Nicholas hadn't thought this through.

Well, he had. For several minutes. When all was said and done, and they had caught their breath, Rayan had coaxed Nicholas to stop slumping on his lap and instead slump against the pillows. Rayan stood without announcing where he was going, and Nicholas got his first full view of the room now that his tunnel vision had eased up. It tunneled all over again when he noticed the upright piano against the far wall, shiny mahogany with silver pedals.

He was already scheming when Rayan returned. The king's shirt was buttoned back up but still crumpled and half-untucked. Preoccupied as he was with his strategizing, Nicholas didn't react when Rayan offered him a damp cloth. Rayan had taken the brunt of the mess, anyway. He huffed and half-knelt on the bed to wipe at Nicholas' chin. Nicholas tempered his tone into something unconcerned, cucumber cool:

"Will you play something?"

Rayan followed his gaze. "I thought we were trying to be quick."

"And I read quicker with music. Just one song. It can play on a loop."

Apparently Nicholas had been calculating the wrong odds, because Rayan didn't put up much of a fight.

He should have been worrying about himself.

The figurine of the singing woman sat on the piano's lid. Nicholas watched from behind, against a corner wall to Rayan's right. Best seat in the house, objectively: he could see Rayan's knee bobbing with every pass over the pedals, and his shoulders rolling relative to the song's intensity, and his hands flying over the keys, and half of his face.

Subjectively, Rayan's legs were ridiculously long even bent ninety degrees, and his shoulders were already broad before he stretched for those high notes, and his fingers were long and thin and pale. Because of course he took the gloves off to play. Nicholas had not thought this through.

He fidgeted with his own gloves to keep his hands from doing anything stupid, like reaching out.

Like the songs that had come before, this one was gritty and blunt, grave in a galvanic way. Rayan alternated between opening and closing his eyes as he played. His mouth tightened as the song peaked, enough to show in his jaw. His expression didn't shift a whole lot otherwise; Nicholas could have predicted as much. But it would be wrong to call him an expressionless player. Nicholas watched Rayan's face least of all, engrossed with the way his fingers danced, arrogant, over the high notes, and leaned dramatically into the low. Rayan's back curled as the song grew violent, hands like crashing waves. The fever broke on his left side first; his right took longer on the come down. There was dissonance. It worked. Then it eased, and his chin tipped up, and his shoulders rolled with a slow tide. And then it was over.

Rayan spoke the charm to seal the recording, sino dakira. Nicholas approached from behind, feeling unsteady, so that Rayan had to tilt his head back to see his reaction. Rayan didn't get very long to look. Nicholas held his face and leaned down to kiss him. It was short-lived but far from shallow. Rayan made a noise of surprise that petered into something pleased.

"Upside down?" he asked. Nicholas straightened, finally grounded.

"I've always wanted to do that." He was very impressed with how he sounded. Like he hadn't spent all eight minutes of that song feeling like he was hanging upside down for real. "Like Spider-Man."

Rayan gave a deeply confused frown but didn't bother to ask. He turned around on the bench, replacing his gloves so swiftly that Nicholas didn't notice until those hands were on him, gliding up from his knees to his hips. Nicholas allowed himself to be guided between Rayan's legs; to be lured back in by a seeking, rather bossy raised eyebrow; to be kissed slow and dirty, dangerously close to the bed they'd just soiled.

Demanding fingers coaxed one of his knees onto the bench. When Rayan started pulling at Nicholas' other thigh, like he was ready to forgo the bed altogether and make it happen at the piano, Nicholas had the presence of mind to peel himself away.

"Weren't we making haste?"

Rayan braced his forearms on his knees, let his head hang. His voice was gravelly and strung tight when he said, "One moment."

♛ ♛ ♛

There was no ducking into walls on the walk to the library. Nicholas didn't even have to duck his head. He felt unnatural all the same; he tried to keep his back straight and thought too hard about his own steps until he was practically marching, but how else was he supposed to hold himself publicly at the king's side? The halls were empty after dark, but he felt like he was back in Dalisay's domain - like the walls had eyes.

