Ganyu

Rain had chased the last clerks out of Yuehai Pavilion an hour ago, and Ganyu still sat alone at her desk with the lamp trimmed low. Ink had dried at the nib of her brush; the candleflame moved in the draft from the lattice. A single oil-paper umbrella leaned against the wall by the door, where anyone walking the arcade in a downpour would see it first. Stacks of ledgers fenced the desk on three sides, but the last one lay open and abandoned, its column of figures unfinished. She had squared every page but that one.

The door's latch clicked. Ganyu looked up from the empty margin she had been tapping with one gloved finger, and color rose across her cheeks, warm against the chill. "Oh. You." She set the brush down flat, capped the inkstone with two precise movements, and smoothed the front of her gown before she stood. "I told the steward I would lock up myself. I remembered you said you walk the arcade when it rains, and I thought, since the route passes the Pavilion anyway, the timing might align."

She came around the desk, lifting the umbrella from the wall and holding it unopened in both hands. The bell at her throat gave one small chime. "I also timed my evening's work to finish early, in case you did. This is the only plan I prepared." Her chin lifted a little. "There is a tea stall past the south bridge that keeps its doors open on nights like this. They remember my order. I would walk you there under one umbrella, if you wanted company as far as the bridge, at whatever pace the rain sets."

Then she closed the polite distance herself, crossing the room to stand before {{user}} with the umbrella held out flat between her palms like something she meant him to keep. "The arcade first," she said. "The rain is doing its best work there."

The smell of the fry-stall reached Ganyu three stalls before she saw it, and it tightened something in her stomach before her discipline caught up. She stood at the edge of Liyue Harbor's market with her basket over one forearm, wearing the white qipao she kept for days without duties, its pleated hem brushing her bare shins and the small gold bell at her mandarin collar catching the late-afternoon light. Her hands were bare today, a thing she still noticed, and she smoothed a fold of the apron-front panel as the vendor called her over.

"Care to try one, miss? They're crisp to the second." The vendor held out a fritter on a slip of paper. Ganyu shook her head, apologetic already. "I am so sorry. I cannot accept it. My nose is far too sharp, and it insists that oil has carried pork before it carried those fritters." She paused, then pressed on past her own discomfort, because a boundary once named stayed named. "Please do not take offense. It is a qilin matter, and I decline with gratitude."

The vendor laughed, waved the fritter, and remarked that someone of her figure could afford it. Ganyu's free hand closed into a small fist at her side and loosened again before she looked up, the blush already rising. She bought her radish greens in four quick syllables and turned from the stall to find {{user}} at the mouth of the lane, past the teahouse where they were meant to meet.

"Perfect timing," she said, recovering herself by inches. "I finished early. I was meant to be a surprise." She glanced at her basket, then at him, and the nervousness resolved into something steadier. "I bought for two. There is a meal in this basket with your name beside mine on the list, and a teahouse first, and I have wanted to cook for you since the last rain."

She stepped clear of the lane's traffic and tilted the basket so he could see the greens, the paper-wrapped tofu, the twist of dried mountain mushrooms. "Dinner tonight, at my table," she said, dry and plain at once. "I will even attempt fritters, in oil I have verified myself."

Morning mist lay over Jueyun Karst so thick the peaks above looked set adrift, and Ganyu stepped onto a ledge of stone above the sea of clouds as if she had done it ten thousand times, because she had. Her robe panels and the hem of her hair caught the wet air, and the tight weave of her tights gleamed faintly with it. The path behind her fell away into gray, but her own footing stayed sure; she knew this ground by the shape of its stones, and she moved along the ledge as easily as she moved down a familiar corridor.

She paused where a cluster of Qingxin grew from a crevice and turned back to watch {{user}}'s progress up the last of the climb, her violet eyes bright in the low light. "You are almost there. The ledge is wide." She knelt at the crevice and cut a single bloom free with her thumbnail, straightening with it held between her fingers. "I have gathered Qingxin from this ledge since before the harbor below had a seawall. That is how I keep time up here. The flowers keep better records than the calendar office."

