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His nostrils are thick with the stench of horse: damp, sweaty fur; foaming saliva; saddle-leather and fur-coated blanket. Up ahead, smoke is rising in the night sky.
He rides almost standing in his stirrups, leant forward over his mare’s neck and whipping her; she is already galloping, making that low hollow noise that suggests she doesn’t have much more in her.
Her hooves slice up the road’s dusty surface like a cleaver, stones flying beneath her shod feet, spraying off into the dark night. Up ahead all is silent. But as he approaches the clearing, a new scent fills the air. The smell of a battlefield: fire, burnt wood, burnt flesh.
Sui Zhou stumbles off his horse, leaving her to her own devices as he scrambles forward over the gravel and dirt ground. He feels drunk. Drunk, or maybe dreaming. He’s seen this nightmare before, the bodies on the ground, half-buried, faces scorched. Fire flickering on wooden spars, sparking greedily. Cold night air rippling half-burned fabric, eerily quiet.
The bodies on the ground are still. They’re shrouded in dust and ash, blanketed in it as though they had lied down and pulled it atop them before falling asleep. But they’re not sleeping. These men – Western Depot soldiers – are not asleep.
Sui Zhou scrambles through the smoking wreckage and the sea of corpses, both desperate and terrified. Searching for a familiar face, praying he doesn’t find it.
Until.
Among the fawn-brown uniforms he sees a swatch of blue, like fresh crisp lake water. Soft, cool silk. A magistrate’s emblem. His knees twinge, almost give out under him; his ankles scream as he tips forward dizzily, his whole body seizing, muscles spasming and forcing hot blood up under his skin until he feels like he’s being cooked on a griddle.
“Tang Fan?”
The firelight is orange, the colour of a fall moon, the colour of a qixi lantern. A time for harvest, for reaping, for leaves to wither and die. Tang Fan’s smooth face is painted a soft osmanthus tone, his not-quite boyish cheeks warm with it. His eyes are closed, lashes dark, still. He looks peaceful; looks like he too is sleeping.
“Runqing! Tang Fan, Tang Fan!” Sui Zhou drops at his side, gravel pieces digging sharply into his knees, his shins. He reaches out and grabs the man, feels the firmness of his shoulders, his arms. There’s no resistance. Tang Fan, who is all independence and contradiction, who makes a game out of objecting to everything Sui Zhou says or does, doesn’t fight him now. His body is limp, and Sui Zhou’s shaking hands can’t feel his chest moving, can’t feel the draw of his breath. He can’t be dead. He can’t be.
He can’t be.
“Tang Fan!” Sui Zhou howls the name, feels it ripped from his throat like a dog’s cry, feels the paper-thin guise of his humanity rustling. All the constraints of society – etiquette, laws, habits – feel like nothing but so much gossamer against the inferno of his need, his grief. Without Tang Fan, without this one last comrade to protect, Sui Zhou is nothing. Is merely an animal made to snap and bite and kill. He draws his fingers down the fine silk of Tang Fan’s robes, blind, desperate, seeking for a reassurance that can’t be given. He paws at the body, hands dull, insensitive. A low, hollow whine slips free between his teeth, the sound of it raw as bare bone.
He starts to pull back, hurt and wild with the pain, looking for something he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything at all, his mind a mad swirl of colours and sounds – screams, the wet catch of a stab, the suck of an arrow passing through flesh. The taste of blood. His leg skids out from under him, body tumbling –
And on the ground in front of him, Tang Fan coughs.
It’s a small sound, just the gritty pull of sandpaper over wood, but it freezes his world solid. Sui Zhou stares, held motionless by a sudden white flame of hope, and Tang Fan coughs again. He’s weak, barely clearing his chest. But he’s alive.
Dark eyes slant open, unfocused, glassy. “Mince noodles,” he whispers, his lips wet with spit.
Sui Zhou acts without thought. He scoops him up, heedless of his weight, not even feeling it. He carries him in his arms to his horse, shifting fearfully in the stench of smoke and burnt flesh, and carefully lifts him into the saddle. Tang Fan moans and starts to list to the side; he leaps up after him and holds him there, steady, both arms around him. He’s hardly awake, leaning back with almost his full weight onto Sui Zhou. That’s alright. Sui Zhou can handle it.
Without knowing what’s wrong with him, he doesn’t dare gallop back to the city. They go slow, Tang Fan passing in and out of wakefulness. Sometimes he slumps back, his head resting against Sui Zhou’s shoulder, the form of his magistrate’s hat itchy and uncomfortable. Sometimes he jerks upright and asks a question, “What’s happening?” “Where’s this?” “Wang Xian?” His voice when he speaks is quiet, murmured, like a man waking from a dream. Once he leans over the side of the horse to retch, Sui Zhou’s heart rabbiting in his chest as he holds him to keep him from tumbling off.
