They end up keeping the dress.

That is not the long of it, but it is certainly the short of it. Cui-mama takes one dagger-keen look at the arrowhead-wide slit in the fabric of the breast, with the faded flecks of blood staining the white a stale red, crimps her mouth, and leans too hard on her faux-disappointment as she sighs about how it’s such a shame that such a lovely piece — one of her favourites — will have to be discarded.

So, they end up keeping the dress. Rather, Sui Zhou ends up keeping the dress, because Tang Fan unceremoniously shoves the wad of it into his hands and provides no elaboration on what should be done with it before he heel-turns to descend the stairs two at a time.

If the Heavens have any mercy left in them to spare for him, no-one will ever ask Sui Zhou why he keeps it. He’s not holding his breath in hope for that, though, so he’s prepared some excuses for the eventuality. Such as: they might have need of it again for a case in the future. Dong’er might like it, when she’s grown. One can never have too much scrap fabric around the house. All short and simple explanations that Sui Zhou absolutely won’t snare himself in and stumble over if and when pressed.

A delicate but determined touch gets the last of the blood out. The tear is so small it takes next to nothing to patch. Sui Zhou puts it away, after, and, in all honesty, does not think of it again any longer than briefly and distantly until much, much later. There are other concerns, up until then, to occupy him, that are greater and more pressing than lace and heady thoughts prone to taking heated turns when left unchecked.

Sui Zhou thinks of the dress, again, one morning, when Tang Fan pulls a face. It’s an innocuous expression, really, a slight crease in his brow and a purse of his mouth, but his hair is loose around his face because he has ambled into Sui Zhou’s room before he’s brushed and braided it, and his lips are red from the cold. It’s familiar like an ache, bone-deep and long-set, and it makes longing well up the back of Sui Zhou's throat to start knotting in on itself, close to the cusp of his tongue, suffocating.

By then, it is no longer just a dress. It’s a dress, and a comb he’s been given for his wife that he could not return, and a small half-empty case of lip paper he confiscated from Cheng’er and Dong’er when he found them playing with it one day, and powders from Tang Yu meant to cover bruises, and—

It is no longer just a dress, sitting at the bottom and back of one of the chests shoved far beneath his bed. But no-one has asked him, yet, why it is there, why any of it is there, why it has all been kept, so— so. It is not that Sui Zhou thinks it is a secret kept safe, but he does think that he has some time with it to himself still left.

In his defence, even in retrospect, nothing unravels in any sequence of events that is obvious and out of place. When Tang Fan comes to him one night in the kitchen and asks to see him, later, to discuss something, amongst several other subjects he rattles through rapidly as if reciting from a list, Sui Zhou attentively hums his acknowledgement and leaves it be at that. When he can’t find Tang Fan at first, later, after they’ve eaten dinner and Sui Zhou has taken a moment of leave from his company to bathe, he thinks nothing of that, either. There are only so many places in their home that Tang Fan can be. When he’s not in his room, Sui Zhou checks his own, and it is less strange that Tang Fan is in there at all than it is that he is on Sui Zhou’s bed with the curtains drawn, the low lamplight casting him in stark shadow through the gauze.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Tang Fan calls out hurriedly when Sui Zhou reaches for the curtain. Sui Zhou watches as the vague shape of his hands rises from his lap and comes into sharper relief as he flails to cinch the curtains shut between his fingers. “Guangchuan, you must promise not to get mad at me, first!”

Hardly a promising portent for the remainder of the night ahead. Sui Zhou nods once, stiffly, with no small amount of reluctance, unease cloying low in his belly.

“You must also promise not to run away,” Tang Fan adds, after a beat.

Sui Zhou sighs through his nose. “I won’t,” he promises.

“Just remember that you promised,” Tang Fan replies, before he parts the curtains.

Sui Zhou sucks in a startled breath. Tang Fan— Tang Fan, presumptuous and pretty and too smart and sly for his own good, sometimes, Tang Fan, blinks up at him. With his eyebrows filled in, his mouth rouged red, and his cheeks powdered pale, he makes an unconvincing picture of innocence. He’s wearing the damnable dress and his thin sleeping pants and nothing else, the fabric swimming loose at his chest. The forward hunch of his spine makes it all it gape in such a way that Sui Zhou is powerless to do anything but trace the downward trail it tempts him onto, to see the soft swells of Tang Fan's pectorals and how his dark nipples are already peaked from the chill that’s prickled its way across the rest of his bare skin.

“Yes, I found it,” Tang Fan explains, as if to answer the thoughts that would be racing through Sui Zhou’s head if he could even gather himself together enough to think them in the first place. “I didn’t mean to, of course, because I respect your privacy, and I don’t make it a habit to just go through your things, but it was important at the time, you see. The circumstances. An exceptional case.”

“Right,” Sui Zhou manages, hoarse. He’s not particularly in a position to argue contraries, at any rate. It takes him a moment to circle back, then another to catch himself up on the rest. At the time? That means—

Tang Fan curls a finger through a clumped lock of his hair in a play for idle indifference that comes undone with how harshly his throat works around his swallow. “I will spare you the long retelling," he declares, "as a kindness, afforded for our long acquaintanceship, of how I was so very cross with you, thinking you were hiding a relationship from me, of all people, your closest of friends, and how I was eventually convinced that I may have been… misguided. In my assumptions.”

Tang Fan licks his bottom lip, and Sui Zhou tracks the nervous lave of it, stare snagging on the way the skin is left spit-wet in the wake of his tongue. “Ah,” Tang Fan murmurs, breathy, when their eyes meet. Then, “Sui Guangchuan, you’re really going to kill me if you don’t do something more than stand there and stare at me. After all, and I’ve— if I’ve misunderstood—"

The powder is slathered too thickly on his face for Sui Zhou to see the bright blare of his blush as it burns across the surface of his skin, but he can see it collaring his throat and sprawling down his sternum, lower and lower and lower still. “You haven’t,” he chokes out, rough. He barely feels his own mouth work around it, and almost doesn’t hear himself say it. “You haven’t,” he repeats after a beat, a little less rushed for the breath, but a lot more raw for the pause.

“Oh,” says Tang Fan, rather stupidly. His mouth stretches wide around a smile that is so pleased and so honest that it branches out, bold and brilliant, into seductive. Enrapturing, and ensnaring, and— Sui Zhou takes a half-step forward before Tang Fan even holds out his hand for him to take in a lofty, languid beckon. “Well, good, good. Of course I didn’t. I knew that. Now come here,” he adds, unnecessarily, as Sui Zhou threads their fingers together, already here enough that Tang Fan has to straighten and then spill back, half reclined against the sheets, slim thighs bracketed by Sui Zhou’s knees. “Make up for what you’ve put me through.”

Sui Zhou, ever the responsible man, leans in, and in, and in, until Tang Fan is laid out flat on his back on the bed, and does.