Sui Zhou stirs, slow, roused by the reach of Tang Fan's voice across the bridge between sleeping and waking.

It takes a moment, a beat and a breath, for Sui Zhou to reorient. The candles had been burning low when he’d closed his eyes with the promise and the lie of it being only for a moment; time enough has passed that the flames have gorged on the scraps of the wicks and snuffed themselves out. There’s only the silver sliver of moonlight, now, shining dimly through the silk screen, to light the way.

Sui Zhou has to rise up on his elbows to see past the furl of his parted curtains and confirm that Tang Fan is there, as something more real and solid than a spectre, than a whisper of a memory skirting a brink. The moonlight haloes the intruding protrusion of his slim frame in the doorway, casting the line of him into a shape as many parts edged as it is ethereal. Sui Zhou can see the claw of his long fingers raking down the spine of a book, clutched hard enough to crumple in his two-handed grip; the washed out pale of his skin and the sunk deep bruise of the sleepless hemming his wide-black eyes.

“Sui Zhou,” Tang Fan murmurs again. The even cadence that woke him is gone, now, superseded with something no louder but a world more impatient, prying and urgent. Sui Zhou hears the floorboards creak and sees the fan of motion in the corner of his eyes that follows it; the swerve of the skirt of Tang Fan’s robe as it drifts along with his half-step to lap at his ankle.

Sui Zhou finds his tongue, then his words not long after. “What is it?” The scrape of his voice stumbles around the pitch of a yawn, the sound leaden with languor. He swallows to clear his throat, shifts the pool of his weight from his forearms to his palms as he sits up, and tries again. “Are you hungry?”

It’s a sensible question. Even when it is not the case, it often serves, at least in part, as the solution. The last time Sui Zhou can confirm with any certainty that Tang Fan ate was two nights ago, when they were last able to share a meal together, briefly and in passing. The Tang Fan of then had been more concerned with talking at and to Sui Zhou, trying to loosen the gnarl of his thoughts while only picking perfunctorily at anything Sui Zhou put in the bowl in front of him. The Tang Fan of now can’t be faring much better, not in any respect, not if he’s here.

There’s soup that he’ll have to swill from the wok before he can cook anything else, and a struggle is likely to ensue if he tries to steer Tang Fan into sitting still with any modicum of force, but Sui Zhou is already thinking ahead and around it before the abortive sound Tang Fan makes in answer cuts his plan down at the neck. The nascent motion coiling up his thighs ebbs, and there’s a crackle of paper as Tang Fan’s hand flails, choppy and disjointed. The fan of his fingers clips through a shard of moonlight; the shadows they cast creep up to brush against the lip of the bed.

“I’m not. It’s not. I don’t.” Tang Fan stops and starts and stops again, tongue lashing against the backs of his teeth. He sucks in a breath and the whistle it makes is wet. The sway of his head as he jerks his face towards his shoulder starkens the light limning the jut of his jaw. It bares, to Sui Zhou’s purview, the gritted tension pulsing in his cheek; the thin pinch of his mouth.

“I don’t understand,” he finally forces out, frustrated and frantic, “Sui Zhou, I don’t, and I’m so close, but I don’t—”

He takes another step forward, and Sui Zhou sees his nostrils flare as he exhales sharply, the ink stroke swoop of his eyelashes fluttering. It’s rare to see Tang Fan so far gone past this point of spent, but they have been together for so long and been through so much that Sui Zhou has become inured to it, somewhere, between the cases and the years that bleed out and on to the next. This is Tang Fan at his ugliest: when his mind is too quick for his mouth, but too slow to yield him any answers. When his body won’t work for him the way he wants and do what he asks it to; when he is so overwrought and so overcome that all he can muster and manage is fury at each and all and every one of his circumstances.

Sui Zhou holds out his hand, past the curtain and out into the gloam, palm upturned. His voice resounds the offer inherent only in afterthought: "Come here."

Tang Fan does, shaky-footed but still yet lope-legged. Sui Zhou means to say something about the husked candles, but his intentions are flung free of his mouth when the touch that meets his hand is not the book but Tang Fan's fingers. His skin is whipped cold from the crisp night air; his callouses sand up the soft underbelly of Sui Zhou's wrist. The book is discarded just on the outskirts of them both, marked by the rustling of pages slapping back together, and then Tang Fan is clambering over his legs and into his bed. The last vestiges of Sui Zhou's drowsiness disperse all at once, robbed away by the brush of Tang Fan’s thighs over his and the way the dull thud of his body coming to sit too heavily at Sui Zhou’s side reverberates underneath his knees.

