Tang Fan follows his appetite and finds Sui Zhou, which is not, in itself, all that strange. What is strange about it is that it is an hour of the morning he’d consider quite late, at least in Sui Zhou’s case, and he’s milling about his kitchen of all things looking misplaced. There’s not a scrap of breakfast to be seen on the bench; no steam or smoke from the wok, not even the smell of something promising in progress.

Tang Fan’s empty belly gurgles its distaste, loud enough to notify Sui Zhou of his presence where the scuffing clap of his boots down the courtyard apparently failed to flag it. He just looks up from his hands and at Tang Fan without so much as a greeting. Though, well, that part may be attributable, at least a little, to how Tang Fan swans over the threshold and up into his space before Sui Zhou gets a chance to do more.

Sui Zhou looks— a mess. He looks a mess, with his sleeves unravelling in their slackened ties and his hair half free and fanning wild around his face, as if he’s been blown in by the wind or dragged by a horse back-flat and boots-first. Tang Fan feels so rattled nerveless by the whole of it that he doesn’t stop to think on the meaning of why, hands flitting out to fuss at the wispy strands at Sui Zhou’s temples. There’s some sort of tart accusation priming on his tongue, too, though Tang Fan’s not certain yet of the words it will take flight with, even as he parts his mouth around their heralding huff.

Sui Zhou shrinks back, just slightly, and Tang Fan watches as his surprise-wide eyes slit narrow as the jerk jars through his shoulders, stringing out a stung hiss through his teeth. It’s an awfully reminiscent echo of the pained sound he made when Tang Fan jostled him in Pei Huai’s clinic, after— after, well.

Tang Fan deflates immediately, suitably chastised by the reminder of Sui Zhou’s dragging injuries and his hand in how he got them in the first place. He draws his hands away, tucks them in a loose, fidgeting clasp against his own chest. “Your arms,” he blurts out, filling the sudden silence.

Sui Zhou straightens, the set of his jaw strained. “It’s fine,” he says. Lies, really. Tang Fan’s not sure what’s the worst of the two to think about: that it’s deliberate, or that it’s true as far as Sui Zhou believes it to be.

It’s the match strike to the smouldering, shame-snuffed embers of his agitation that sees it roar back into a blaze in the pit of his chest. It smokes his throat so scrape dry he feels like he’s going to choke on his own breath.

“No, it’s not!” Tang Fan snaps, voice shrill-tight, his frustration flaring white-hot. It boils over, and he lunges back across the shuffling half-step he’s retreated to snatch up Sui Zhou’s wrist in both hands. “Have you seen yourself?! You can’t— cook, like this!”

The line of Sui Zhou’s mouth twitches in its thin, pale-lipped press, and Tang Fan can see the shade of his throat working around a swallow where the high neck of his inner robe has rucked down in on itself. If he has a retort springing to mind, Tang Fan isn’t going to give him time to voice it — he tugs on Sui Zhou’s wrist hastily, insistent. A little more roughly than intended. He feels Sui Zhou flinch underneath his fingers, digs his heels in as Sui Zhou steadies still, resisting his draw, instinctive. It’s ridiculous, it’s absolutely— Tang Fan has no hope of moving Sui Zhou if he doesn’t want to move, but he’ll spite him in making sure he hears about it, if he won’t.

He doesn’t need to devolve to denigrating both of them by shouting, thankfully, as it turns out. After that one split beat of reluctance passes, Sui Zhou yields to his better senses and lets himself be led back out of the kitchen at hand point.

The precarious tension thrumming through him doesn’t abate with Sui Zhou’s acquiescence, but intensifies, instead, the quiet turning over to something tangible, serrated. Tang Fan can almost feel the protest Sui Zhou is keeping unsaid and in check suspended overhead, tracking them up through the courtyard and into the northern master wing. It’s not right, for Sui Zhou to be so quiet. To not lash back out, even if it really is just bluster without bite, with Sui Zhou, coarse brusqueness hemming in a soft heart. There’s a playfulness to the way they quip at one another, or was, at least, before. Tang Fan has always thought so, anyway. The rougher friction of their early days smoothed over into something a bit more comfortable as they got used to one another, and their bickering reshaped to fit their space. Even when Tang Fan is furious, truly blind red with it, Sui Zhou is the shore to his crashing wave, so why would he suddenly—

Ah, he realises, belatedly as always. This time, it’s different. For all he’s shouted the utterly regrettable at him in moments of anger, Tang Fan has never actually hurt Sui Zhou before, not as deeply, not so much. Not even in all the times he’s struck at him, too, at that, any and all blows glancing off and sliding away, forgotten behind them when Tang Fan has cooled enough again to look ahead. Sui Zhou has always been sturdy enough to force Tang Fan up past the surface rile of his naked emotions, and Tang Fan— just— he never once thought it at all possible that Sui Zhou might be the one out of the two of them to break.

It makes sense, held up and scrutinised beneath that bright blaring light, that Sui Zhou is shied gentle, erring to caution with him. Maybe he should have expected as much. Pei Huai’s observations, Dong’er’s frets, even their own stilted encounters, reservedly brief and consisting by and most of clipped exchanges of case details— they had painted their picture even if he hadn’t wanted to so much as look at it. The guilt about and fear for made it harder to hold onto the anger at, and he had wanted to be angry, to stay moored by it, for just a little while longer. To keep one thing that was still familiar, that felt within his control, when the world had flipped out from underneath his feet so staggeringly once again in as many years.

It had been very selfish of him, and unfair to Sui Zhou. But he’d hoped, he’d hoped that, maybe, if the cause had been him leaving, then the solution would be him returning. That it could be so simple, for once, and come so easily.

He needs to apologise properly. People should apologise when they’ve done wrong, and he’s done more than wrong Sui Zhou over the past weeks. That they are still neck-deep in a case is no excuse for how long it has been taking him to do the right thing. It’s important, Sui Zhou is important, and Tang Fan should have found or made the time sooner than this.

Tang Fan stops short at the bedroom threshold, contemplation bringing him to heel. Sui Zhou draws up to his side, slow, but it feels— distant. Adjacent. All of him is far away, his head hazed white, his thoughts a slow heel-turn drift. The hold he still has on Sui Zhou is warm. Their skin is clammy where it is starting to stick from the sweat beading up on his palm. Sui Zhou’s sigh sounds a little closer than everything else, the testing twist of his wrist in the cuff of Tang Fan’s fingers more immediate.