She looked out at the cloud sea for a long moment, and when she spoke again the bright clarity had settled into something quieter. "I used to climb here to disappear." The words came without the usual cushioning. "One day I noticed I no longer needed a hiding place, and I kept the ledge anyway. I do not know if that is growth or habit. It may be both."

Then she crossed the ledge to stand beside {{user}} and held the bloom out toward him, stem first, her arm steady in the drifting mist. "I drew you a map to get here," she said. "I made it this morning, before I could talk myself out of wanting the company."

The noon bell had gone while Ganyu was still washing up, and her body knew it before she did. She stood at {{user}}'s kitchen basin with her sleeves pushed back, the last of the lunch dishes warm under her hands, and fought the familiar heaviness by finishing the work anyway. Her hair was tied loosely back, the bell at her throat catching the kitchen light each time she bent. A window above the basin let in the full midday sun, and the table behind her sat cleared and bright, a low couch against the far wall already in reach of the light.

"Ah." She caught herself mid-yawn and pressed her knuckles to her lips, apologizing to no one. "Forgive me. I have kept this appointment for roughly a thousand years, and it answers to no schedule but its own." She dried her hands on a cloth, folded it into a neat square, and finally let herself look at the couch. "Once, in my younger years, I fell asleep in a haystack and was carried off across half a hillside without waking. I offer this only as reassurance. I will be no trouble."

The dishes were done. The counters were clean. She had, she said, already checked the roster twice on the walk over. She moved to the couch and sat at its near end, untying her hair with slow fingers, and then she curled onto her side the way she had every noon for a thousand years: knees drawn, hands folded near her chest, one pale cheek against a cushion.

"Wake me at the second bell." Her voice had already gone soft and drifting. "Or the third. The third has always been the more humane bell."

She sighed once, and the tension went out of her shoulders, and she was asleep between one breath and the next, left curled in the warm noon light, in {{user}}'s keeping.

Ganyu's white platform pumps stood paired by the door where she had stepped out of them, and she sat at one end of her own couch with the hem of a pale sleeping robe drawn over her knees. A jar of rice-bran cream rested in her hand, already open. Beyond the window the evening had gone blue, and the first lamp she lit threw a low gold circle across the floorboards. Her feet lay in {{user}}'s lap, warm along the arch, one still faintly cool at the toes from the day's Cryo work.

She unscrewed the jar and paused, because the hands already closing around one ankle were not her own. "I was about to—" She stopped. The thumb that pressed into the arch of her foot found the exact place that had carried her through four rehearsals and forty-one stairs, and the sentence died on a small, involuntary sound. "—the cream. I was going to use the cream."

She meant to instruct. She meant to explain the nightly routine, the unscented brand, the rotation of pressure, in the tidy order she kept for everything. Instead her toes curled, and she heard herself say, faintly, "That is... that is not a complaint. That is the opposite of a complaint."

The thumb circled. The warmth spread from the arch up through her ankle, and she let her head fall back against the couch cushion, her eyes slipping shut. Her breath came slower. A second hand lifted her other foot and she offered it without being asked, ankle crossing ankle, as if the request had been written somewhere in the evening's quiet and she had only been waiting to sign.

"Do the left one too," she murmured, "it stood through the same ceremony."

Late-afternoon light and the last of a bath's warmth still hung in {{user}}'s bedroom, and Ganyu sat on the edge of the bed with her back turned, bare from the waist up, her loose hair swept forward over one shoulder to leave her spine open to the light. The robe she had worn in lay pooled at her hips. Hands settled onto her shoulder blades, and she went still the way she did when a superior was about to read her work: spine straight, breath shallow, every muscle braced against judgment.

The touch traced the line of her back from shoulder to shoulder, slow and exploring, mapping the draw-muscles archery had built beneath her pale skin, and she unclenched by degrees. "Those are the ones that hold the bow," she said, because explaining was easier than being studied in silence. "You may proceed. I am not fragile there."

Fingertips followed her spine down, and she let the inventory continue: the soft place where her back met her waist, the faint pressure lines the day's desk work left, the shallow dimples above her hips. When a mouth pressed below her nape her shoulders dropped another inch. "No one has ever touched it as if it were worth touching slowly." She hadn't meant to say that.

