The Nine-tailed Fox gets pushed against a wall

Wu Yun gets all his clothes off, and runs down to the pools. The smaller of the two has warm water, the rising steam billows in the gentle breeze come in from the yawning cliff drop below. The larger pool has still dark waters, Wu Yun can feel the cold emanating from them at a distance.

He jumps into the hot spring without a second thought. As soon as his chilled skin touches the warm water he lets out a relieved sigh.

Lan Tian watches from the rough stone steps as Wu Yun leans against the pool's edge. The infinite blue of the sky behind him and, and a blissful expression relaxing his usually alert features.

He feels robbed of the naturalness that existed between them, when his eyes drift to Wu Yun's collarbones, and his pink nipples. Before what happened in the secret dimension, even at his most confused, his feelings were only a jumble of fleeting thoughts and overwhelming emotions when Wu Yun was near, they never had a specific target, he never knew what he was supposed to do with them.

Now, looking at the lean lines of Wu Yun's body, he does. It feels like a violation of Wu Yun's trust and privacy to look at him in that way.

Wu Yun looks up at him then. "Didn't you say you were coming in?" He reaches over the granite rim separating both pools and touches his fingertips to the cold water on the other side. "This one is cold, just how you like it."

Wu Yun said he didn't want things between them to change, and Lan Tian promised him they wouldn't.

That night, in the Ou house he told Wu Yun how he felt as clearly as he knew how, and Wu Yun was clear in expressing that he didn't feel the same way. If Lan Tian values his company and his friendship, he will keep his promise and try to overcome his feelings and the red-tinged thoughts that assault him.

He turns around and starts taking off his robes, conscious of his own body as he never was before.

Wu Yun's eyes are glued to Lan Tian's back, to the silver scars, that mar the sinewy and lean expanse of it. He feels guilt bubbling up in his throat at the sight, and looks down at the his own scar curling like a snake around his wrist.

Are they even? Can a single scar pay for dozens of others? He doesn't think so.

Lan Tian gets into the cold pool and sits far away from Wu Yun, almost against the opposite wall.

He's been distant since he fell unconscious in the forest, and Wu Yun wants to get to the bottom of it.

"Why are you sitting so far away?" He leans over the rim between the two pools and rests his face sideways on his crossed arms. "Come here."

Lan Tian gives him a wary look from beneath his long eyelashes. "I'm fine here."

"But I'm not fine with you there," Wu Yun insists. "Come here."

"Things don't always happen according to your wishes," Lan Tian says.

His words are cryptic and Wu Yun has a feeling he's talking about more than their sitting distance.

"Are you mad at me?" Wu Yun asks, the thought of it makes him more worried than he wants to admit.

Lan Tian's eyes soften at the concern in Wu Yun's face. "I'm not, I just want to rest."

"Well, you can do that here."

Lan Tian sighs. "You are always so annoying."

"So are you, but it has been established that we both like it."

An invisible fist tightens around Lan Tian's heart. He doesn't think that Wu Yun likes it as much as he does.

"I'm going to come over there if you don't come here," Wu Yun says, dragging his chest halfway over the granite border.

"You hate cold water," Lan Tian says, confident that Wu Yun will remain exactly where he is.

"I like having my way more than I hate cold water."

He slides over the border and falls on the cold water with an ungraceful splash. He comes up sputtering and spitting out water. He's clearly freezing but he still swims determinedly to Lan Tian's side, who flattens himself further against the wall.

Wu Yun reaches Lan Tian's side and clings to this arm like a persistent barnacle.

"Ah I made it," he says triumphantly while his teeth chatter from the cold.

Lan Tian is conscious of all the places where their skin touches, but he can't help a fond smile at Wu Yun's words.

"You did, and now you're cold, I hope it was worth it."

Wu Yun shrugs, affecting nonchalance while his entire body shivers. "You'll warm me up."

Lan Tian's eyes blow wide, the amber almost swallowed by darkness of his pupils as his mind conjures dozens of scenarios to match those words.

Wu Yun notices his odd, unfocused gaze and continues, "Like you did when we first met, remember? When we were in the river hiding from Jiang Tanmei and Lu Meng."

He drapes Lan Tian's arm over his shoulder to demonstrate.

Lan Tian's heart rate slows down minutely. Of course that's what Wu Yun meant, he shouldn't allow his mind to go places it isn't meant to.

His heart rate picks right back up when Wu Yun continues talking, "I still wonder what they were doing in that rive-"

The word dies on his lips, and his eyes widen in realization.

He never gave that odd scene another thought, but after that dream in the Jiang estate, he does know what they were doing.