Sui Zhou doesn’t try to free himself. He just stands there, awkwardly hovering and unduly patient. “Tang Fan,” he prompts, stiff, after a moment.

Tang Fan blinks. Straightens. Clears his throat and sorts himself. Right. One or three things at a time. He can start drafting his apology while he’s making Sui Zhou decent. “Right,” he says aloud. Then, “Where is your comb?” he asks. “I’ll brush your hair for you, then you can cook breakfast.” And, speaking of breakfast, “What are you going to make?”

He tugs on Sui Zhou’s wrist then toes over the raised doorsill, not meeting his eyes quite yet. He needs a moment before he can manage it. Maybe two.

“Egg rolls,” Sui Zhou answers. “Whitebait, as well. Dong’er has gone to the market to get it.”

Tang Fan risks a peek over his shoulder as they weave between the silk screens and sheer curtains. Sui Zhou’s gaze is settled just shy of level with his own, at his cheek. “Fried?”

Sui Zhou nods back. His glance flicks away when Tang Fan stops short again; comes back when Tang Fan starts craning his neck before he abandons it to spin around instead, hand slipping from Sui Zhou’s wrist.

“But,” Tang Fan starts to complain, “if you don’t rest them in marinade first they won’t be as good, and if you rest them in marinade you have to for at least—”

His belly growls again, cutting him off. Tang Fan digs the heel of his palm into it and snaps his mouth shut with a clack of his teeth, sheepish.

“Bear with it,” Sui Zhou replies. If it was any other time, the note of apology in his voice would make Tang Fan thrill with some sort of amusement, or fill him with a sense of accomplishment. At the moment, he succeeds only in feeling quite contrite.

Sui Zhou looks somewhat less grim, at least, though that could simply be a trick of the light — the sun is high enough now to flood wide through his room, washing out the latticed windows. He gestures behind Tang Fan’s shoulder, and Tang Fan follows the line of it with his whole body, turning around again.

Tang Fan spots the small wood chest set on the same shelf as his sparse books and waves Sui Zhou off before he sees any need to clarify. “I see it,” he says, stepping away. There really isn’t a lot of anything to look at in Sui Zhou’s room, so it isn’t as if he can easily miss one of the few pieces he does have in the way of furniture or even decoration. It is a waste of a southern-facing room to be so stark, but Sui Zhou is always so combative when he tries to remedy it. Calls Tang Fan’s additions clutter, of all things.

Ah, well. Maybe he’ll be more amenable— later. Eventually. Tang Fan can come back to it.

He deliberates with himself for a few swift rounds of back-forth before he plucks up the entire chest. When he comes back around the divider with it in-hand, Sui Zhou hasn’t moved from where he left him, right arm flat at his side, the left bent up, elbow out, hand hovering at his hip. Like it does, sometimes, near the hilt of his sword when it’s with him. Like it does, sometimes, too, instinctively, when he’s without it.

“Sit,” Tang Fan tells him, and he does, crossing the last few paces to perch on the lip of his bed, slightly angled, almost side-saddle. There is nowhere else for him to sit, unless he wants to stoop low to the table or lower still to the floor. Now, if he’d only let Tang Fan move a chair in here, or two, perhaps a table to read at— but he’s getting ahead of himself again. Of his presently pressing priorities, reconciling lists much higher than refurbishing. Eating is a close second, and finding Wang Xian and Princess Gu'an follows on the heels of that.

The lack of seating does mean his choices are limited to standing, though. He follows Sui Zhou over and circles around behind him, trying not to hover too awkwardly or brush his arm too roughly against Sui Zhou’s back as he sets down the chest on the bed at Sui Zhou’s hip. He sees Sui Zhou lift his hand to his hair from out of the corner of his eye as he opens the lid, smacks his elbow, and remembers why that’s not the best go-to at the moment when Sui Zhou hisses sharply.

Tang Fan snatches his hand back and scrunches up his shoulders, making himself smaller as he fixes his stare firmly on the ferret of his fingers through the chest’s contents. “Ah, sorry, sorry— but you shouldn’t be touching! I’ll take care of it, Guangchuan, just be patient.”

“Understood,” Sui Zhou says, a little testily, but that’s good. That’s actually good. Well, maybe not good in all respects, but hearing Sui Zhou be even a hint of annoyed at him is a relief more than it isn’t. How could it not be? If Sui Zhou is brusque it means he does not think Tang Fan will break like glass and slice through his fingers in the handling.

There isn’t much in the chest — a silk-bound bundle that turns out to be his comb, plain-carved boxwood; an openwork bronze handwarmer; carved hairpins; some lacquer boxes and porcelain jars that might have oil or gels or somesuch, he doesn’t go prying — so Tang Fan has to while away a bit of time wastefully so he’s not going too fast.

“This won’t take long,” he says, when he’s as ready as he’ll ever be.

Sui Zhou grunts affirmatively.

Tang Fan closes the box with a snap and tucks the comb up into the cup of his palm. He contemplates sitting again; gets about midway down in a squat before he realises it really isn’t going to work, no, proportionally, and concedes to hunching a bit instead, bent at the waist. “Relax!” He pitches the direction at Sui Zhou’s shoulders, where they’re strung up taut, as he reaches for what’s left of his topknot. “I’m very good at this, you know,” he adds reassuringly, “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

Sui Zhou’s hair is quite soft, to the touch. Strawlike and shabby where days on days of braiding and binding have frayed the strands, yes, and split at the ends, but soft. Nothing some oils and attentiveness won’t ameliorate. Tang Fan runs his fingers through it, unsnagging the tangles and smoothing the wave of it down flat, nails raking across Sui Zhou’s scalp lightly. “Too hard?” he asks, when Sui Zhou starts.

“No,” Sui Zhou answers quietly, after a moment.

“Well.” Tang Fan pats at his hair again, clicks his tongue, then gathers it up from where it has slid to curl against his throat to bring it back across his shoulders. He’s mindful of the brush of his fingertips to bare skin when Sui Zhou starts again at the contact, a slight shiver further subdued by the stony set of his spine. “Of course not, I’m quite gentle. But you’ll tell me if I do hurt you, won’t you? Yes?”