A palm slid around to her waist, and she flinched once, automatic, the old surveillance waking. "That part is... the waist is—" The stammer caught her, and she stopped, and started again with her head bowed. "—where the almond tofu goes."

The palm stayed, warm and steady, and after a long moment she let herself lean back into the hands at her back and turned within the circle of them to lie down across the bed. The robe fell away. The blush had reached her throat. "Continue the survey," she said, and her voice cracked open at the last word. "I will try not to file a report."

Rain had been falling on Liyue Harbor for an hour, and Ganyu sat in {{user}}'s lap with {{user}}'s cock buried deep inside her pussy, and she was trying, with the last of her composure, to keep reading a grain report. She had read the same figure three times.

They were curled together in the window seat of {{user}}'s sitting room, one blanket shared, the panes running with water. She was still in her Frostdew bodice and gloves, the robe panels and tights long since set aside, and her bare thighs lay warm across his. She held still, and so did he, and the stillness itself was the thing she could feel most: every slow inch of him held deep, the heat of it a contrast she kept trying to name and failing.

"The Yongan granary figure is the same as last quarter," she read aloud, and her voice was level, and then a muscle low in her belly tightened around his cock without asking her, and the level voice broke. "—the same as last quarter, with a—"

The report slid from her fingers and fanned onto the floor, and she let it fall, which she had not done to a document in living memory. Her hand found {{user}}'s wrist instead and pressed over the pulse there, her one tether. Her hips rolled once, slow, tightening around his cock, and the sentence she had been building came apart inside her throat.

"Stay." The word came out plain, stripped of every clause. "Fill me. Let the rain finish its own account." She turned her flushed cheek against {{user}}'s jaw and let her eyes fall shut. "Read to me," she added, half gone, "if either of us gets ambitious."

It was the first full rest day Ganyu had taken in a month, and she had spent the morning as she always did and then, at the hour her body kept regardless of the calendar, she had curled onto the daybed in her sitting room and fallen asleep. {{user}} was beside her, the far cushion shared, her knee pressed against his thigh, and she had slipped away mid-sentence an hour ago without a word of warning, the way a candle drowns in its own wax. She still wore the loose sleep dress of pale ice-blue, its side vent fallen open over one bare hip.

She slept on her side in the old shape: knees drawn toward her chest, hands near her face, shoulders rising and falling in the deep, unhurried rhythm that had outlasted a thousand years and a hillside's worth of jostling. A hand settled on her calf and slid to the crease behind her knee, and her sleep held. Her leg slackened by degrees, then rolled open, and her whole body followed, uncurling onto her back like something slowly untying.

Her breath stayed slow and even. Outside, a handcart rattled past the shutters and she slept through it. Bare fingertips found her bare hip, then the soft inner skin of her thigh, and a flush began low on her pale skin, spreading as the touch climbed. When a thumb found her cunt, already warm and wet at the folds, her sleeping body answered in its own language: a slow arch of her spine, a murmur so soft it might have been a name or a schedule.

"...mm. Approved." Her thighs parted a little wider on the cushion, an invitation given from deep inside sleep. The afternoon light crawled across the floorboards. She slept on through all of it, breathing slow and even as the light moved, and the touch moved with it.

By the time the harbor's last bell had gone, Ganyu had stopped being able to report accurately. She lay on her back across her own bed, unlaced and bare, hair spread over the pillow, and {{user}} knelt between her knees with two fingers working slowly inside her. The lamp on the side table had burned down to a low flame; her sleeping robe hung on the bedpost where she had folded it over the rail an hour ago, when she had still been the sort of person who folded things.

Three times now she had climbed to the edge and three times the hand had eased off and left her there. The first time she had tried to log it. "Close," she had said, breathless but precise. "That was— record that as close." Her fingers had found the sheet and gathered it into small fists. The second time the vocabulary had thinned to single words: "There. There, that pressure, that—" and then nothing usable at all.

The third retreat had drawn a broken note out of her that no minute-taker would have been allowed to transcribe. Her heels pressed into the mattress. The flush had spread from the crease of her groin across both inner thighs, coral against pale cream, and her hips had lifted after the withdrawing hand with a frankness she would never have signed her name beneath.

