永远的鸣禽

[corvo]

永远的鸣禽 Rating: Teen Fandom: 成化十四年 | The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty Pairing: Sui Zhou/Tang Fan Tags: Post-Canon, Established Relationship, Slice of Life Length: 1900+ "I'd suffer you," says Tang Fan. "Man or woman. Someone does have to." Notes: For astrophyllite.

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When Sui Zhou comes to reflect on it, he must wonder how it did not happen sooner than this.

He is not, as a measure, mercurial with his things. That he has always lived with the means to be wasteful has been all its own reason to take care. But he does work what he owns to every extent that worths their while. And the robes had been no different; cladding his back to the furthest reaches, shielding his skin from blows and slashes. But it had not been journey or struggle that wore their latest wound into the weave. No: the honour of bending that break had alone been Tang Fan's, yield of his sweet need and his grappling hands.

Sui Zhou had not apprised a prior warning, given, as truth would so have it, he was better and otherwise preoccupied. But he had felt the moment the give had loosed in his sleeve, tension snapped to tear, and Tang Fan's gasp spilling ahead as musical accompaniment.

"Do I not know my own strength?" he had exclaimed, betwixt delighted and aghast.

"Perhaps not your own eagerness," Sui Zhou, merely a man, had thus responded. And Tang Fan had laughed, and laughed, and pulled at him some more, and soon the robe was deposed to the floor, a place that proved safest from all the proceedings to follow. When Sui Zhou had scrabbled it up in his hasted alight back to his own chambers, like a blooded fiance partaking the flesh of the peach before his marital day, he'd tossed it into his study and subsequently failed to pay it further heed.

Until tonight, at least. Pervading sleeplessness best ripens ponderous opportunities. Sui Zhou does not think much more on it, only that it is there, and he does not have to go a ways to fetch his kit. Better this business than to only sit here, stilled as if in receipt of some divined penance. So he rises from his bed, slow in the stretch, and he shuffles to open his study, fetching the robe; the needles; the threads. He is careful in his motion, mindful of how noise carries through the night, on the air.

It is all for naught to that end, anyway. Just as Sui Zhou is stooped to purpose, narrowed by labour, he hears the drag of his screen door in its housing slat, the creak of floorboards beneath approaching steps. Malaise is greater a being than any man, city, or heaven.

"This was so urgent?" comes Tang Fan's voice, still roughshod from sleep. Sui Zhou looks up at him, like one does the sky after captivity. His hair hangs low, framing his face and shoulders in crested spill, tresses waved from his unsnare of their braiding. He must have harboured intentions to wash it, before the light from Sui Zhou's room diverted him to a new course.

"I was idle," says Sui Zhou, finding his voice weathered by the hour, too. A lesser man might flinch for the edge; its jag. But cohabit and company builds him above that moment and this tension of tender flesh.

"You should have been rested," follows his chastisement. Though Tang Fan seems to hear his own irony, by the grimace that glances his face, for the argument is summarily abandoned. "Come, let me," he demands instead, extending a hand to flap between them.

Sui Zhou complies, of course. He sheathes the needle mid-stitch first, careful, then holds it out for Tang Fan's reaching grip. Obedience earns a smile, which, with this benefactor, is reward from the divine. Tang Fan gathers it close to his chest, as if it is shroud for some immodesty, then gently toes over the distance left between them to take his place at Sui Zhou's side.

"This is a wife's work," he says as he settles. Ginger, but unhesitant. So soft gone that there is barely a jostle as they brush together.

Sui Zhou peeks for his face, observing the momentary pride that lights it as he seems to recognise the tear as his historical work. "Is it?" he asks.

Tang Fan shoots him a look as he fiddles the needle back free, as though his is the cheek. "Isn't it?" he counters. Haught tempered by picayune petulance; opaque mischief. "But I will take the pity tonight."

Sui Zhou watches his hands— admires, rather. His long fingers, the precise pinch of their tips to levy pressure, direction. Tang Fan has always been more deft in frangible labour, even if it is a supremacy only by comparison. If he was to consider beyond, neither of them would approach a realm of contest. But needs always must.

"I've no need," murmurs Sui Zhou, on that, almost by compel. "Not for a wife."

Tang Fan yips his laugh, which bodes little more waver in the bow of his head than his instinctual perk at Sui Zhou's interposition. "What wife would take you?" he replies, just as quiet and called-upon.

Many, if you would hear Tang Fan himself tell it. Sui Zhou still remembers that year, now long past, where Tang Fan had met news of his betrothal to Yu Xiulian with a vehemence seceding his own apparent awareness, let alone articulation. There will be no wife. But he had been right, in the end, hadn't he, albeit imprecisely.

"Ah," sighs Tang Fan, pronounced. Misinterpreting Sui Zhou's silence to be laden with more meaning or utility than comfortableness. "In our next lives I should be a woman. You can make someone honest of me then. To repay me my kindness."

"Or I could be," leaves Sui Zhou's lips. He can barely hear himself, let alone taste it.

