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An unconscious body still moves. Zhou Zishu's moves violently now and then, and in small ways at all times. The chest expands and contracts. Blood circulates. It sweats. And then the tremors, the clench of teeth. It grows feverish and grows cold. Sometimes its limbs twitch and Wen Kexing thinks, frantically, he is dying, or he is waking up—which thought comes first depends on the day. The quality of the light, the hue of A-Xu's cheeks, what Wen Kexing has dreamt of. If he has slept at all.
An unconscious body requires an amount of care he would not have anticipated, killer that he is. To be moved and cleaned and carefully monitored, nourished, monitored some more. Like a child, a child—a body you could break so easily. He feels sometimes that he has spent so much time circulating qi through A-Xu's body that they are almost one creature, which is fitting, because if A-Xu dies then so will he.
The cold here sits in the joints of his fingers, cramps them where they wrap around A-Xu's unresisting hand. It finds ancient fracture lines in the bones of his left leg, which he had forgotten could hurt. Outside, his eyelashes freeze, and frost-brittle metal burns to touch. No wonder the old monster is an old monster, he thinks, once—shakes his sympathy off, feeling as itchy about it as a wet cat. He wants to pick a fight, work life into his limbs and strip the terrible restlessness out of his body, but who is there to fight? Chengling is so earnest, Lord Seventh and the Shaman are—
They're hard to pick fights with. They form a smooth wall together, and all of Wen Kexing's violence slides right off it.
He wants to claw his own arms open, some days. If he fed A-Xu his blood, would he wake faster?
His grief feels slow and deep, the way river water grows black and sluggish before it begins to freeze.
People leave him. In the yard of a house, on the slope of a mountain, in some nameless dead end street—
Then the tightening of fingers against fingers. An ordinary fog-bright day. Wen Kexing barely understands. His night was sleepless, he must have dozed—he must, he thinks, be dreaming sweetly now—
He surfaces awkwardly, slowly. He blinks the grit of exhaustion from his eyes—
A-Xu is smiling. His thumb strokes across Wen Kexing's knuckles.
We're alive, Wen Kexing thinks, nonsensically. We, the two of us, I, he, the thing that we are together, singular or plural.
"You fret so much," A-Xu says. His voice is thin and raspy. "If you can't stop fussing, get me softer bedding. This stuff feels like sleeping on straw. Get me wine! Take me somewhere warm with beautiful—ouch—"
Subsiding under Wen Kexing's pinching fingers, he accepts his medicine, and drinks it in one swallow.
"How is it?" Wen Kexing asks, smoothing his hand carefully over the place on A-Xu's arm he'd marked with his nails.
A-Xu shakes his head. His eyes are closed; his head hurts if he keeps them open for too long, and he grows truly bad-tempered instead of teasing.
"Drink water," Wen Kexing says. "Here, here."
A-Xu laughs. "I asked for wine."
He drinks without true protest when Wen Kexing holds the cup to his mouth, taking swallows as large as Wen Kexing will allow. He is already growing shivery from the medicine.
"Sleep with me tonight," he says. His eyes are glittering dark slits. He watches Wen Kexing through his lashes for a moment. "What, nothing indecent to say?"
"A-Xu," Wen Kexing says, helplessly.
A-Xu catches clumsily at his hand. It takes him visible effort to raise it to his mouth. His lips are dry and cracked, scrape across Wen Kexing's palm—Wen Kexing whines anyway, deep in his throat. A-Xu can always do this to him. He always could. In any of his guises or stripped bare of them, he always could. More surprising is the way A-Xu shudders too—not with the usual shallow desperation of nausea but slowly, a shudder that seems to work its way through his whole body. His breath is so hot against Wen Kexing's cold skin. He rubs his mouth back and forth, thoughtlessly—Wen Kexing could start trembling and then he might never stop, he might just break open, he might beg for A-Xu to do anything to him, anything at all, when A-Xu is still too weak to stand. When there are things he should not offer, not yet, perhaps not ever—devoted though he is. Wounds he doesn't want to inflict. They come to each other with strange lives behind them, strange scars.
"I'll sleep with you," he says. "If the bedding is rough, sleep on my silk robes. You may rest your head upon my breast—"
He isn't teasing. He meant to tease. It's hard, just now, to tease—to find the tone, to find the role. He's too full of—of wonder, or relief.
"Alright," A-Xu says. "Your finest ones, mind."
Wen Kexing runs his fingers across the bedding. It's soft, already very fine. He isn't sure if he's the one being teased or if A-Xu's nerves are really so raw. But perhaps they really are. His body is still—it's—he frightens Wen Kexing sometimes. Wen Kexing has been insane since he was a child but the insanity he feels in the face of everything A-Xu is—it's different. It's different.
A-Xu wakes gasping in the night. It's so familiar, this could be a year ago, it could be—Wen Kexing is reaching to help him suppress the nails before he's entirely awake himself—A-Xu hisses at the weight of Wen Kexing's palms.
They still.
"Ah," Wen Kexing says. He lightens his touch carefully. He can't bear to just yank his hands away. "Does it hurt so much?"
"I had my meridians torn apart and thrown back together," A-Xu says. "Guess."
Wen Kexing will never forget the screaming. The ugly lumps of the nails lay in a heap beside the bed when it was done, so much bigger than he'd expected them to be. A-Xu looked like a dead man, even after the blood was gone.
"Hey," A-Xu murmurs. He nudges their foreheads together. "Don't give me that."
"Tell me," Wen Kexing says. "Tell me how it feels."
"Like I don't have any skin," A-Xu says.