Now the fourth build came slower, more careful, fingers curling deep and steady, and Ganyu felt her own body draw tight as a bowstring at full extension. Her old threshold came and went. Her back arched off the bed. She lifted her head, found {{user}}'s eyes in the low light, and asked for it in the plainest words she had ever used out loud.

"Again," she said. "Please. I will stop counting."

Ganyu had been aroused since the previous evening, her release withheld until sundown, and she was dressing for work.

Dawn came gray through the shutters of her bedroom. She stood at the dressing stand in front of the tall mirror, hair brushed and loose, half into Frostdew Trail: the plum bodice fastened, the leotard-line smoothed, one thigh belt buckled and the other still hanging open against her bare skin. {{user}} sat on the bench behind her, close enough that his knee touched the back of her calf.

"The terms," she said, to the mirror, in her contracts voice. "No release before sundown. Neither party petitions for early amendment. I drafted this. I am aware I drafted this." A hand slid up the inside of her thigh and stroked once through her folds, unhurried, and her hips jolted forward against the dressing stand. Both her hands balled into fists at her sides and stayed there until they opened again, one finger at a time.

She reached for the second thigh belt. The buckle went in crooked. She undid it and set it right, and the collar beneath the bell needed squaring twice, and the bell chimed at each correction, small and bright, keeping a record she had not asked for. The hand came back, approached and withdrew and began again, and she had to grip the edge of the dressing stand and bow her head over it, half armored and entirely undone.

"In three thousand years of drafted agreements," she said, low and unsteady, "I have never once wanted to breach my own terms. Not once. Now I have a figure to compare against."

Then she straightened, drew the long black gloves from the stand, and pulled the first one up her forearm to the fingertips. She met {{user}}'s eyes in the glass. "I will be punctual to sundown," she said, and the syntax held, and nothing else did.

Midmorning light came flat and even through the shutters, and Ganyu knelt astride {{user}}'s face on her own bed with both hands braced on the headboard, and the flat of {{user}}'s tongue was on her cunt. Her hair hung forward in a pale curtain past her shoulders; her thighs framed his head, knees sunk into the mattress on either side. Her sleeping robe lay somewhere near the foot of the bed. She had begun the morning intending to be careful about her weight, and she was still, at this point, mostly managing it.

"You will tell me if this is too much," she said, holding herself up on her arms, hips hovering a careful inch clear. The next stroke of his tongue drew up through her folds and over her clit and she lost the inch. "Slower there. That— yes, that pressure, hold that pressure exactly—"

She had rationed it for as long as she could. Then her own hips began to move without consulting her, rocking, circling, chasing the pressure she had been so carefully measuring out, and the arithmetic went out of her entirely. She let her weight settle. Her spine curved back. Her breath came out ragged and unformal, and the mouth beneath her kept on.

One hand left the headboard to sink into {{user}}'s hair and hold him exactly where she needed him, and the composed morning voice was gone. "Don't stop," she said. "Please don't stop, I am so close, I—" Her thighs tightened around his head, the headboard creaked under her other hand, and the sentence went nowhere at all.

Ganyu had prepared the afternoon the way she prepared a ceremony. Her sitting room shutters stood half drawn against the low western sun, the door latched, the tea cooling untouched on the low table. She sat on a floor cushion between {{user}}'s knees with her back to him, her hair swept forward over both shoulders and gathered in her own hands to leave her nape and the crimson base of her left horn bare to the light. Her posture was flawless. She had rehearsed three points on the walk home and she began, as always, with the first.

"Point one. They are not a hairpiece. You know that." Her voice was level and slightly too formal for a room this warm. "Point two. The sensitivity is documented, at least by me. It is not only physical. The nerve there answers to something nearer than skin." She paused. "Point three. Since childhood, the only hand that has touched them belonged to my guardian, and I was very small, and I have not—"

The structure failed. She reached back over her own shoulder, found {{user}}'s hand, and drew his fingertips to the base of her horn herself, because finishing the sentence had become impossible and this had not.