There’s a note to this that is new: not the having of Tang Fan in his bed but the how of it. The novelty is short-lived; it burns bright and fast and then it passes over and through, ushering out with it the stall in Sui Zhou’s breath and the apprehension pricking his nape. There are few spaces Tang Fan is yet to occupy in his life, and they grow less and lesser still with the change of every season. Whatever is left of Sui Zhou for him to see and to have is owed; whatever Tang Fan could want from him he need only ask to take.

He’s bright awake, now, and all too keenly aware, in the way the dark narrows all else down to the tip and to the marrow, of Tang Fan’s shins scuffing up his hip as he slumps over on his side. The upright prop of his slanting frame on his elbow is haphazard, trembling, and Sui Zhou can feel the spring of slighted motion knock against him when Tang Fan tries to tuck into himself more tightly.

Sui Zhou sinks down, slow; first to his elbows, and then lower, until his back is flat to his bed again. Tang Fan sighs, then seems to follow, shifting until his sloping side is flush with the brocade bedspread, his hand pinned between his face and the pillow, his elbow knifing into his ribs. When Sui Zhou turns his head, their eyes meet for only a moment before Tang Fan’s glassy gaze glances off past the curve of Sui Zhou’s cheek and into elsewhere.

“I’m missing something.” Tang Fan’s breath gusts against Sui Zhou’s nose in a rush, warm-damp and spit-stale. This close, even the night can’t hide the wreck of him from Sui Zhou: how the rampant worry of his fingers has pulled half his hair free of its ties to fall limp around his face, the fraying redness staining his eyes, the bitten-open skin of his bottom lip. “I have it. I have to have it. But I can’t make it make sense.”

His fingers flex down around phantoms, hard enough that Sui Zhou sees the skin of Tang Fan’s cheek dimple beneath his nails, hears them scratch down the uppermost blanket, catching on the threading.

“Talk me through it,” Sui Zhou says to him, soft.

Tang Fan has dissected this very case with Sui Zhou as both hostage and heeder innumerable times already, of course. Apprised him of every new possible lead and probable conjecture, then dragged him and his men off their own beats and in any which direction he’s needed to apply sudden pressure to. Sui Zhou’s abilities to assist are largely in action, presence and force, and Tang Fan has now long exhausted every avenue he can so point him towards. It’s left him little more to show for it than a newfound place for him and Sui Zhou both within the strained graces of three separate biaoshi across the outer city.

Tang Fan catches his breath; releases it. Then, his eyes flitting back to Sui Zhou’s, fixing them both in place, he starts to retread from the beginning. Tang Fan’s recount, for all he struggles to get his mouth to shape properly around it, is dry, detached. Sui Zhou listens. The details have not changed from the last time, nor the time before that, but it’s no matter. The spring of Sui Zhou’s patience flows eternal down every river and stream that pools into Tang Fan.

It’s not often, anymore, that either of them spends so long in such a stalemate. Practically half the fixtures of a dead nobleman’s second manor are strewn between the Northern Administrative Court and the Ministry of Punishments, collecting dust while Tang Fan sits helpless, pinned idle, with a suspicion he can’t corroborate. The wait is whiling away at time Tang Fan does not have to waste, rendering him sorely impatient and bitterly indignant.

It’s a matter of numbered days, now, before the suggestion that all of their departments collaborate becomes a direction. Sui Zhou has no doubt that the Eastern Depot is already hedging its bets, eager to recoup their losses and better restabilise their place with merits. Tang Fan must be feeling the weight of that, too, like a noose on the neck. Wang Zhi’s Western Depot, defunct on the back of his governorship of Hetao, is no longer an avenue of recourse available to them. In its absence, it can only be missed.

The heft of the hour drapes back over Sui Zhou’s body, heavy. The resile of Tang Fan’s voice between wax and wane ensnares only enough of his attention to keep him aloft, and sets adrift the rest. He watches Tang Fan’s steadily gentling face for what must be minutes, but might be hours, for how little he can tell of time, disoriented and disarmed by the abounding dark, before a sharp shiver splits him through. Tang Fan's expression shutters as he stumbles mid-sentence, jaw ajar, tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth. The track of what he’s been saying sieves through Sui Zhou’s head, slips free and spirits off into the onsetting silence.