Sui Zhou nods shortly. Tang Fan takes it for a promise and as assent.

“Good,” he says, letting the pleased peal of the laugh budding in his throat colour his voice. It’s awkward, but that’s all right. He fumbles the comb until he’s got his fingers around it in a proper grip, then sets to work, feeding the teeth through the drape of Sui Zhou’s hair.

It is easy to let it fall to the wayside of his focus, after that. Tang Fan looks at his hands sweeping through Sui Zhou’s hair, comb then palm, and the sliver of Sui Zhou’s profile through the shroud of the ink-black strands, but doesn’t see them. Not really; not quite. It isn’t going to be enough, to simply say sorry to Sui Zhou. Too inadequate. He needs more words than that, and Tang Fan doesn’t know where to start. He will have to find the moment for it, too. When they’re alone would be best, since Sui Zhou gets so— shy isn’t the right word for it, but he prickles, whenever Tang Fan compliments his many, many finer points, so who is to say he won’t close off in the face of the similarly heartfelt—

Tang Fan’s fingers catch, dredging him out from the river flow of his thoughts, and he blinks only to find he’s three rungs into plaiting Sui Zhou’s hair down the middle out of habit. How Dong’er prefers it, when the warmer weather makes the heavy cumber of her hair against her nape intolerable— surely Sui Zhou would have felt that Tang Fan was doing it, so why didn’t he say—

Tang Fan tugs on his fistful of Sui Zhou’s hair sharply in his haste to disentangle himself and it both, and the sound that he tears out of Sui Zhou’s mouth in turn, a strained scratched-up whimper, shocks his mind blank and his hands static.

“Aiya,” Tang Fan stammers out, “Sui Zhou—”

“—It’s fine,” Sui Zhou cuts in, brittle. His shoulder twitches, the corded muscle in his arm flexing as he grapples down on his own thigh. It is unfair, Tang Fan thinks, fleetingly, that said flexing is so blatantly visible even with at least two obscuring layers of sleeves. He also thinks that Sui Zhou’s reaction contraries his claim.

Tang Fan combs Sui Zhou's hair back out flat, refocusing for a more dutiful — and gentle — second attempt. "You can ask us, you know," Tang Fan mumbles, instead of arguing again with him directly. "If you need help with things. We'll help you."

Sui Zhou takes a moment to answer, but the quiet that precedes it is not a considering one. "It's unnecessary. For this," he amends, after another beat. As though that will make it better.

Tang Fan tuts as he layers Sui Zhou's hair again, separates it, and starts to comb the upper half into a tight ponytail within the band of his fingers, high on the crown of his head. "But what if you hurt yourself?" he reasons. "Lao Pei will never let you hear the end of it, or me for that matter, for letting you."

He pauses, the tip of his tongue peeking out from between his lips, to pluck up the nearest pin to hold everything in place. Sui Zhou doesn't interject in the interim, which helps Tang Fan keep on task and track. "You were injured quite badly," he continues softly, beseeching. He really was; Tang Fan has no need to exaggerate it for argument's sake. He'd been terrified Sui Zhou was going to bleed out on him, there on the floor of the prison, even though he'd promised Tang Fan that he wouldn't.

His fingers shake too much as he coils the first loop of Sui Zhou's hair around the pin, and it ends up too loose. Tang Fan unspools it while he takes a steadying breath. It feels urgent, all of a sudden, that he tells Sui Zhou this, that he impresses on him how— how it isn't nothing. Not at all.

"We are here, and we want to. Isn't it better not to take risks you don’t need to?" The second loop he does is better. Tang Fan nods to himself; lets his gaze wander to the gentling slope of Sui Zhou’s shoulders before he guides it back.

"Then you won't upset Dong'er, or concern your men." Still, Sui Zhou stays quiet, but Tang Fan sees his grip on his thigh ease, tension unlatching in his arm, out from the edge of his periphery. "They're all quite worried about you, you know. It was very hard on them, finding their Da-ge like that."

Sui Zhou breathes in, slow, then out, slower. "I know," he admits, finally, at last.

"Good. It’s good, that you do, that is." Tang Fan twists the last of the length in on itself, fixing the topknot in place. It's not the neatest, but it will hold fast, at least, unlike Sui Zhou’s try at it. He puts his hands into stroking down the sheaf of Sui Zhou’s hair left loose, straightening it down his back. "I want you to recover quickly as well, of course! We still have a case, so the sooner the better."

Sui Zhou falls quiet again. Tang Fan isn't sure if it is docility or contemplation, but it’s convenient, as selfish as that is. It lets him spread himself a bit thinner to think, too. He slopes down, sidelong, and reopens the chest. He’s still not sure of what to say, but it’s as good an opportunity as any to say it. Waiting until after they find Wang Xian and Princess Gu’an could come at too great an expense. Something could happen, between now and then, couldn’t it? And then Sui Zhou might never know that Tang Fan regrets what he said and did that night and then all the mornings after it.

Tang Fan wraps the comb back in its silk, returns it to its relative compartment, and drifts his hand across the bed briefly to make sure no pins have gone amiss. He wonders, too, tangentially, as he straightens, just where Dong’er is. Surely she should be back by now, especially given that she left before Tang Fan even found Sui Zhou in the kitchen. Then again— Tang Fan is not sure how much time has passed, here, precisely. It feels like a still eternity, forever, Sui Zhou’s room discarded aside from everything else. But it feels like it has been too short to be too long, as well, conversely and concurrently, all at once.

It is because he is still engrossed by his entanglement in that tangent thought that Tang Fan does exactly what he does next. Backstepping into rote, he pats down Sui Zhou’s hair again; tells him, “There,” and kisses his temple softly. A very natural progression through a very quotidian sequence of events, ordinarily, but not today. It is certainly not Dong’er who has whipped around to face him, mouth ajar around her standard complaint that crumbs from whatever snack she’s squirrelled to Tang Fan from the kitchen to tide him over until breakfast have rubbed off from his lips and into her hair. Very familiar argument, that one, lively, well-trodden. Usually lasts them the entire walk from his room to the table.