As they cut through the quiet midnight streets Sui Zhou is calculating the shortest route, the flattest route, wondering if Tang Fan would be better in a carriage, if he could steal one.
Once, Tang Fan starts to sniffle, to cry for Duo’erla. Once, he pats the back of Sui Zhou’s hand where it rests around his waist, tells him he’s a good friend.
The moon is high overhead by the time they reach Pei Huai’s home. Sui Zhou slips off the mare’s back and reaches up to tug Tang Fan down, into his arms. He tumbles down in a press of soft silk, moaning as Sui Zhou catches him. He carries him to the door and pounds it with his foot. “Pei Huai! Pei Huai!”
The door is opened by Pei Huai carrying a lantern and a wooden club. He takes one look at the two of them and drops the club. He guides Sui Zhou over to his medical study, running beside him in a swish of sleeping robes. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Don’t know. There was an explosion. He keeps waking up and passing out. He was sick, before.”
At Pei Huai’s order he sets Tang Fan down on the white-sheeted bed. “Take off his hat and let his hair down,” orders Pei Huai, already unbuttoning the blue magistrate’s robe at the shoulder.
Sui Zhou does as he’s told, loosening the ties of the black mesh hat and slipping it off, then reaching back to find the pins holding Tang Fan’s hair up in a neat bun. His fingers come away slippery, wet. “Blood,” he says, without stopping. The thick silken locks fall over his fingers, loose and light, so long he could wrap his hand in them. He wonders at that, an instinct close to violence but not, adjacent somehow, a desire to hold down, keep Tang Fan beneath his palms.
Pei Huai strips Tang Fan down to his inner shirt and trousers, the white linen without any sign of bloodstain. He takes his pulse, his temperature, listens to his breathing. “Light more candles,” he says.
Sui Zhou’s hand is red with blood. He swallows, then wipes it off on the sheet and hurries to bring candles closer, lighting them one by one so that the room is filled with flickering yellow light. Firelight again; he shudders and bites his tongue.
In just his inner layers and with his long hair pulled loose Tang Fan looks young, vulnerable. His well-fed cheeks appear round in the soft light with a child’s chubbiness, his lips plump. Sui Zhou watches like a hawk as Pei Huai turns Tang Fan’s head to the side to examine the wound at the back, first with his eyes, then his fingers.
“Laceration, and significant bruising,” he diagnosis. “He has a concussion of moderate severity. He needs rest, and quiet. Careful hydration – he may struggle to keep food and liquids down.” He picks up a roll of thin linen and begins wrapping Tang Fan’s head, padding the back over the cut to absorb the still-flowing blood. “He may be dizzy, or confused. You should wake him every sichen, to ensure there’s no deeper damage beneath the surface.” He finishes, tying the bandage off neatly just behind Tang Fan’s left ear. “Hm?”
“Understood,” says Sui Zhou.
“If you need help,” begins Pei Huai. Sui Zhou shakes his head.
“No need. It’s fine.”
The doctor looks thoughtful at his statement, but doesn’t argue. “I’ll be by to see him first thing tomorrow.”
Sui Zhou merely nods, and lifts Tang Fan off the bed. He seems even lighter in just his white inner clothes, seems like something held in a stage of waiting, like a chrysalis. Waiting for life to be breathed back into him, for the brightness of his mind to spark again.
He carries him out, into the street, and home.
***
Back in his house he brings Tang Fan to the room he claimed so adamantly when he first came to Sui Zhou’s home. He lays him down in his bed, tugs the boots from his feet, and lights the candles. The ones around the bed, first, then the indoor lanterns, then the outdoor lanterns. The press of darkness feels physical, threatening; he wants none of it here to twine itself around Tang Fan’s throat, to crush in atop his chest.
When he returns inside, shutting the lattice doors behind him, the room is soft and painted in hues of orange, like the inside of a New Year’s lantern. Tang Fan’s usually rice-flour pale skin is the colour of satsuma flesh, his lips the tone of ripe persimmons. The highlights of his hair are red as pomegranate seeds, and just as shiny.
It’s been days since Tang Fan left. When he moved into quarters at the Ministry of Punishments he went without saying a word, abandoning his writings and his books like they were nothing to him. Like Sui Zhou, his home and his hospitality and his shelter were nothing to him. Now, with him back here in his bed again, the room feels full once more. His ink well in the shape of a mountain, his brass turtle incense burner and his celadon bowl topped with a lotus flower no longer seem like lonely memories.
Tang Fan turns his head on his pillow – the pillow he had once offered as an aid against nightmares, its embroidery of chrysanthemums and phoenixes, grandiose and auspicious in a way Tang Fan himself never is. He is perhaps the least auspicious of all the emperor’s magistrates, and it still bemuses Sui Zhou that more officials don’t panic when he turns up on their doorstep with questions. Still, for every man Tang Fan has ruined, he has himself been harmed almost equally – either by his dedication to justice, or his kind heart. His continued perseverance is a mystery. Tang Fan isn’t like Sui Zhou. He has more than one talent, he could find another career. But he doesn’t. He carries on through demotions and promotions, through danger and hardship, and while he may whine the whole time, he also never falters.