Tang Fan halts mid-stitch, his head swivelling to meet their gazes. Already, there is amusement plucking at the fringes of his expression, the crook of his mouth twinging. "You?" He does not sound aghast, even as a ploy, a try for taunt that won't leave scars. "Well," Tang Fan surmises, after a moment, "that wouldn't be too terrible."

With that, he returns to his task, possessed of a motivation Sui Zhou doubts is so commonly witnessed by his colleagues in the magistracy. His movements have all accorded to splay his hair about his face enough to mimic a bridal veil. There is a sloppiness to it, the unanimal unmade. A kin ferality cinders in Sui Zhou's fingers— the chasmous need to brush it back to order, lay him naked for consideration.

"Wouldn't it?" asks Sui Zhou, for sound more than answer. In the space where sleep has fled his voice now prowls a hunger, chafing.

"I'd suffer you," says Tang Fan. "Man or woman. Someone does have to." Airy, like it weighs the ease of a blessing. The rend in Sui Zhou's sleeve is a slim thing, a slit of a few fingers' breach in the pit at best generous, such as it is already practically mended. Yet Tang Fan fiddles with it some more, adamant, and Sui Zhou allows him that, as he does all else.

Would they know one another, then? Would they remember this life? These are the romanticisms Sui Zhou knows Tang Fan would turn over, appraisive. But a pragmatic man, his heart full, would only wonder after it too. And Sui Zhou thinks they will. He cannot imagine it otherwise. Something within him, unexplainable, would recognise in Tang Fan that very same. Just as he imagines it could have for them here, or did. What else would have drawn them to each other, when Sui Zhou has seen flimsier fates again and again cut down, ripped apart?

Tang Fan takes him by the wrist, sudden enough to knock the breath from his chest. But he endures Sui Zhou's flinch, steeled, and so there is nowhere else for that instant's wildness to go but a tamed relax. "So frightful," he teases, turning his hand over until the palm is naked, forthright. And there he sits the needle, as careful as he has been with it all along, and the robe, and Sui Zhou both.

"This bachelor is grateful," says Sui Zhou in turn, indulging his own playfulness.

Tang Fan snorts at him, mirthy, his nose crinkling. "Cad," he chides. It lands alike the crop on the back of a man who knows himself righteous; who loves its pain. Tang Fan must know it, too, as all punishers do, and so refine their whole bodies into the swing. He makes to stand, and Sui Zhou arcs his shoulder towards him, anticipating his hand, desirous of his weight.

"You know," he begins, glancing away. To nowhere, either certain or particular, Sui Zhou estimates. The past, maybe. "You've had this for years. At least as long as I've known you, no?" Tang Fan looks back, and realigns their sights to the here, now, considered. Absently, bordering idle, he begins to fold the robe in his arms to something more parcelled, manageable. "All these mends, and the colour is fading. Why not replace it?"

"It would be a waste," Sui Zhou explains. The expected reply of him, surely, given how Tang Fan's eyes are already hooded, his lips curving, as though he's heard it given.

"I suppose it would," he agrees. "It is a handsome make."

"A handsome make," Sui Zhou repeats innocently. Only it?

Tang Fan cocks a brow, shrewd. "No use for a wife, have you?" musters his tutting.

"None," says Sui Zhou.

Tang Fan rolls his eyes. Pui, Sui Zhou all but hears, mimed. "Then I will leave you to your bachelorhood, Suitor Sui." When he turns away, his hair flutters his back, strands spidering a makeshifting breeze. "Put the needle and thread away. I will launder this old thing."

Sui Zhou folds his fingers over the needle, mindful of its prick. "I will warm some water for the basin," he says into the gap, before Tang Fan's steps can truly allow it to encroach, and watches as it gives the predicted pause. "Your hair," he elaborates. "To wash it."

Tang Fan's head tips back, for a beat, greeting the laugh that does not eventuate. But its joy remains in the very place made for it. "Repaying me already? Fine. A start, then, it will do."

There can be no debt between them, not truly. To put a price on what Tang Fan means to him, that he does and he gives, is to find only the excesses of limit in what Sui Zhou can afford to pay. He stands to that occasion for Tang Fan, as well, he's been lessoned and learned certain. A judgement found unwanting.

Tang Fan waits for him to take to his own feet, and lingers the time it vacates for their paths to cross; for Sui Zhou's spare hand to reach up between them and prune a branching of his hair back behind his ear. His shiver is more precious than metal, the whip of his exhale land and station.

"No hurry, have you? Hm?" Tang Fan whispers. Proud as he is, he does not try to hide his pleasure from it. "Go, the water. I want to see a bed again before morning." His, another's; a distinction rendered irrelevant.

"All right," Sui Zhou abides.

Sui Zhou knew life could be like this, shared and simple, old and plain. In his younger years, and even his later, he hadn't the daring to picture it for himself. But he sees it every day, now, in the future he is permitted to have. Days to look forward to; familiarities to be felt anew.

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