Sui Zhou finds his own arm slack at his side and lifts it, taking hold of the blankets and sheets from underneath so he can drag them up, urging them out from underneath the curl of Tang Fan’s body. Wasn’t he awake only moments ago? He feels half-submerged back in his exhaustion, enfeebled and inept. Surmounted by the sum of all his days, now, instead of simply the one he is trying to leave. He wonders, for all the seconds it takes for Tang Fan to start to move, if he’s fallen asleep again. He’s not convinced it is at all possible for him to have a dream as odd as this, as ominous, as wonderful. The Tang Fan that is trying to kick his bare feet beneath the lifted linens while all the heat Sui Zhou’s body has pressed into them escapes is too wholly fleshed out to be one of Sui Zhou’s fantasies.

The dam of him where he’s shored up every shudder has sundered, and Sui Zhou can feel Tang Fan shaking apart. His feet are so icy that a sting lances down Sui Zhou’s shin when they graze him, the chill seeping through to his skin. Tang Fan slides in, and in, syrup-drip slow and timid as a newly told secret, until he’s filled the space Sui Zhou has made for him. The back of his hand brushes Sui Zhou’s chest as his cheek comes to rest on his bicep, and when his fingers flinch up into his armpit, Sui Zhou startles, the shock of it jostling the latch of his grip loose. Even Tang Fan’s breath feels cool when the sudden drop of the blankets from overhead coaxes something approaching a laugh out of him.

“You’re warm,” he mumbles, a shade more coherent. Sui Zhou can feel his mouth curl against his sleeve. In the seconds Sui Zhou takes to gather himself to speak, he watches red ripen the rise of Tang Fan’s cheek, the drift of his eyes beneath his lashes as they trace the dip of his chin. He’s no closer than he was before, but every burgeoning bare brush of skin to skin feels as if it has breached something irremediable, broached something impetuous.

“You’re cold,” Sui Zhou says back. His voice scrapes. The rest of what he wants to follow sticks to his teeth.

The heat that he’s leaching from Sui Zhou has unspooled in his gaze, ushering out the haze. Sui Zhou feels trapped beneath his stare in every way he doesn’t by the solid press of their bodies together. Something has changed. Something has been made clear. Now, Tang Fan is turning the full-brunt force of his perceptiveness on some disinterred vulnerability, a break. His hands clamour dully for a greater grip on Sui Zhou’s chest as he comes closer, closer, closer still. The tip of his nose is a brisk shock against Sui Zhou’s skin as he nuzzles in, parting the collar of his sleep shirt. His breath is clammy on Sui Zhou’s collarbone.

Then, he’s rearing up with a start, hand planting flat on the plane of Sui Zhou’s sternum for purchase, eyes flint-sharp, glinting down at him in the dark. Sui Zhou’s mind reels up after him; his body, held fast under Tang Fan, jerks instinctively to follow.

“Wait,” Tang Fan blurts out, “wait.” Sui Zhou is; has been; always will.

Still. He tries to fit himself to Tang Fan’s ask. He can feel the rapid kick of his own heart against his ribcage being fed back down into the soil of him by the cup of Tang Fan’s palm, a rattling ricochet. The clutch of his fingers and the wreathe of their legs is making Sui Zhou’s trepidation ramp into tension. He doesn’t know when he took a wrong turn tonight to get himself so far gone, lost in the wilderness. Perhaps it was when he beckoned Tang Fan into his bed. Perhaps it was when he brought Tang Fan into his house. Perhaps he was never found to begin with at all, not before Tang Fan, and this is the culmination and comeuppance of that cost, that cession of control.

“Do your dreams change?” Tang Fan asks suddenly.

Sui Zhou’s breath catches. He wants to hold onto— this, turn it over, reason with it, but it spins out of his fingers, shatters into pieces, splinters off into a thousand separate directions. He thinks of Tang Fan in a soldier’s armour with blood dripping from his mouth. He thinks of Tang Fan laid out amongst strewn steel scrap and fire, blue-robed and blue-faced. He thinks of him in countless ways, in worst outcomes and near misses, one after the other, a funeral procession that he remaps in traces while Tang Fan watches him intently.

His breath releases. “Sometimes,” Sui Zhou says eventually. “Yes.”