Rayan let out a cough that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. Nicholas looked over in time to see his eyes darting away and an amused, mocking thing taking shape on his lips.

Nicholas narrowed his eyes but let his shoulders sag. He supposed walking with a king meant he could walk however he pleased.

♛ ♛ ♛

Rayan saw the state of the archive and stalled at the top of the stairs. "Saints."

"Something to say?"

"I like what you've done with the place."

"I took some liberties. Would've consulted my partner, but he made himself scarce."

"Oh?" said Rayan. "Tell me more about this partner."

"You know what I meant. Don't get a big head, the space is cluttered as is."

"Is it? I didn't notice."

Nicholas crouched, gathering the books he deemed most important to bring them over to Rayan's usual spot on the sofa. Before he could rise, Rayan sat cross-legged in the Nicholas-shaped clearing on the floor, hunching over the closest title with honestly concerning posture.

"What do I need to know?"

Nicholas crouch-walked to Rayan's side with his armful, nudging books with his feet until there was enough room for the both of them, and did his best to catch Rayan up. It was a good thing he'd gotten the unhinged ramblings out of the way with Mariam. He didn't spare a single detail, citing his sources like he was back in literature class. Rayan was a good listener in an odd way. Unresponsive, which should have been unnerving, but Nicholas preferred speaking into the quiet. It give him space to talk, and talk, and lose track of himself.

"And they came in pairs, wasn't that weird?" He hadn't planned to bring this up. It was abstract, too untethered to their cause to be worth mentioning. But he had said everything he needed to say a while ago, and he was still talking. He must've been speculating aloud for some time now. Rayan didn't call him on it.

"The women in the tavern, I mean. Those ladies who talked to us, for one, but it wasn't just them. Everyone was sort of...coupled up. I know people have best friends, or lovers, or whatever, but there was that girl with the purple hair and the much older woman, too. And remember that sad lady in the corner, the one that's been, like, nonverbal since Angesie Bazar's arrest? That's intense. Those ladies said they were 'bonded'; isn't that a weird way to describe friendship, or romance, or..."

Nicholas was rambling now, extra unhinged. He stopped himself.

"You noticed that much?" asked Rayan, as if that was all very plausible and Nicholas was perfectly hinged.

"Um. Yes?"

"Have I told you before that you are eerily observant?"

Nicholas needed to be studied. He had been in bed with this man not an hour before, so why was he flushing to the tips of his ears over this - Rayan telling him something he already knew about himself. It hadn't even been a compliment. Sounded a lot like an insult, actually.

"Comes with the territory," Nicholas muttered, holding his own cheeks.

"Territory of..."

Nicholas wasn't particularly short, but he had somehow always managed to walk just below the eyeline. "Being overlooked."

"Earth must be an anomalous place, if somebody like you can go unnoticed."

That was it. Nicholas had always known he was observant. It was a different thing altogether, stunningly unfamiliar, for someone else to notice.

How would you know? He wanted to say. You've never seen me observe anything else.

But that would sound idiotic. He didn't know why he felt so defensive. He got back to the lacemaking craftbook, and Rayan started up the music.

In the end, it really did turn out to be about lacemaking.

Nicholas moved on to an old grayman's autobiography, but his mind moved somewhere else entirely, steered by Mariam's story. He pictured the first two pages of his journal. Adjacent drawings - a woman reaching for a man's broken body; a constellation of two lovers. He remembered looking through the telescope and seeing them in the sky. He thought of his burning dream, oleander bushes in Eden, a spiteful question: "So we're doing the impossible now, are we?"

They were one and the same. The woman in the drawing, the woman in the stars; the broken body, the wilting man in his dream.

I didn't think that was allowed, anymore, the woman in the dream had said.

"I do believe you have to look at the page to read the words," Rayan said, like an asshole. Nicholas gritted his teeth and forcefully pushed aside thoughts of Delilah.

Time passed as it always had when they shared the archive: in the gentle scrape of turning pages and their gradually shifting positions. Nicholas sat with his weight on one hip, then propped back on his forearm, then leaning against his knees. Rayan stretched out his legs, crossed and uncrossed his ankles.