Sui Zhou, staring up at him from the bed, wide-eyed and paling in surprise, hasn’t got an argument for him, apparently. At least not yet. But his lips stay parted after he sucks in a rushed breath, and nothing follows into the silence for several excruciatingly accursed seconds.

Tang Fan makes a very strangled, whiny sound, one that he doubts does or will do him any favours. “Ah, habit,” he rattles out reedily, scrambling, “a habit! I wasn’t paying attention! Guangchuan, don’t be angry with me, I’m not...” he trails off, floundering, then closes his mouth, fingers twisting into the lap of his skirts for parity. He’s not… what? Teasing? It’s hard to mitigate a slight when you don’t know how it’s harmed.

Something shutters across Sui Zhou’s face, complicatedly indescribable, defiant of explanation. Tang Fan stresses trying, since he owes Sui Zhou at least that much, eyebrows pinching as his eyes narrow thin enough that his vision briefly blurs over. If it was anyone else, Tang Fan might say it’s wounded, how Sui Zhou looks away, evens his expression, then looks back. But it’s Sui Zhou, so it doesn’t sit right with Tang Fan to think that.

“I am not angry with you,” Sui Zhou replies, not meeting his eyes. He goes to rise, and Tang Fan, lanced through with panic, claps him on the shoulder and pushes at him until he sits back down, sidestepping around to block his escape route. Knowing that there’s some choice in it, on Sui Zhou’s part, to capitulate, instead of stepping around Tang Fan or putting his hands on him to move him himself, as he has the power to do and very much has done before, is emboldening. It encourages Tang Fan enough to set his other hand down on Sui Zhou’s other shoulder, too, before he can think better of it.

“Well!” Tang Fan exclaims, a little foolishly and a lot too loudly. “Well, you should be!” Not about the kiss, necessarily, but Tang Fan doesn’t think this is just about that, anymore. Or today, or even the last few, ever since he came back to impose himself on Sui Zhou as had once been their norm.

“I should be,” Sui Zhou repeats slowly. Beneath his bafflement there is that testiness again, arcing up. Tang Fan, impelled, wants to yank it out to the forefront.

“Yes!” Tang Fan insists. He rubs the pads of his thumbs against the jut of Sui Zhou’s collarbone underneath his robe in order to scratch the itch to shake him. “I have not been treating you well. Properly,” he settles on, “I have not been treating you properly, since I— well, even since before—”

“Tang Fan,” Sui Zhou interrupts him tersely, mid-flounder.

“Sui Zhou,” he snaps back, “let me, just—” This is turning into more of a catastrophe than an apology, but he can still salvage it. “I said— what I said to you wasn’t right. Or true, or meant.”

It’s off-putting, how Sui Zhou is looking at him, brow furrowed and mouth frown-crumpled. Piercingly quiet. It is what Tang Fan asked for, by cutting him off so that he could finish, but it’s not what he wanted in the way he wanted it, he realises, now that he has it.

“You should be angry,” he concludes firmly. “It would only be fair, if you were.” Easier, too.

Sui Zhou sighs out, the sound deep-slung, defeated. He glances down Tang Fan, gaze skimming everything but snaring on nothing, before he lifts his head and meets Tang Fan’s eyes. “You were hurt,” he justifies, infuriatingly reasonable. “It was understandable. Don’t dwell on it further than that.”

Underneath his hands, Tang Fan feels Sui Zhou’s shoulders tense, and he digs the heels of his palms in, retaliatory. This isn’t how he expected this to go, he thinks, or how he wanted it to— Tang Fan isn’t even sure why he’s irritated, only that he is, cast wide and directionless with it. “But—”

Sui Zhou, disregarding the deterrent of Tang Fan’s hands digging down, stands up from the bed. Tang Fan takes the half-step back that he needs to make room before the rise of Sui Zhou’s body forces him to, but holds his ground for the rest, even when it brings them face to face and all but pressed chest to chest. It escapes his notice, at times, how close they are in height in actuality; Sui Zhou has a way of seeming taller, grander, all-encompassing. Officious and dominant. Like now.

“It’s done,” Sui Zhou says, low and soft and far too kind, all considered. He looks away, to somewhere past Tang Fan’s ear, pensive, then, “It’s not what's important. There’s nothing to forgive.”

Sui Zhou’s hands draw up from his sides, finding Tang Fan’s wrists. The press of his thumbs across the ridges of tender-frail bone there feels heady, dazing. Tang Fan fists the collar of his robes and plants his feet, doing his utmost to hinder Sui Zhou from separating them.

“But you were all right!” spills out of Tang Fan, frantic. It’s enough to buy a stay of Sui Zhou leaving; he freezes, the rope of his fingers drawing tighter. “I don’t know what to do,” he rushes on breathlessly, “I don’t know how to help, I don’t— it’s my fault, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t.” Sui Zhou’s answer is so quick and so sure. He stares Tang Fan down; it runs Tang Fan through.

Tang Fan’s eyes start to sting, a dry throb. He feels so utterly bereft and helpless that it’s making him nauseous, apprehension calcifying into a thick knot in his throat. He swallows around it; chokes on his own spit; makes a raw, wet sound in the back of his mouth.

Sui Zhou's fingers unfurl from his wrists. Tang Fan tilts his chin to glimpse the trace of his hands up to rest over his knuckles, the curl of his thumbs as they dip to slide across the basins of his palms. They hook in, and Tang Fan relinquishes his grip on Sui Zhou's robes only to clasp down on them instead.

"You're here," Sui Zhou murmurs. It sounds torn free of him, awed and unintended. The breath that follows after it is ragged. He means to say something else, Tang Fan knows, he can tell, but it doesn’t come.

Sui Zhou's gaze is so heavy, and hits like a blow. Tang Fan's face feels hot, his skin pulled too tight over his bones. "Of course I am, I want to be," Tang Fan mumbles, maudlin, when he is certain all he’ll interrupt is nothing. "Weren’t you listening? I need you. You can't leave me."

He doesn't know how else to say what he needs Sui Zhou to hear. How to say it so that Sui Zhou can understand what he means by it. He will have to apologise for this apology, too, at this rate, what with the mess he's made of it.