“Runqing?” Sui Zhou’s voice is low, the candle on the brass stand beside him dipping shyly in the path of his breath. He turns Tang Fan’s head gently, so that there’s no pressure against the wound. His dark hair slips free, pools like ink in the shadow of his shoulder.
Tang Fan’s lashes flicker; his lips press together, an expression of distaste. His eyes open and he looks up without moving.
“Where are we?” asks Sui Zhou.
Tang Fan’s gaze slips around the room, moving slow. “Home,” he says, his voice gritty. The word curls soft as a kitten inside Sui Zhou, pleasing.
“Who am I?”
Tang Fan looks up, staring at him with a strange, blank expression. “Guangchuan,” he says, though. He’s so biddable now, as he never is usually.
“Good. Go back to sleep.”
“Mmn what?” Tang Fan starts to stretch and flinches inwards as soon as his head shifts on the pillow. “Oww, ow ow ow.” He closes his eyes and curls up, sheets whispering beneath his body. His hands clench against his chest, long thin fingers used to a brush, not a sword.
“Don’t move,” says Sui Zhou. Tang Fan makes to turn towards him, and whimpers. Sui Zhou reaches out and grabs his arm, holds him still. “Don’t move. Just rest. All you have to do is rest.”
Now, shadowed by the soft curve of his shoulder, Tang Fan’s cheeks are deep tanghulu red, his mouth shining as if glazed. “Don’t – gotta – it’s so… important…” he shivers; Sui Zhou pulls the quilted comforter up over him.
“Everything is fine. There’s nothing for you to do. Just sleep. Runqing. Sleep.”
“Don’t – it’s not – I –” Tang Fan’s lids droop. He sleeps.
***
The next time he wakes, Sui Zhou is sitting at his side peeling the skins from garlic cloves with a small knife. Mince noodles, Tang Fan had said. He always wants it with too much garlic, the broth tangy with the intense flavour so that it almost – but not quite – overpowers the taste of the pork.
Tang Fan’s brows furrow and his nose twitches like a rabbit’s. His eyes, when they open, are dark as pooled ink. “Guangchuan?”
Sui Zhou makes a low sound of affirmation.
“Mm hungry.”
“Too early to eat. Go back to sleep.”
“Mince noodles.”
“I remember. Go back to sleep.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Tang Fan goes back to sleep.
***
“Duo’erla…”
Outside the barest hint of dawn is coming, night’s tapestry beginning to brighten just at the edges. Tang Fan is lying still, steady, his breathing slow. He’s dreaming, Sui Zhou thinks, or maybe is drifting in that misty space between sleep and wakefulness.
He reaches out hesitantly, pausing, then puts his hand on Tang Fan’s shoulder. His touch is light as snow falling on cedar, but Tang Fan sighs, his lashes lifting. He looks up at Sui Zhou for a long moment, neither of them moving or speaking.
“She’s gone,” he says.
Sui Zhou nods.
“You came back.”
He nods again.
“That’s your job,” Tang Fan tells him. He sounds straightforward, factual, like a child reciting idioms. “You always come back. You have to. Have to. Guangchuan is Guangchuan, and he always comes back.”
“That’s not,” begins Sui Zhou.
Tang Fan reaches out and catches his sleeve, the dark fabric of it pinched beneath his pale fingertips. “I’m here, there, everywhere. Guangchuan is home,” he says.
“This is my home,” says Sui Zhou, uncertain. Tang Fan tugs at his sleeve, insistent.
“No. Guangchuan is home.” He looks so serious, the way he does when he closes a case. Not when he solves it – that’s all brightness and joy and enthusiasm – but when the wrong-doers are caught and charged with their crimes, pitiful and hopeless in the face of his stern certainty. When Sui Zhou tries to tug away he pulls him back, starting to sit up before curling back in pain.
“Alright,” says Sui Zhou quietly, letting Tang Fan hold his sleeve. “Alright. You’re right.”
Tang Fan blinks, then smiles up at him. That smile is unaccountable, something Sui Zhou still doesn’t understand. Tang Fan knows so much, sees so much, and is still impossibly innocent. It makes Sui Zhou ache inside, the only good ache he knows these days. Better than a bellyful of food – it’s watching the warmth of his meals, the warmth of his home, the warmth of his touch fill another. For now, just in this moment, that’s all he needs.
“I know I’m right,” says Tang Fan, closing his eyes. “I’m always right.”
Sui Zhou sits back down beside the bed, his sleeve still held tight in Tang Fan’s grip, and settles in to wait for dawn.
END