Nicholas had stopped his mind wandering, but his eyes were another story. It wasn't his fault that Rayan demanded attention, always. Although, stretched out on his stomach with a concentrated frown, hovering over two books at once like he was making up for lost time, nothing about Rayan's manner screamed, look at me. Nicholas started to wonder if it ever had, or if the call had come from his own head the whole time.

He shifted onto his back with the book held up to box in his vision. That way there was nothing to see, except when he neared the bottoms of the pages and steely eyes came into view beneath the book. Rayan didn't seem to realize Nicholas could see whenever they would drift his way and snag, and Rayan's head would turn slightly as if pulled.

"What was it you said, about looking and reading?"

Rayan scowled.

"You're distracted," said Nicholas, putting his book down and sitting up.

"No." Rayan's eyes swept over Nicholas from head to toe. "So are you."

"I'm not denying it." Nicholas stretched his arms above his head to release his back. When he opened his eyes, Rayan averted his gaze. "A break might do us some good."

He thought it was a pretty simple proposition. They had started earlier than normal; the night was still young. And Nicholas was still wearing the gloves. But Rayan took long to answer.

"I cannot."

"I know I gave you a hard time about slacking off-"

"I said I cannot."

"-but you don't have to take me so seriously."

"Let it go, Nicholas!"

Nicholas tried to do the math. Given, that had never been his subject, but his words and Rayan's reaction just didn't add up. "Okay...jeez."

He found his page in the autobiography, but he couldn't concentrate now that the silence had grown legs. Only a minute passed before Rayan's forehead thunked against the open pages. He took a long, loud breath in, shot it out through his nose, and raised his head.

"You and I are not on equal footing. However it may seem when we..." He didn't finish the sentence. Nicholas found it awfully demure. "I must remind myself that you are not here by your will. In this room, especially."

"Every choice I've made has been my own," Nicholas said, a little miffed at the implication otherwise.

"And I've heard stories." Now Rayan was the one rambling, though he was much more level-headed about it. "Hostages, out of their right minds, who fell in love with their captors-"

Nicholas snorted. It came out of nowhere and surprised them both. "Well then it's a good thing I don't love you, isn't it?" he said, fighting back a smirk for the first time in his life. Or particularly like you, for that matter. "And that you've hardly got me living like a prisoner."

He almost missed it - had to squint to make sure he wasn't imagining it, but sure enough - dusty pink on the high points of Rayan's cheeks.

"You don't even have a door." It was a diversion. Nicholas let him have it. "...Would you like one?"

"Would that make you feel better?"

Rayan grimaced.

"Not that you need it," he said pointedly.

"That was a unique circumstance."

"I don't suppose you'll tell me how you managed to get to my bedroom."

"If you order it. You're the king."

Somehow, Nicholas knew he wouldn't.

"So..."

"I won't touch you down here," Rayan said, resolute.

"I know. Can I?"

"Can you?"

"Touch."

"Oh." Magnificently, the dusty pink spread downward in patches.

"Not, you know. Nothing crazy." Nicholas held his hands up by his head. His innocence might have been undermined by the whole smirking thing, he wasn't sure. He'd never been a smirker before. He didn't know where it was coming from. "I'll keep reading and everything. I honestly think it'll help."

He wouldn't be able to focus worth a damn otherwise.

"Right. Well. Proceed."

Nicholas shuffled until he was also on his stomach, facing Rayan's side. He rested his cheek in one hand, easing off every time he needed to turn the page. With the other hand, he explored.

He started at the base of Rayan's neck and slowly made his way downward, pausing to spread his palm between sharp shoulder blades, slotting two fingers into the defined dip of his spine. Nicholas hadn't taken the chance, earlier, to fully untuck Rayan's shirt and admire his back; he'd been distracted enough when the front buttons came undone. He made up for it now, sliding beneath the hem to trail his fingers over lean muscle. Rayan's skin felt smooth. What little Nicholas could see looked smooth. But through the gloves, he couldn't tell whether Rayan had those tiny bumps around his shoulders. He wanted to know badly.