Tang Fan hums, then clears his throat. Sui Zhou is drawn in to watch the bob of it, then back out in a blink. Back to Tang Fan, who is watching him.

Is that what this is about? Has Tang Fan bolted into his room in a bout of mania within the dead of the night not because he’s been compelled by his case but because he’s been chased by what waits for him in the places he can’t escape? Sui Zhou is— he isn't sure as to the extent he can—

"Mine never used to," Tang Fan says, and Sui Zhou understands, with that, the crux he’s contemplating. Tang Fan possesses things and evokes the names of them. He speaks hauntings aloud to exorcise them. His nightmares might not be like Sui Zhou's, which reshape for retellings, but they needn’t be. This malleable element of them posits a problem, and Tang Fan is, by nature, someone who craves challenge half as much as he commands closure.

Sui Zhou wonders, unwelcomely, just who visits Tang Fan at his lowest. He thinks, too, of what he's been told of the dead who march back and the silent messages they carry. He doesn't believe he has the right to share it. He's not certain Tang Fan could understand it, anyway, if he did.

He can listen, at least. That seems to be what Tang Fan believes is helpful, in these things. That seems to be what Tang Fan wants from him. Tang Fan shifts against him, breath wrenching out of his mouth alongside some small animal sound and Sui Zhou feels mute warmth roil up his thighs. It bears down into the pit of his gut as Tang Fan settles again, rebalanced to rest over Sui Zhou more firmly, weight centred and steadied against Sui Zhou’s chest instead of his elbow, slotted in against Sui Zhou’s side.

It’s brought him closer again, somehow, up and into a space he’s carved out of Sui Zhou just for the sake of making it exist for his use. Sui Zhou brings his arm back close to his body; bends it. His hand finds the back of Tang Fan’s arm where he’s straining from holding the last scrap of himself up, and he grips him, tight, taking more of him into and onto himself.

Tang Fan can be a heavy burden to bear, but he’s not here, he’s not like this. He’s draped over Sui Zhou like a lover might be in one of his books, hand to his heart, bidden to unbury what Sui Zhou keeps hidden. Sui Zhou has never read them, but he’s heard Tang Fan when he writes them; the way he tips the tone of his voice between characters and how smugness colours his words when he thinks he’s being especially sly with his equivoques. He’s heard Tang Fan when he writes them when he thinks no-one is there to hear, when he’s quiet but the night is quieter and the hour so threadbare that it carries.

“Mine never,” Tang Fan repeats. He doesn’t get far; his voice cracks midway through it, and his brow crumples after in consternation. The fan of his fingers on Sui Zhou’s sternum sprawls out further, skating the swells of his pectorals, smoothing over the creases to flatten his sleep shirt back against his sweat-damp skin. The edge of his nail clips a knot of scar tissue, and Sui Zhou’s breath tears out between the both of them, telling.

Tang Fan’s brows raise, and something inscrutable flares across his expression before he douses it. His breath whistles in through his nose when he regathers, then he clicks his tongue to unseat what’s still unspoken. “I keep dreaming of the explosion,” he whispers. “Every time, it's different. Then I wake up, and—” he cuts himself off, his hand rapping down, once, against Sui Zhou’s chest, then, “Guangchuan, don’t you worry that your nightmares will change how you remember they really happened?”

Sui Zhou feels his shoulders twinge again as he breathes in. Deep, slow. He takes his time, because it is here of all places that he can afford it. “I worry I’ll forget they happened at all,” he admits.

The brunt of Tang Fan’s consideration is tangible; the quiet pause it brings terrible. All Sui Zhou can see is the dark narrow of his eyes, the pale swoop of his cheek, the frame-fall of his tangled hair. Sui Zhou thinks of lifting his idle hand to comb the strands with his fingers, and how it might feel to the touch as he tucked them all back into place behind Tang Fan’s ears. He is only a man, after all, in the end.

Tang Fan’s brows knit back together, pensive, as his mouth purses into a plush pout. Sui Zhou is used to seeing this expression, punctuating his puzzling out or poring over some problem or another. It's considerably more peaceful a state than the one Tang Fan first entered in.

It's clear, though, where little else is or dares hope to be, that Tang Fan doesn't understand his answer. So much of his intent is always naively naked on his face, in the open way he holds his frame. Sui Zhou can't explain it, either: how the nightmares of his years at the borders are no longer his perdition. That he can better grasp, now, more days than not, that they are not his punishment; that his survival doesn't demand penitence, but there is a price to pay for it, and his is that.