Sui Zhou's eyes are dark and peering and unreadable only because Tang Fan is being obstinate, overcome with a nonsense fear of what he might see within them. He pulls free of Tang Fan's grip, and then his hands are bridging between them, palms a shock of cool to his blush-hot skin when they cup his face. Tang Fan shivers; presses his cheek into Sui Zhou's touch unthinkingly. Sui Zhou edges impossibly closer, he notes distantly. Tang Fan’s heart jackknifes into his ribs, hard, slamming his breath out of him in a gasp that brushes up against Sui Zhou’s lips.

Oh, Tang Fan thinks pithily, before his ability to think is swept clean out of his head by a terrifying wave of relief. Sui Zhou will know— he will know what he means, what he wants, what to do. He can always be found at their midway mark, even when Tang Fan is not sure where he himself is, where he’s to turn and set off to. “Please,” Tang Fan says, to something, to anything and everything and whatever it is that Sui Zhou means to give him. Hesitation encroaches on Sui Zhou’s expression for a moment, an age, and Tang Fan doesn’t breathe until it burns an ache like a hole through his lungs, until he’s drowning from lack of air with no surface to break.

The moment passes. Sui Zhou’s restraint retreats, and he presses closer, crossing the distance Tang Fan never knew until now was even left between them to cross. His breath is damp-hot where it curls over Tang Fan’s chin; his lips are chapped dry and chafe against Tang Fan’s softly when he drags their mouths together. His moustache scratches the bow of Tang Fan’s lip; his beard Tang Fan’s jaw. It’s so little that it leaves him yearning and so much it leaves him lost. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands; if he should do anything with them, at all, or if it is best to leave them in their slack furl against Sui Zhou’s chest. He doesn’t know if his eyes should be open or closed; if he should look or not; if he’s even allowed to watch.

Sui Zhou draws back all too soon and all too quickly, and Tang Fan hears himself whine shakily as he strains blindly against the cradle of Sui Zhou’s fingers, trying to give chase. He opens his eyes, having found that he closed them, in the end, after all, and blinks through the fogged swim of his vision until he can find Sui Zhou again.

It doesn’t take long, of course, to find Sui Zhou, because Sui Zhou never goes far at all. He is not as close as Tang Fan would like him to be, though, at the moment, head tilted back, gaze roaming over Tang Fan’s face. There’s a handsome splash of pink to his cheeks that Tang Fan would appreciate a lot more were it not accompanied by the reservation colouring his countenance.

“Why did you stop?” Tang Fan complains, hoping to counter whatever catch Sui Zhou is considering so carefully before he convinces himself he’s made some manner of mistake. “I liked it,” he adds, and then, “come back.”

Fortunately, Sui Zhou does. Tang Fan gets a glimpse of Sui Zhou’s smile before he leans back in, sees the rest of it in the touch of its soft, bared-open curve to his own mouth. It should be no surprise that he makes something already perfect better for the second try of his hand at it — Sui Zhou’s phenomenality has seldom been proven unbounded — but, well.

Tang Fan busies his hands with recharting the planes of Sui Zhou’s shoulders and his broad chest under this new light of context, all too aware of his clumsiness and giddily arrogant enough not to care. He has certainly kissed and been kissed before, but it has always been a means to lead on into something else. Sui Zhou kisses him as if it is any other unbending undertaking he is giving himself wholeheartedly over to. As if kissing Tang Fan is his entire point and purpose, what he knows in every certainty and with utmost contentment is how he wants to spend the rest of his life.

It’s so much to take and to have; too much. Tang Fan wants more of it, he doesn’t think he could ever get or be given enough. He arches his back, buries himself in and in and in to Sui Zhou like a knife to the hilt and then urges on further, past the guard, relentless and starved. Sui Zhou steadies him by the nape when the floor starts to sway out from underneath his feet and takes it, lets him, swallows the whimper that’s strung out of Tang Fan and licks into the space it’s left behind his teeth.

Sui Zhou’s tongue curls around his, slick and wet and so, so good, and Tang Fan tries to give the thrill of it back with the scrape of his teeth over the swell of Sui Zhou’s bottom lip. He thinks he must manage it, from the way Sui Zhou’s blunt nails scrabble against his neck as he groans, the sound catching between their mouths, loud enough to mute the rush of his blood in his ears and the shuddery pant of their breaths.

Tang Fan pets Sui Zhou’s shoulders, his biceps, artless aimless little circles of his fingers that evoke another delightful sound from Sui Zhou, a low moan that rumbles up from deep in his chest. He feels his arms flex beneath his caress, all corded muscle and constrained strength, and, oh, that’s good, too, intoxicating, makes his toes curl in his boots and power cloud his head. Sui Zhou’s palm roughs up the column of his throat, fingers circling his jaw to tip him by the chin, a firm hand to steer Tang Fan into place. Tang Fan’s eyes flutter shut at the drag of Sui Zhou’s teeth against his lip, shiver-light, parts his mouth at the coaxing prompt of Sui Zhou’s thumb kneading his cheek, and then Sui Zhou is sucking on his tongue, drinking deep, all frictionless heat. A tremble quakes down the backs of his thighs, slap-hot and sudden, and Tang Fan cringes away, turns his face into Sui Zhou’s cheek to gasp his shock as he staggers in place, crumpling against Sui Zhou’s chest.

“Oh,” he manages, hoarse, mouth shaping it against Sui Zhou’s fever-hot skin. His head spins, and then his body spins to follow it, Sui Zhou’s broad hands tracing up his sides to grasp him underneath his arms as he moves him without effort. Tang Fan’s head empties out with a jolt that ricochets down his spine as the wing of his shoulder blade clips the bedpost, the rest of him following until his back hits surface, body anchoring between the wood and the wall and Sui Zhou’s frame crowding him in against it all, his fingers fanning over Tang Fan’s fluttering ribs.

"Tang Fan," Sui Zhou murmurs, voice sounding so lovely, raw-scraped and wrecked, and Tang Fan quivers underneath the heady heft of knowing it's him who did it. Him who made Sui Zhou's mouth so plush and kiss-bruised red, his cheeks flushed, his eyes dark with desire and sharp with intent.

"Yes," Tang Fan rasps, and not without a note of petulance — nothing seems nearly as important as Sui Zhou kissing him right this instant, and this is the sort of talking that impedes that need's fulfilment. "Yes!" he repeats, in answer to the essence of the question he's sure Sui Zhou is about to ask, in one way of words or another. "Come here, come here again, you are so far away, how can you kiss me from there?"