"Turn over?" he said when he'd had his fill, already near the book's end. He really was focusing better.

Rayan rolled onto his back. Nicholas was starting to think Rayan might let him take whatever he wanted, if he asked.

He could use that to his advantage. Maybe even to Adrian's advantage.

Rayan shivered at the first brush of fingers over his waistline. Nicholas was going to have to save that thought for another time.

The song was barely audible after looping so many times through the figurine talisman. Nicholas tuned into the steady motion of Rayan's chest beneath his palm, musical in its own right. He traced the centerline of his chest straight down through his abdominals, to the dark hair beneath his navel. Rayan was so pale. Easy to bruise, if he ever allowed it. Nicholas leaned down once to skim a kiss over Rayan's stomach and felt the muscle clench. He was becoming kind of obsessed with Rayan's sensitivity to his touch.

"If you're so bothered by my position," Nicholas said when it had been a while since the music petered out for good, and the movement of his hand had slowed to an absentminded back-and-forth, "why don't you even the playing field some? Tell me something that will make you vulnerable."

He was half-expecting to be flat-out ignored, but he was still disappointed when Rayan kept on reading.

"My hands."

"What about them?" It had been so long, Nicholas didn't remember asking.

"I can't touch anyone. Or be touched. Everywhere else is fine. It is...illogical."

"That doesn't count. I already knew that."

"I wasn't allowed to see the king and queen when they were dying." Rayan was still holding a book, though his eyes had locked in place on the page. He spoke with so little inflection, he could have been reading out loud. "The illness spread by touch and I was the only heir. I overheard that my father would not make it through the night and I stalked the halls until the evening nurse arrived, and I begged. She allowed me two minutes on the condition that I swore not to touch anything, least of all them. But my father could not hear me or see me, and his hand was hanging over the bed, out of her sight. The nurse was none the wiser when I held it."

He told it like a bulleted list.

"My mother was delirious. I assumed she could not see much of anything, either, but she began to scream: father's poison was already sinking into my skin and I was going to die, and the kingdom would have no king, a headless serpent, and go- before it can spread- your hands are a lost cause, cut them off at the wrists or Caldora will be ruined."

Monotone the whole way through.

"I don't believe I used my full two minutes. Cairo was the one who found me - it's always been a talent of his. I didn't cut my hands off, but I did have a knife, though I could no longer hold onto it by the time he arrived."

Rayan removed his gloves. Nicholas had only seen his hands a few times. Once just that night, once in Rayan's study, and once on his very first day at al-Narin, when Rayan tested him for magic in the infirmary. Once during the bandit attack. But it had always been the back of his hand. Nicholas hadn't seen that his palms were covered completely in scar tissue. Fat stripes of healed-over skin spanned the lengths of his fingers. The lesions on his right hand were smoother - clean cuts by his dominant left. They couldn't have been too deep, but still, the marks on his left were ugly.

Rayan had been eleven when he became king.

"You touched me once," Nicholas remembered. Rayan had pressed all nine kova zem into Nicholas' hand, one at a time, and felt his wrist for a reaction.

"That was a necessity. And difficult. And you bathed immediately before. I do not wish to speak of them any longer."

He talked about his hands like they were separate from his body, like in his head they really had been severed at the wrists thirteen years ago.

"I won't be here tomorrow night."

Nicholas withdrew his hand. It had been still for some time. "I thought you wanted to get back on track."

He didn't want to go back to reading alone. He regretted pushing too far. He never pushed too far.

"And I plan to." Rayan stood, taking several books with him. "You need to rest. You look terrible."

"You didn't seem to mind the way I look earlier."

"You clearly haven't been sleeping. Take the day. And the night."

"You can't stop me from reading."

"Unless I order it. That is what you said before, is it not? So rest. That is an order. You'll miss something if you are not at your best, and neither of us can afford that."

"Aren't those books supposed to never see the light of day, or something?"

Rayan smirked. It wasn't quite up to its usual haughtiness, but it suited him much better than Nicholas. "I am the king."