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There was only one bed in the room that the village head had brought them to, and the misery of that knowledge was stamped across her features as clearly as if Shen Qingqiu had taken up his best brush and composed a poem on them. "Honored immortals," she began, then froze, looking between them in mute panic before apparently settling on Mu Qingfang as less terrifying. "...honored cultivators? Please accept the unworthy hospitality of--"
"It's fine," Liu Qingge said, having spent those few seconds blatantly examining the tiny space for possible vectors of attack before dismissing the possibility, along with the rest of the speech, which faded into stumbling nothingness at the interruption.
"Thank you," Mu Qingfang added, more gently, and slid the door shut behind her. It really was a very small room, especially compared to the head disciple's house on Qian Cao, which he had finally begun to feel at home in. But then, it was a very small village, notable only for its proximity to a border with the demon realm, beyond which grew the twelve-petaled azure heartsong flowers which Mu Qingfang's shizun had expressed interest in adding to a footnote of his herbarium, and its astonishing distance from every other location of interest in either human or demon civilization.
To put it simply: they were in the middle of nowhere, and were probably the only cultivators to have passed through in years. Decades, perhaps; his shizun might well have been the last, in the days when he had been still a disciple himself. As such, the reception was not particularly surprising. Nor was Liu Qingge's reaction; however different his life had been before Cang Qiong, a narrow bed in a small room was far from the direst hardship he had endured since, whether he had to share it with someone else or not. Qian Cao's records could attest to that.
Mu Qingfang had also passed the night in more uncomfortable places-- though, he thought, eyeing the bed once more, perhaps not recently. "We should rest," he said nevertheless; it had been a long day's flight, and the days before it as well. "It will be easiest to locate the heartsong flowers just after dawn, especially if the bee demon colony is still active."
"En." Liu Qingge took a final sweep of the room before taking off his sword and propping it by the side of the bed.
Mu Qingfang followed suit, then folded his outer robes neatly and stowed them in his qiankun bag, as if they were still sleeping rough. By the time he had prepared for bed as much as he could under the circumstances, Liu Qingge had long finished and stretched himself out on the bed, scrupulously keeping to one half, eyes already closed.
"Good night, shixiong," Mu Qingfang said, somewhat amused despite himself, and extinguished the small, smoky lantern their hosts had provided. Enough light came in through the tiny slatted window for him to cross back to the bed without trouble, though he had to settle on his side to keep their shoulders from brushing at the midpoint of the bed.
Liu Qingge hmmed in acknowledgement; within minutes his breath had evened and slowed into the rhythm of a light sleep, calm and familiar.
Between the quiet pattern of breath, the close warmth of Liu Qingge's body beside him and the small bars of faint moonlight that striped the room, it was not entirely unlike the disciple dormitories-- no, what it reminded him of was earlier than that: when he'd been only a child in his parents' small house and his little siblings had climbed into bed with him. This was not a comparison he would repeat aloud in Liu Qingge's hearing, of course, but Mu Qingfang let himself smile silently at the thought in the privacy of the dark room.
Some hours later, Mu Qingfang woke from hazy dreams to the startling sensation of arms wrapped around him and a thigh cast over his hips, pinning him down into coarse sheets. His first thought was lost in the memory he'd revisited--but Suyin had been only a little thing, and Duyi had never been so heavy; it couldn't be right. He blinked away the shades of the past, re-centering himself in his body, in the present, remembering, and then blinking with new surprise.
It was Liu Qingge, of course; now that his thoughts were clear, he recognized the particular form of the arm draped across his shoulders easily enough, though he was squashed into the bed too awkwardly to turn his head to look back. And the feel of Liu Qingge's qi was familiar, too, as the inside of his wrist brushed over Mu Qingfang's forearm. Their inner robes had gotten as tangled as their bodies, somehow, their sleeves rucked up enough that Liu Qingge's sleep-warm skin laid bare across his.