Sui Zhou stoops forward, a man led and possessed, but manages to catch himself, to Tang Fan’s excruciated exasperation, just shy of reach. His fingers twitch against Tang Fan’s ribs, palms smoothing almost impulsively idle half-crescents into the creased fabric as he holds Tang Fan’s gaze, wavering firm.

“Are you sure?” Sui Zhou persists, because he’s a gentleman, a brute, he’s killing him. Tang Fan makes a frail little sound that’s more a whine than the curse he wishes it would be, tangles his fingers in Sui Zhou’s hair, and tugs at it, blithely undoing the effort of all his careful combing.

“Yes!” Tang Fan grouses, again, fighting his other hand up from its useless hang at his side to stroke over Sui Zhou’s neck, his strong jaw, his warm cheek. “I can beg if you don’t believe me.”

“Don’t beg,” Sui Zhou tells him, in a weak tone that very much suggests that he would quite like it if Tang Fan did so anyway.

"Kiss me and I won't," Tang Fan negotiates fairly. If there’s a lilt to his voice that is more pleaful than demanding, well, he can’t be held to blame for it. It’s Sui Zhou’s fault, cruel man, for throwing open his horizons so widely in one moment and appending this wait in the next, expecting patience when he should know that he can’t have it.

Sui Zhou accedes, wisely and without argument, bowing his head to nose their mouths back together with a wisping breath. Tang Fan claws at his hair and clutches at his face, ungainly, an unmanning whimper leaving his lips when Sui Zhou licks back between them without his prior preamble. The heat seeping across his skin surges back from where the pause had tempered it, dizzying; his gut clenches tightly, and then Sui Zhou’s knee is pressing between his spread thighs, an inexorable push of pressure that rucks the skirts of his robes and rolls over him in all the right ways.

Tang Fan's watery legs drain out from underneath him in a haze, and he turns his face away again, heaving in a breath against the corner of Sui Zhou’s mouth, eyes squeezing shut as sweat from his brow drips into his eyelashes. His mouth feels dry; his tongue too thick between his teeth. He’s shaking, but he feels it more through Sui Zhou’s hands, how each tremor feeds into his broad palms as they smooth down the slim valleys of his waist and the hills of his hips.

“You’re so good,” he sighs, scratchy, when he finds his voice and fetches it back from where it has scattered between them. The breath he tries to catch feels tacky in his throat, thick; he swallows it down, then sucks in another, shallower, and finds it sinks into his lungs far easier. His heart is kicking about so frantically behind his ribs he thinks it might break free. He kisses at Sui Zhou chastely, for the joy of it, shivering at the scrape of his stubble against his worried lips. Sui Zhou’s hands slow their strokes, then stop entirely, settling on his sides, a steady, sprawling weight.

"You're so good," Tang Fan repeats, louder, now, more pieced together. Sui Zhou's fingers tighten where they've come to rest, clawing down on Tang Fan's robes, clipping his belt. Tang Fan shudders, hitches his hips up— moans when the lie of residual strength gives out in his knees and bears his weight down on the brace of Sui Zhou’s thigh, the slide so firm and so perfect and so much—

The heat doesn't quell; burns hotter, instead, billowing into an inferno in the space it makes for itself. Tang Fan pants out into Sui Zhou's cheek, mouth slack, hands dragging down from his hair and neck to find a hold on his arms. He remembers too late, winces at Sui Zhou's grunt, tongue tripping over an apology that doesn't eventuate. It's shaken free of his head alongside everything else when Sui Zhou just takes his hands and brings them to his own hips, fits Tang Fan's fingers there and squeezes down while he pitches up, pinning Tang Fan's cock between his thigh and the crease of his hip with such a brutal rough shove that Tang Fan hears the clack of his knee against the wall over his own wordless shout.

“How,” Tang Fan croaks, enraptured, wrecked, “how are you so good? Hm?” Sui Zhou flinches against him, a stutter of loose motion followed by a stall of rigid tension. The stroke of his palms stumbles where they have swept back to trace up his sides, and Tang Fan huffs out a laugh, unsensible but resistless. Sui Zhou is always doing that — guarding against ovation as if it’s a blow and not a kindness; as though the truth of praise is suffering to be survived. Of course it bleeds through to even here, somewhere insignificantly small and intimately private. Just them, with no-one else to hear. Well, if Sui Zhou was not meant to be extolled, he would not be so exceptional, and so he’ll have to learn to embrace that rather than merely endure it sooner or later. Soon and sooner still, even, if Tang Fan has his way in it.

“Fine, fine,” Tang Fan relents, ever-merciful in his appetence, “just— come here, that’s, oh—” his voice splinters feebly as Sui Zhou readily obeys. He turns his face back again to catch Sui Zhou’s lip between his teeth, the flat of his tongue flicking out to wet it as Sui Zhou’s hands start to move again, the rove of them feverish, fumbling. They brush up his ribs, the slight swell of his chest, the heels of his palms kneading down, deepening the drag, and Tang Fan squirms, arching up harder into Sui Zhou’s grasp and his mouth with a needy prayer Sui Zhou saves him from sounding out by kissing him quiet.

Sui Zhou is tenacious in this, too, in how he takes in hand Tang Fan’s every reaction and turns it over until he’s thoroughly mapped out every trace of what there is to find. Until he knows what will make Tang Fan gasp brokenly into his mouth and buck up blindly against his thigh, desperate; what will make his blood run honey-thick in his veins and make pleasure rake its nails down his every nerve, setting him aflame. Tang Fan can’t hold a thought in his head, can’t pull himself together from where he’s been so neatly shattered and separated. Nothing else matters but the urgent unmaking that is Sui Zhou, here, with him, that is Sui Zhou’s hands and his mouth and his voice and his everything. The corner of the bedpost needling into Tang Fan's back, the pangs of hunger in his hollow belly— it is all cast aside, past his reach and beyond his care.