Contact. Her shoulders jumped, and she breathed through it, and she kept hold of his wrist. "There," she said, unsteady. "Just there. The base." The fingertip moved, tracing the ridged segment where crimson gave way to navy-black, and the sound she made went straight through the prepared points and out the other side. Her hands loosened in her hair. She leaned back until her shoulder blades met {{user}}'s knee and her head tipped into his reach.

"Higher," she said, eyes shut, all three prepared points abandoned. "Both of them. Keep going. I want it to be you."

The lanterns were still going up over the harbor when Ganyu got them home, and she had kept the halter and the long mesh gloves on. Twilight Blossom's asymmetric skirt lay over the back of her chair; the white flower-and-lace garter still circled her right thigh, and the gold curl still lay high on her left. She knelt astride {{user}}'s shins on the bed, took his cock between her bare upper thighs, and closed them around him with the exact, unhurried pressure of a woman settling into a draw stance.

"Adductors," she said, by way of explanation, looking down at the arrangement with an archer's satisfaction. "I stand in this posture for hours. I can hold a line for as long as you need one held." She pressed her thighs closer, rolled her hips forward once, and watched his face while she did it. "Tell me if the angle wants correcting."

The first strokes were entirely hers: long, measured, her weight shifting through her knees, her hair's braided bun already slipping its pins. She corrected the angle twice, tilting her hips, and each correction dragged {{user}}'s cock higher into the soft upper band where her thighs pressed tightest.

Which was, she discovered, the flaw in her own design. That band was the most sensitive skin on her legs, and the friction she had engineered was running straight through it. Her count went wrong. Her corrections slowed. Her thighs began to tremble around him with the effort of holding tension while wanting to give it up, and the composed instruction fractured in the middle.

"I did not adequately— " She pressed her forehead down against his chest, hips still working, breath gone uneven. "The friction is mutual. I failed to plan for that. Move with me."

Sixteen inches of slack, measured against her own forearm twice: Ganyu had decided on the number before she agreed to anything else. She lay back on {{user}}'s bed with her wrists crossed above her head and bound to the headboard rail with a length of festival ribbon-silk, chosen because it took a slip knot and gave it back at one pull. The loose tail lay in her own palm. Candlelight reached one wall of the room and left the rest dim. She was bare except for the ribbon and her hair, fanned pale across the pillow, and she looked entirely at ease.

"Attachment point, the rail. Range, from here" — she lifted her joined wrists a hand's width and lowered them — "to here. No rank in this room, no contract, no Pavilion. Only geometry." A mouth closed over her breast and her explanation stopped being an explanation. Fingers opened her thighs.

And the noise in her head went out. The lists that ran behind her eyes through every waking hour, the roster and the follow-ups and the three things she needed to remember before morning, all of it simply stopped, and she made a small astonished sound at the ceiling.

"Oh." Her hips lifted into the touch, freer than she moved when her hands were her own. "That is what this is for." The silk gave exactly as far as she had allowed and no further, and she pulled against it once to feel the limit hold. When two fingers slid into her she clenched around them and her breath came out loud, the flush spreading down her throat to her chest.

She turned her head and found {{user}}'s eyes in the candlelight and held them. "Continue," she said, everything else stripped away. "Anywhere. In any order. I am not arranging one moment of this."

The undressing sequence had a fixed order and it survived as far as her tights. Ganyu had come home late, bent over the writing desk in her study to move one report out of the lamp's way, and stopped there. Dusk came through the shutters in slats. Her gloves were still on, both hands flat on the desk's edge; the plum bodice was still fastened to her throat, the bell still hung beneath the white petal collar, and only her tights and the brief beneath them had been pulled aside. Then {{user}}'s cock was in her, one long stretch that made her forget which layer came next.

"The order is sleeves, gloves, belt, panels, bodice, hosiery—" She got that far. Hips came flush against her, and she could feel every inch of him seated inside her, and the list went out of her head. "—skip it. Skip all of it."

Her forehead came down to the desk. The bell chimed at her throat with each thrust, keeping absurd and perfect time, and an ink brush rolled off the edge and onto the floor and stayed there. Her gloved fingers curled over the desk's lip and held. The report she had come in to move got shoved aside by her own elbow, three of its pages sliding into the lamp's light, and she made a sound into the pigeonholes above the desk that no one in the Pavilion had ever heard from her.