Maybe he should be able to, but words have never been for him.

“That’s not it. That’s not—” Tang Fan’s voice pinches, tightening up again with the scattered pique he first woke Sui Zhou with. His arm flexes beneath Sui Zhou’s hand, and when he flicks his hand against Sui Zhou’s breastbone, his fingers catch in the snare of his sleeve. Words are meant for Tang Fan, but they are failing him, here, too. “I keep seeing,” and he starts to choke around that, as he says it, eyes darting up towards the roof and sky and heaven overhead, wet-hemmed. Tang Fan takes a shuddering breath; another; grips down on Sui Zhou’s chest, and pushes through. “You. I keep seeing you there.”

His gaze wilts back down to Sui Zhou’s. Sui Zhou holds his stare, even through the recoil he feels judder through Tang Fan’s arms as he unfists Sui Zhou’s shirt only for his fingers to clip bare skin, cinched now between his own twined sleeves and Sui Zhou’s rumpled collar. Sui Zhou hews his focus, shying back from the staggered revelations that seem to be dawning on Tang Fan, fashionably gradual, as to how little is left of either of them that is not touched together.

“I was,” Sui Zhou reminds him. It is difficult for him to choose his words carefully when there are so few to choose from, but these two will do. For all of Tang Fan’s veritable trials of fire over the years they’ve been together, they’re true.

“No, no,” Tang Fan hastens to explain, “the first. The very first. In the thirteenth year of Chenghua.”

He squirms forward, his other hand clutching for Sui Zhou’s shoulder, and the slippery slink of his thigh between Sui Zhou’s brings crashing into the scrutinous light of the fore the reason why humid heat sticks to Sui Zhou’s skin; why the trepid beat of his heart won’t gentle even in the absence of danger. Tang Fan’s breath shudders out of him, reverberating like a plucked zither string in the thinning distance between their faces. The grind of contact in counterpoint to the all-but-caress of their lips, a wire snap away from becoming actuality, rips clear of Sui Zhou’s head the words that Tang Fan has even said.

There is no axis left for Sui Zhou to reorient to. There is nothing left at all, anymore, save for Tang Fan. The scrape of his hair against Sui Zhou’s throat where it has spilled over his shoulders; the play of the streaked shadows on his cheekbones from where the meagre moonlight catches on his eyelashes. The heady brace of heat and pressure where his thigh is nested between Sui Zhou’s legs. The brand of his hand, pressed like a flower between the pages of their chests. The skip-stride of his heartbeat, quickening to match pace with Sui Zhou’s.

“The first…” Tang Fan croaks out. He bites at the well-worried skin of his bottom lip, rolling it between his teeth. The dart of the tip of his tongue that follows makes the moue of it glisten a damp, sore pink. “You weren’t there. Were you?”

His eyelids hood as his chin tips forward, just a whisper of a fraction, enough to draw him closer, for all it feels further, schisming wide, not enough. His throat arches like a three stone bow drawn taut.

Sui Zhou knows it is futile to forestall the inevitable when it has already burned up to your doorstep, but what is his life if not an annal of hopeless endeavours?

“I was,” he replies.

It’s not what Tang Fan means, and it’s not what Tang Fan needs, but it’s true on the face and the heels of his question. That night-day-night again is a blur where most of all of Sui Zhou’s other terrors are clear. It had lit up the night like a flare; sounded through the city like a clap of thunder. It had thrown Sui Zhou and his men and every other body caught unawares in the epicentre asunder. When he’d first awoken in the wreckage, it had been so dark and smelled so suffocatingly of smoke and burning flesh and blood that he’d thought he was still at the borderlands. By the time he’d managed to get his feet rooted back to solid ground, he knew he’d brought the borderlands back home with him.

The ruins had stretched wide and the hours had spread thin. The weaker part of Sui Zhou thinks he would have recognised Tang Fan’s face later if he’d seen him then; the wiser knows there had been so many others to see, warped by gore and grime and grief. Too many to hope to remember.