Tang Fan feels Sui Zhou's hands finally settle still, spanning his chest, and there is no warning at all before his thumbs graze his nipples, hard beneath the far too many layers of his robes. Tang Fan wrenches out of their kiss with a sob-clotted splutter, tears stinging his eyes, hands fisting numbly at Sui Zhou's waist as he feels his cock twitch, swollen thick and slick at the tip. Sui Zhou's lips brush the blade of his cheekbone, breath roughing his skin, and then he pinches, hard, rolling the peaked nubs between the cloth-blunted pads of his fingers. It rips a wretchedly feral sound out of his mouth, and Tang Fan kicks out instinctively as his head lolls back, the tears edging his eyes spilling over as he squeezes them shut tight.

"Oh— oh, that—" It's really all he can do, to just hold on and take and take what Sui Zhou gives him. He can’t even pretend that he’d be embarrassed, were his senses intact — it’s too good a thing to spoil with shame. "There, yes, like that, Guangchuan, your hands—"

He jerks, shoulders slinging back as he bends his spine, shoving up into Sui Zhou’s hands as he ruts against his thigh. Sui Zhou mouths something unintelligible into his neck, then kisses over it. Tang Fan can't find a rhythm to set, too spun out and spread thin and insensate, so he follows his greed instead, tries to have the best of all of it at once. His face feels hot, cheeks tear-streaked, red bruised lips spit smeared— he's ruined, he realises wildly. Sui Zhou has ruined him entirely, forever, for anyone else, and— and he will have to take responsibility for it, now, won't he? He'll have to keep him.

It crashes through him, the thought of that, like it's tangible, and Tang Fan whimpers half as much from the impact as he does from the nip of Sui Zhou’s teeth over the juddering pulse in his throat. Sui Zhou's hands pet down his ribs, then up, circling gently, but the tide of his need is past stemming — all Sui Zhou's soothing does is stoke his arousal, low-flung, molten heat seeping down the bow of his spine, the backs of his thighs. He feels so full and so knotted up around it that he might burst or break beneath a breeze, cock leaking steadily, sticky-wet on his skin, sopping through the thin cloth of his pants. He tries to curl into himself, down onto Sui Zhou’s hands and onto his shoulder, leg hitching up as if to fold against his chest. The curve of his knee crawls, firm, tucking up between Sui Zhou’s legs, tangling in his apron, and Sui Zhou growls, gravelly, the sound rumbling against the hollow of his throat.

And, oh, yes, Tang Fan knows Sui Zhou is big, just as he knows he probably shouldn’t have known before now that Sui Zhou is big, but— Sui Zhou is big. Tang Fan rocks up, foot scuffing against the floor, knee pressing in tighter, and Sui Zhou bites what might be his name into his neck, the sharp shock of teeth smoothed over by the flick of his tongue. Tang Fan fractures open on the pure possibilities of it, upended into the fantasy of things he’s only ever entertained in glimpses, thieved snatches hidden away for twilight perusals and darting thoughts of what-ifs that he parts himself all-too-quickly from. He wants all of it; can’t believe he’s lived so long without.

“Please, oh,” he begs, thrust too close to a teetering edge. He wants this to last, yawning out into aching endlessness, slipped into the liminal space where jade sea meets blue sky. He needs it to end. “Oh, Sui Zhou, you’re going to make me come like this, is that what you want?”

“Yes,” Sui Zhou hisses, torn open and bared up raw, like supplication, and then his hand is sliding down the flat of Tang Fan’s quivering belly, drawn in taut around the threat of a stabbing breath. It trails lower and lower and lower between the thread of their legs to fold over Tang Fan’s cock, hot and heavy and huge, the fit of his fingers snug, and that’s enough, that’s it, that’s too much. Tang Fan comes with a keening wail that unravels threadbare, spilling over himself and into the sturdy squeeze of Sui Zhou’s perfect grip. His voice breaks off on his tongue, somewhere, as it goes on and on and on, shuddering him apart, and Sui Zhou’s other hand halters his nape, reels him in by it until his head is bowed and burrowed into the crook of Sui Zhou’s neck, sobs muffled soft by his collar.

“I have you,” Sui Zhou is murmuring when Tang Fan regathers enough to hear anything past the dense shroud of his thundering heart and his hiccuping pulls for air. His lips brush Tang Fan’s cheek, the shell of his ear, his hair, a shade of a kiss but with all of its sweetness; his fingers circle Tang Fan’s sweat-flecked neck, tracing the tender skin pulled thin over the knobbly chine of his spine, other hand drifting absently down the lean slant of his thigh. Tang Fan, languid with overindulgence, noses at the join where his shoulder meets his neck delicately before he lifts his heavy head, blearily blinking the sheen of tears and sweat from his eyes.

“You do,” he husks agreeably, raspy-spent and ramble-slow. He feels a little bliss-addled, still, fucked out; like he’s sprawled out warm in a sunbeam, stretched past the lines of his own limbs. It’s nice. He wants his hands to move, and after lingering for a moment they finally do, sliding around to fold into the small of Sui Zhou’s back, enclosing him in a lazy embrace. "That was. Oh."

The soft laugh that gusts his ear sounds like it surprises Sui Zhou, too. There is still the trace of its smile tugging at the corners of his lips, though, when he pulls back to look at him. Tang Fan looks at him too, makes no secret of it, taking in his blush-ripened cheeks and his even redder mouth, the tremor limning his jaw.

Sui Zhou swallows, the work of his throat around it harsh, strained. “Runqing.” It’s tentative, venturing.

Tang Fan scrunches his nose up as he snorts, lacing his fingers together, thumbs teasing absently at the ties of Sui Zhou’s apron, the corded rope belting his waist. Sui Zhou should know the answer, written out as it is on his face — Tang Fan shouldn’t have to say it — but he’ll show him a little leniency, just this once.

“Yes!” Tang Fan tries to sigh it out quite gravely, as if pressed, but he promptly breaks off into a peal of giggling. "I am fine, I am— filthy." He laughs again, helplessly pleased. It is a discomforting sensation, his drying come tacky on his skin and sticking to the lap of his clothes, but taking care of it means untangling from Sui Zhou, and that would be much worse.

He still feels aloft in the aftermath of his release, but the ephemerality of his thoughts is starting to evanesce, regrounding him in his own head, rooting him to the soil of his senses. Tang Fan wonders at the newness of this and them reconvening around it; at how old Sui Zhou’s want could have possibly been, how gradual its build. If Sui Zhou has thought about it, and what he’s thought about it— but his curiosity feels so leaden, here, when the rest of him is so light. Like he’ll be dragged back down in the asking. Tang Fan hasn’t felt this at ease since— since.