He flushes red in embarrassment. Even thousands of li away Jiang Tanmei continues to be a thorn on his side. When he sees him again he's going to make him wish he was unconscious again.

Lan Tian notices the flustered look on Wu Yun's face and comes to the sobering realization that somehow between then and now he must have learned what sex looked like. Bai Xiaoli traumatized them both with her technical account of what sex is, but Lan Tian only knows what it's supposed to look like because he stumbled on picture books of a dubious nature in Jiang Tanmei's librabry.

How does Wu Yun know? The thought is enough to make his head spin.

"They were having sex," Lan Tian says, slowly, testing out the words and keeping an eye on Wu Yun's reaction.

Wu Yun nods, his cheeks and ears tinged crimson.

Lan Tian asks a question that he fears the answer to. "Have you ever done it?"

Wu Yun's dark eyes snap up at Lan Tian, his mouth open in shock. He's ready to deny it but he stutters. Surely a dream doesn't count, besides, it wasn't even him, he was just experiencing the same things as Ling Yan. It doesn't count.

He settles for a wavering "No," before Lan Tian's amber eyes burrow a hole into the top of his skull.

"Then how do you know that's what they were doing?" Lan Tian asks.

Wu Yun curses himself for bringing up this issue, he looks out at the open sky over the pool's edge and contemplates taking a deep dive into the abyss.

"How do you know what they were doing?" Wu Yun asks, in a bid to divert the attention away from himself.

"I saw it in a book in the Jiang estate's library."

Lan Tian doesn't tell Wu Yun that he read that entire book front to back, and then went searching for more like it.

He also doesn't tell him, that while some of the pictures were odd and unappealing, others made his heart race. He doesn't tell Wu Yun that his face and body swam up to the front of his mind as he read the lascivious descriptions, and saw the graphic ink drawings.

That he imagined Wu Yun's smirking lips shaping the vulgar words of the dialogue.

"I saw it in a book too," Wu Yun says, jumping at the chance of a perfect excuse.

Lan Tian fixes him with a questioning look and a quirked eyebrow. "Really? What was the book called?"

Wu Yun fumbles for an answer, before saying the first thing that comes to his mind, "It was called 'The picture book of sex'"

Lan Tian takes a sideways glance at Wu Yun's pursed lips and serious expression and tries to hold back his laughter. He read several of those books, they all have one thing in common, besides the graphic depictions of sex acts and unlikely love stories: completely innocuous and overly flowery titles.

The last one he read was called "Moonlit nights among exquisite chrysanthemum fields." He remembers it vividly because Lu Meng caught him reading it, and almost keeled over in laughter at the panic in Lan Tian's face.

"You're lying."

Lan Tian turns around in the water and cages Wu Yun against the cave wall, his hands resting on the rough rock above his drawn shoulders.

Wu Yun looks up at him, and Lan Tian watches his throat move as he swallows.

It's then that he realizes what a bad idea this position was.

Their noses are almost touching, and the wet tips of Lan Tian's hair trail over Wu Yun's chest. He makes the mistake of looking down and seeing the peaks of his nipples rise and fall with his rushing breath.

Wu Yun's dark eyes are all pupil, it's easy to notice even with his dark irises. His eyes usually shimmer like stardust when the light catches them, but now they're swallowing all the light around them, like a starless night. The kind of inscrutable darkness that makes foolish people wish they could get lost in it.

Lan Tian must be a fool, because he leans down closer, almost whispering against Wu Yun's soft ear shell, "You said you wouldn't lie to me."

He doesn't know why he's torturing himself by drawing so irresistibly near to what he can't have, but he's powerless to stop it.

Wu Yun feels his breath disappear inside his lungs. Lan Tian's voice in his ear makes him shiver with more than just cold. His body is telling him to do all sorts of irrational things he doesn't understand, he wants to run, but he also wants to stay caged against this wall between Lan Tian's strong arms forever.

"I didn't lie...I...I know because I saw, I saw i-"

He doesn't get to find out how he would finish that sentence because a loud snort from the stairs brings him out of his reverie.

"I'm glad I told Wan Mi I would come instead of her. Seeing her parents in such compromising positions can really traumatize a child, you know?"

Bai Xiaoli crosses her arms and muffles another laugh against her shoulder when Lan Tian and Wu Yun break apart like lightening bolt fell between them.

"Get dressed, dinner is going to be served, and there's a last minute guest here who wants to see both of you."

----

A.N.: In China chrysanthemum is a flower associated with men, and it's used as an euphemism for something else ;) Also, ancient chinese gay porn books are a thing that exists, the greeks don't get the monopoly on ancient gay porn.