“Oh.” Tang Fan’s brow creases. “Were you— did we— no, no.” He exhales, shaky, as his palm pivots, the pads of his fingers listing over the ridge of his collar to settle in against the hinge where his shoulder meets his neck. “Ah, Sui Zhou, you know that’s not what I’m trying to…”

His voice tapers off, faint. Then, his eyes flick off to the left, towards the wall, as if drawn to some divergent pathway in his thoughts. Sui Zhou feels like he’s choking; knows he’s not. The touch of Tang Fan’s fingers against his throat is little more than a caress, if that, for all it constricts like a clamp. If Tang Fan wanted to choke him, he’d have to put both his hands into it.

Sui Zhou gulps down a breath like it’s his last gasp despite it, instinct devouring sense, and Tang Fan cringes, clawing at his handholds on Sui Zhou. He’s bitten his nails so far down that they’re too blunt to dig in, but the scratch still makes a shiver swim up his spine, splashing his nape.

“Oh,” Tang Fan mouths. His eyes flick back to Sui Zhou’s, and the expression that blooms on his face whenever he’s put the pieces of something particularly precarious together fits itself into place. He swallows, scrounges up his voice, then, “Oh!” he exclaims.

When Sui Zhou opens his mouth, Tang Fan's tongue fills it, his whole body kicking up the last barrier of space left between them. His hands clutch for Sui Zhou's face, the heels of his palms scuffing against his beard. His tongue slicks against the roof of Sui Zhou's mouth, a jarring wet to the dry skin of his lips, the riptide of sensation dragging him down to drown. Tang Fan is dazzling, dizzying, and he’s dazed, severed and sent off in separate directions, head two thousand li south and shoulders three thousand li west. Sui Zhou’s slow with hesitation and slower with disbelief, and so he has to catch Tang Fan by the neck when he pulls back, fingers winding through his hair. The strands are as soft as he thought they would be, but tacky with oil. His grip is not harsh enough to keep Tang Fan where he doesn't want to be, but hard enough to convince him he's where Sui Zhou wants him to stay.

“Tang Fan,” he manages, raw. He dips his chin to his clavicle to see him better, as best he can, laid out as he is underneath. Tang Fan is wide-eyed, wary, assessing. There’s red blotting the swell of his bottom lip; Sui Zhou can taste the copper tang of it, he thinks, in his own mouth.

Sui Zhou softens his grip in Tang Fan’s hair and raises his other hand to cup his jaw in trade, thumb roughing across his cheek. He’s wanted to do that, too, for longer than he cares to remember, and longer still than he’s brave enough to admit. He hopes that it’s convincing. He hopes Tang Fan doesn’t regret the mistake he’s making.

“Oh, Guangchuan,” Tang Fan murmurs, all clotted and wet and resplendent with relief, “really?” Sui Zhou doesn’t know what he means, but he has his suspicions. When Tang Fan leans back in, Sui Zhou tips up to meet him, fingers pressing down to lead the angle, and he takes his confirmations.

It is as if Tang Fan has found some sacred reserve of energy slung deep, tapped into it just for this, for the fit of their mouths together. He’s clumsy with eagerness, and he still tries to take his fill too quickly, too much, all at once, as if he’s unconvinced it will last, that there will be enough to content him. Sui Zhou tries to keep his head above the water when all he wants to do is sink, pared down to nothing but these seconds, Tang Fan’s hands cradling his face, the hitching rut of his hips against Sui Zhou as he tries to crawl into him. Tang Fan’s whine arcs out, whipcrack sharp, when Sui Zhou guides him back to the shallows, softening the glide of their lips to something refrained, close-mouthed and sweet.

It’s tempting to take it all now, what he wants, what is being given. He'll take his time instead. Tang Fan is half unravelled at his seams as it stands; better to stitch him back together, first, before undoing him elsewhere. He'll do right by Tang Fan, take care of him properly. Be thorough. Make it worth the wait.

Tang Fan’s concession is accompanied by a sound of wordless complaint. When he tries to leverage himself higher, over, Sui Zhou feels his feet kick out against his ankles where they’ve become tangled in his robes. His hiss wisps against Sui Zhou’s chin. “Sui Zhou,” he whines in grievance, tinny.

Sui Zhou relents only the inch it takes to tilt Tang Fan’s head between his hands so he can kiss the corner of his mouth, then his chin. Apologetic. Promising. Whatever Tang Fan wishes to read into it.