“Now you,” Tang Fan says instead. It’s a far more pressing need for his attentions, anyway — these are questions that will keep. He unthreads his fingers, lets them rove up the dip of Sui Zhou’s back, unhurried and undirected. “You too. I want you to,” he preempts, when Sui Zhou's expression starts to edge tightly towards troubled. "And I want to. I want to so much.” It’s not as frightening as he expected to admit, but it is more exciting than he anticipated to be free of it.

Sui Zhou’s fingers claw down into his robes, as if he means to tether himself. Tang Fan can commiserate: he feels very lost, too, stranded somewhere uncharted with an abundance of choices to be made and no clear direction to take. It might help Sui Zhou — might help both of them — if Tang Fan leads him to a narrower crossroads.

“I could use my hands,” Tang Fan offers. Sui Zhou's eyes widen even more, somehow, as his breath punches out of him. "Or my mouth," he adds, the words clumsy with haste, cluttering together. He feels his own breath stutter, catching on the latch of his eagerness. Then, "Would you— oh," he gasps out. It's been so long since he's done that for anyone, and Sui Zhou is so big— could he even take much of him? Would Sui Zhou like it? Would it feel good?

Tang Fan can't disentangle himself from the trap of that desirous thought, now he's had it. It staggers him, pushes out everything else that's unimportant, that isn't all wound up in this need to know what it would be like. To sink to his knees and suck Sui Zhou's cock, to have him fill his mouth and taste him on his tongue. To find out how much he can swallow before he chokes; how much more he can work his throat open around before Sui Zhou comes.

“Would you like that?” Tang Fan finishes breathlessly, watching Sui Zhou’s face for any hint of proof that he might actually not. It’s never gone astray for him before, to simply kneel down and press his face up into a man’s lap in absence of words aloud, but Sui Zhou’s thigh is still between his legs, barring the way. Tang Fan will have to settle for sounding it out.

Sui Zhou certainly doesn’t look like he’s averse, not at all, but Tang Fan doesn’t get to hear if what he’s parting his mouth around is an answer or something else, because the knock on the sliding door comes first.

“Sui da-ge?” Dong’er calls out. “Are you here? Is Tang da-ge with you?”

Tang Fan, in his rush to extricate himself faster than he has ever moved before in his life, momentarily misremembers where he is, precisely, and that he’s flattened quite cosily to the wall. He smacks his head when he tries to leap back, yelps out, and that’s how Dong’er finds them when she rounds the screen in alarm: a compromised mess of limbs, Tang Fan’s hands clamped over the throb rattling through his skull.

“Are you fighting?!” Tang Fan knows that it’s a general you, meant for the two of them, but the accusation feels like it is being pointed at him in particular. He can just make out Dong’er’s wide eyes and puffed up cheeks from over Sui Zhou’s shoulder, and her glare is entirely directed at him — or what little of him she can see, out from behind the bed and the curtains and Sui Zhou. Tang Fan does not feel comforted by the relative privacy, considering. The suggestive indistinction absolutely makes it all worse.

“No, no, no!” Tang Fan cranes his neck as he protests his innocence, perhaps a little more shrilly than he needs to or is really called for, in this situation. “We weren’t fighting, we were—” he stumbles on it, trying to find where the truth overlaps best with ambiguity.

“It’s all right.” Sui Zhou clears his throat. “Go set everything up,” he continues, steadier, turning his face from Tang Fan to glance over his shoulder, “I’ll be there in a moment.”

Dong’er’s brow knits together, her lips pursing, but she does back out of the bedroom, albeit while looking utterly unconvinced. Tang Fan squeezes his eyes shut with a groan when he’s sure she’s at least past the doorsill, scrubbing furiously at the back of his head with both hands.

“Are you all right?” he hears Sui Zhou ask after a too-long moment.

“No,” Tang Fan sulks, mouth crimping. His head hurts. He’s starting to remember how hungry he is. He’s so mortified he wants to sink to the floor and stay there, face down, until he wastes away to nothing.

Sui Zhou’s hands brush his chest, flattening the crumpled fabric of his outer robe back into place. Tang Fan cracks open an eye when they fall lower, to his waist, then the other, chin dipping towards his clavicle as he looks down, watching Sui Zhou’s fingers refasten his belt. Oh. Tang Fan feels a bit mollified, but also like his heart is about to burst, brimming too full with fondness.

“I still want to!” Tang Fan blurts out, before he manages to let slip something far more foolish. “I do,” he adds, quieter, when Sui Zhou looks back up at him. As though it’s the assertion that makes it a private thing, the assurance that reveals him. It might be, really.

“Later,” Sui Zhou says, after a stretch of seconds that Tang Fan has to hold his breath through. It sounds so soft, so sure. Tang Fan breathes out. “Go wash up.”

Right, that. Tang Fan grimaces, makes it a few bowlegged steps out past Sui Zhou when Sui Zhou recedes to give him space, then stops with a start. “Wait, wait!” Tang Fan spins around and shuffles back, flapping his hand at Sui Zhou, half-turned towards him, now, brows raised. “Your sleeves!” That had been the second part of what he’d been meaning to fix, before he was rather soundly sidetracked.

Sui Zhou turns back around, facing the wall, and Tang Fan stoops to fiddle with the rope around his middle. He gathers up Sui Zhou’s sleeves, more haste than grace, and manages to pin them for long enough that they’re in a better state than they started when he crisscrosses the cord over Sui Zhou’s back — carefully — and reties it all together.

“There, there, done,” he rambles, stealing a cheeky swipe or two at Sui Zhou’s hair when he straightens, too, flattening it back down from where his fingers mussed it up. “You can be seen now. And cook. All right.”

And without further fuss or farewell, Tang Fan hoists his skirts up past his ankles and strides off, trying very, very hard to put out of the forefront of his mind the urge to keep looking over his shoulder and his acute awareness of how sweaty and sticky he is, in all over disarray. He very much needs all of his attention so he can focus on not tripping himself over somewhere in the courtyard by stepping on his hems. It seems to be the day for it. Best not to tempt fate.