Mu Qingfang found himself diagnosing, by instinct or by long-learned habit: following the even flow of Liu Qingge's qi through his meridians, measuring the space between inhale and exhale. It was odd to feel Liu Qingge's strength around him, to count each breath through the stir of air against the nape of his neck--but it wasn't unheard of. There were treatments that began in this way, though Liu Qingge had never availed himself of them to Mu Qingfang's knowledge, preferring to bull through by sheer force of exertion and denial rather than seeking out or accepting assistance whenever he had been afflicted by the various pollens and poisons that called for them.
There had been no sniff of a succubus over their entire journey, so there was no need to think of them in any case. Mu Qingfang did his best to suppress his body's growing interest, to concentrate only on assessing--
There was an irregularity in Liu Qingge's qi, so tiny it could have been easily missed; so tiny that Mu Qingfang had probably missed it himself, the last time he had taken Liu Qingge's wrist in the main hall at Qian Cao. It was fascinatingly placed, close to his core: the smallest twist in a meridian-- a misalignment, merely, not yet a blockage that might present danger of deviation, and of the sort that might simply work itself out in time, if the cultivator practiced judicious care and caution and did not work himself to excess.
...It was Liu Qingge. Mu Qingfang shifted slightly, to lay the length of his fingers against Liu Qingge's arm for a better sense, and felt sudden stiff tension from behind him as the slight motion brought Liu Qingge immediately awake.
The breath against the back of his neck stopped as well, and Mu Qingfang, having been thoroughly distracted by his discovery, immediately recalled the compromising position they were in and began inadvertently to wonder whether Liu Qingge also found it compromising, or-- Never mind. "Shixiong," he said, keeping his voice calm, steady, familiar, "Have you noticed any new difficulty or obstruction when you circulate your qi?"
"Ha?" Liu Qingge said, immediately distracted, as Mu Qingfang had intended. "...No."
Mu Qingfang pressed his own qi gently back through the area, noting Liu Qingge's slight twitch as he did. There was a slight turbulence, but if they hadn't been pressed so closely together, even suspecting it was there, he might still have passed over it. "Here?"
"...Mm. No. The same as always."
"You're certain?"
"Yes."
An old issue, then, whether injury or flaw, which--unsurprisingly--hadn't healed as it might have. It was good that he'd caught it, then, no matter how it had come about. "It's only minor," he said first, because that was usually Liu Qingge's first question when things did bring him into Qian Cao hands. "But a deeper flaw could develop if it's left like this. It should be smoothed out like this weekly until it resolves."
"Again," Liu Qingge said, then made a quiet, dissatisfied noise when Mu Qingfang repeated it. "I can't tell what you mean."
Discarding dignity in favor of duty, Mu Qingfang twisted around within the circle of Liu Qingge's arms to face him, meeting a startled, wide-eyed glance, the hint of an uncertain blush dusting the fine high cheekbones. "Here," he said, touching his fingers lightly to the spot, a scant hand's breadth above his lower dantian, slightly to the side.
Liu Qingge's eyes flickered downwards, though they were lying so close together that it was inevitably fruitless; he looked back up at Mu Qingfang almost helplessly, then blinked, licked his lips. "Again."
"One more time only," Mu Qingfang said. "It was long in the making; it could cause more damage still to try to repair it too quickly." He took it more slowly this time, an easy, steady flow, watching Liu Qingge's eyes narrow in concentration as he followed the path.
"I think..." Liu Qingge said, then furrowed his brow, shook his head slightly. "Maybe I feel it. When can you treat it again?"
"When we return."
Over Liu Qingge's shoulder, the moonlight creeping through the window was beginning to slowly warm, the night creeping towards dawn. Liu Qingge disentangled his legs from Mu Qingfang's, shifting back on the bed, and only then seemed to remember that his arms were still clasped about him. He drew them back, blush deepening, and abruptly reached out to straighten a lock of Mu Qingfang's hair which had slipped astray in the night. "Good," he said, and sat up.
Mu Qingfang straightened his robes, then sat as well. When he looked over to Liu Qingge, there was an unfamiliar tension in the line of his back. He reached out and set his hand gently on Liu Qingge's shoulder-- not to diagnose or to treat, but simply to touch, to reassure.
Liu Qingge took a deep breath, let it out again, and straightened under his hand. "Good," he said again.