence. This is not necessarily new, not anymore, but there are honest moments, shrouded by their rurality, where it’s novelty, still, enough, to inspire trepidation and leniency in equal measures within Wang Zhi. To culminate in too clumsy an eagerness.

Fool boy, Ding Rong thinks, fond. As if he is not equally susceptible to that same very vulnerability. As though it is not the very same wound they’ve bled together, now scarred over. He untwines his arms, and lets Wang Zhi take him by the wrists, where the joined bridge of their bodies is enshrouded by the drape of swimming silk.

It is with that, and from there, that Ding Rong is briskly and summarily led, off to where he is meant to go, where he so belongs to be.