Tang Fan pushes back against the cup of Sui Zhou’s palm to his cheek, turning the inch back on him to bring their lips back together. “How long have you, you really—” he babbles on, awe-giddied, between the little pecks he peppers to Sui Zhou’s lips, fingers petting his cheekbones, his temples, trailing back to trace behind his ears and underneath his jaw. Charting him, almost. “Why did you never, all this time, we could have been—”

Sui Zhou hushes him, once, twice, again, until it sets in and Tang Fan cuts himself off, huffing. “When did you last sleep?” he asks, already knowing what he will do with Tang Fan’s answer.

Tang Fan blinks for a beat before he catches on. The bridge of his nose scrunches up and his red mouth thins out as his affront colours over his features. “In my study earlier. I’m not tired,” he argues, boldfaced to the last. Even if his own second wind has him sold on the lie that comes sprinting through his teeth, Sui Zhou won’t be swayed by his insistence.

Sui Zhou brushes the hair framing Tang Fan’s face behind his ears, pats it down into place. Then, he sits up on his elbows, grunting at the twinge that thrums down his shoulders. Tang Fan has little choice in the matter but to sit up, but he still has his say, and he ensures his voice is well heard as he settles back in Sui Zhou’s lap.

“But I’m,” Tang Fan flaps a hand between them, the other fluttering restlessly along Sui Zhou’s waist, “but you’re—”

“Sleep first,” Sui Zhou interjects. Then, “It will keep,” he promises. If it can’t make it to daylight, it wasn’t meant to be.

The agitation hardening Tang Fan’s expression abates, though the sulk left behind beneath its wake indicates it is, at least somewhat, begrudgingly. He plants his hands on the bed, then, something tight and dangerous flashing in his eyes, he crawls out of Sui Zhou’s lap with one long dragging thrust along Sui Zhou’s cock that goes on and on and on. Need pools anew low in Sui Zhou’s belly, white-hot, like molten melted wax, calcifying into a burl that fills him up to the back of his throat. He pants out, ragged, and the pointedly petulant crimp of Tang Fan’s mouth smoothes out, mood mollified by his own achieved mischief.

Sui Zhou swallows, and the pressure evens out, fades back to a throb he can tolerate. He wrests his hand out from under the half-shucked blanket as he turns over, twisting just enough to watch Tang Fan as he draws his legs beneath him in a kneel. The exhaustion he’s stemming starting to creep into the narrow of his eyes and the crook of his smile as he looks down at Sui Zhou, fumbling for the ties of his outer robe.

“You are a terrible tease,” Tang Fan gripes, parting his robe at the waist and gathering his skirts out from his lap, wriggling around to free the parts tamped down by his knees. “Cruel! Ungenerous. I want Zhu Hongwu doufu for breakfast. It’s only fair. Oh, and...”

Sui Zhou doesn’t rise to his bait by objecting as to who better fits Tang Fan’s accusations, and which. Tang Fan fills the space with his chatter, his demands escalating from childish to outlandish as he goes on to strip his robe back and pull up his hair, bundling it all back into its ties in a sloppy ponytail. By the time he has to stop and stifle a yawn, shivering, the back of one hand daintily shielding his mouth while he tosses his robe over the foot of the bed with the other, his breakfast list has bloated. In its final state, it is something more akin to a lavish feast of curiosities for a particularly spoiled concubine with child. Sui Zhou is almost charmed by the thought of the exasperating compromises that will need to be bartered for in the morning if Tang Fan manages to remember even half of his requests. Only Tang Fan could evoke such a fondness through annoyance.

“Let me in,” Tang Fan complains, voice sleep-thick, and Sui Zhou turns back over, lies flat, and lifts the blankets for Tang Fan to bundle back in underneath. He’s frosted over again where he fits flush against Sui Zhou’s side, hand fitting around his hip, face nuzzling into his chest. His breath hitches around another shiver as he breathes out, and Sui Zhou, more tentative than Tang Fan is and has been, gingerly curls his arm around Tang Fan’s back, finding a place to set his hand down on the bony slope of his shoulder, fingers threading through the splay of his hair. For all his protest, it does not take Tang Fan long at all to drift off, the swell of his chest with every inhale levelling out, mouth parting slack against Sui Zhou’s shirt, breath slow and soft.

Sleep doesn’t loop back for Sui Zhou as easily as it comes to Tang Fan. It takes longer for the vice of his vigilance to release him enough that he can let go. In lieu and until then, though, the way the quiet shapes around their mingling breaths and the warm fold of Tang Fan’s body over his is peaceful enough. An agreeable compensation.