Wen Kexing can't suppress the flinch. The things his hands remember doing. He has touched a man with no skin, he—
"Fuck's sake," A-Xu says. "Lao Wen, Lao Wen. It's all—sharp. Bright. I don't know. Everything is—"
Wen Kexing cups A-Xu's cheek, careful, careful.
"Bad?"
"No," A-Xu says.
"You're laughing at me."
"Maybe. You're mothering me. You haven't even felt me up, it's creeping me out."
"I have bound my heart to the worst man in the world," Wen Kexing says. "He thinks I have no virtue. He mocks my feelings, and complains every day about taking his medicine."
He presses his thumb lightly to the corner of A-Xu's lips, rubs small circles there. A-Xu's body arches against his, although his whine is probably not a sign of pleasure—unless it is.
"Ah, I'm tired," A-Xu says. "It's hard, my life is hard."
Wen Kexing tucks A-Xu's hair back behind his ear. He skims his fingers down the side of A-Xu's neck.
"Harder than that," A-Xu mumbles. "Ticklish. Yeah, like that."
The line of his collarbone, the oddly sharp angles of his shoulder. Wen Kexing's body is responding—it hasn't responded to much in all these months but it only needs small sounds from A-Xu, the press of his body, and it draws itself taut. He lets it stay that way. He touches A-Xu. Where A-Xu wants, how he wants—how he says he wants. Not his cock, not anything between his legs—but a hundred other places. The inside of his elbow, the skin between finger and thumb. A hand on the soft stretch of his stomach is too much for him to take, he twitches and curls in on himself and pants and it isn't a fun game, so they stop—go back to fingertips against fingertips. They say with their eyes in the half-dark: we want to devour each other, but we're so tired and bruised. Let's take small bites, just small ones. Just for now.
A-Xu walks with a shuffling gait, but he walks. He lets Wen Kexing bundle him in cloaks, the softest cloaks he can find. He lets Wen Kexing curl an arm around his waist. He leans against Wen Kexing as they eat breakfast, pale again in that washed out way which says he's pushing himself hard, hazy-eyed and slow. But he laughs, too. He keeps his eyes open for longer at a time.
He reaches casually for Wen Kexing, and Wen Kexing, who is a grown man and an experienced lover, blushes at the knowing looks A-Xu's friends give them.
I am fussing over him, he thinks, helping A-Xu to his feet. A warm thought. He can fuss, there's someone for him to annoy with care.
They wake close together again and again. They touch in the blue night. They are circling something they can't touch yet. Small bites, small bites. A week of them, a week and a half.
"Lao Wen," A-Xu says. He throws his arm around Wen Kexing's neck. "I need to—"
His hips are saying what he needs to do. He grinds himself against Wen Kexing's thigh.
Wen Kexing reaches—A-Xu shakes his head.
"Just," he says. "I, uh—uh—"
A quick stutter of his hips.
"Did you," Wen Kexing says.
"Fuck off," A-Xu tells him. His arm is tight, he's clinging so hard. Wen Kexing knows the shape of all the bones in a person's neck. His might reshape themselves under pressure.
A-Xu breathes raggedly into his shoulder.
"Let me clean you," Wen Kexing says, once A-Xu is something like steady again.
"If you touch my cock with a cloth right now, I'll break your hand," A-Xu grumbles. Wen Kexing adores him. He truly is the worst man—bad enough to like Wen Kexing back.
"What about with my mouth?" he asks.
It's meant to be teasing—but he still keeps messing up teasing. He makes himself honest by accident.
A-Xu makes a thoughtful little noise. Wen Kexing might come from that noise. He feels strung out and strange and young in his desire. Small bites—they keep taking small bites—he can hardly stand it.
"Try it and find out," A-Xu says—says like a threat—says like a threat although he's flopping awkwardly onto his back, parting his legs. The movement opens his robe for him, although his lower body is covered by their blankets. His profile is briefly sharp as it travels across a sliver of light.
Wen Kexing is shaking, he supposes. He supposes A-Xu may break his nose from the shock of feeling alone—but to be allowed the attempt makes it worth it.
He shifts into the space that's been made for him—presses his face into A-Xu's stomach, where he couldn't stand to be touched a week ago. A-Xu only sighs—hums thoughtfully when Wen Kexing pets his hip. Which of them is the skittish animal here?
A-Xu smells of sex. The smell could be stronger, it could be the two of them mixed. It will be. But it's still—Wen Kexing feels so—
He mouths at A-Xu's skin below his navel, kisses the crease of his hip. Shadowed by the blankets, he can't see much of A-Xu's cock—feels it out instead, careful, they're still so careful. He knows the shape of it well, but he's never touched it directly for a sexual reason, although he's pretended—suggested impure motives as he bathed A-Xu to make the awkward necessity of it easier to bear—
He noses at the base of it, testing. A-Xu makes a strange sound between his teeth, but his hand lands on Wen Kexing's head, pre-empting his question—telling him to stay. It must be too much, it must be far too much. Wen Kexing treats him as gently as he knows how, sinks himself into the taste of A-Xu's come and of his skin. He takes it slow. A-Xu shifts restlessly under him. His cock twitches as Wen Kexing wraps his lips cautiously around it, but doesn't try to harden properly.
He licks at A-Xu's balls, rubs his fingers across them. He's rutting against the bed—it doesn't feel that important. It feels like a secondary pleasure. The real one is here, with one of A-Xu's slim legs thrown over his shoulder, with coarse hair against his face and soft skin on his tongue. A-Xu's fingers in his hair.
"Come here, you idiot," A-Xu says, at last—he sounds sleepy, good, that's good, the sooner he can sleep through a night the sooner he'll be able to stay awake through a day.
Wen Kexing goes to him—moans softly as A-Xu kisses him. His eyes sting.
"You taste disgusting," A-Xu says, with feeling, and kisses him again.