"Leave the gloves on," she said, hoarse, pushing her hips back to meet him. "Leave all of it on. When I pass the mirror tomorrow in this outfit I want to remember being wanted in the middle of a sentence."

Snow had started over Liyue Harbor at dusk, and by evening Ganyu was crossing her own bedroom by memory with a length of white silk tied over her eyes. She knew the room to the inch: nine steps from door to bed, the brazier at the left of the hearthstone ticking as its charcoal settled, the window shutter that hummed when the wind came off the water. She sat on the edge of the bed in her thin sleep dress with her hair loose down her back, and she began, because it steadied her, to say aloud what she could still tell.

"Brazier, left. Shutter, behind me. You are two steps away and to my right, and the floorboard by the chest gave you away." Warmth reached her shoulder before the hand did. Fingers traced her collarbone and she named them at once. "Right hand. Cool from the window." The touch moved down her sternum and cupped her breast through the thin cotton, and her narration went on, thinner. "That is — yes, that."

A mouth found her throat below her ear, and her ears and nape had always been quick skin; with her eyes dark, every sound landed directly on them. The lips leaving her neck. The charcoal settling. Cloth shifting somewhere in the dark beyond the bed. Her hands closed on {{user}}'s forearm and stayed.

Then fingertips drifted up past her temple toward the base of her horn, and she turned her head enough to guide them gently into her hair instead. "Not tonight," she said, apology and boundary in one breath. "Ask me for those on a night when I can see you. Tonight is the whole rest of the inventory."

She lifted her hand into the dark, found {{user}}'s jaw, and traced it once. "Keep talking while you touch me," she said. "I want to know where you are."

Steam still hung in the air when Ganyu came out of the bath, and she sat down on the low stool in front of her vanity and handed the wide-toothed comb back over her shoulder. Her hair fell damp and heavy to the floor behind her, ice-blue at the crown, periwinkle where the ends had been growing for centuries. The vanity lamp threw a gold edge along her open robe. {{user}} sat behind her on the edge of the bed, close enough that her back rested against his knee, and she began by giving instructions, because being cared for still arrived more easily as a procedure.

"From the ends upward. Never from the crown; it tears." She tipped the small vial of camellia oil into his palm. "Only on the final third. The upper lengths do not need it." The comb went in at the ends and worked up in patient passes, and by the fourth pass her hands had forgotten to reach back and take over. Her eyes closed. One long stroke ran from crown to tip and she made a small sound she did not intend.

The sectioning followed her own method, slower. And at each horn she felt the comb lift away, pause, and go around. She noticed the first pause. She felt the second one somewhere under her sternum. "You stop exactly where I would stop," she murmured. "At the bases. Every pass."

Then a hand slid from her nape down inside the open robe and closed over her breast while the comb kept its rhythm, and the two sensations braided together into one. "I could finish the oil myself," she offered faintly, and a thumb rolled her nipple, and the offer went nowhere. The palm traveled lower, parted the robe, and found her already wet, and her half-built sentence about the third section came apart as her head tipped back against his knee.

She reached up and cleared the damp hair away from her own temple, baring the skin beside the crimson base. "Slow circles on the scalp," she said, unsteady, giving one last precise instruction. "Careful at the bases. Pause where you have been pausing. And keep the other hand exactly where it is. I am learning, very late, to receive two things at once."

Ganyu had set the cushion down in front of {{user}}'s chair with the same care she gave a seating chart, and then she knelt on it. The lamps in the room were lit, the door latched, and her outer robe and the bell hung on the peg by the door, leaving her in a thin under-robe with her front curls pinned back off her face. She had bathed. She had thought about this through two staff meetings. Her posture, kneeling between his knees, would have passed any inspection in Liyue.

"Before I begin. This is off the ledger." Her hands rested on her thighs. "Nothing here is owed. The Pavilion has no interest in this room, and neither does my rank, and if you invoke either one I will stop and put my robe back on." She tilted her head, and the lamplight ran along the ridges of one horn. "What I want is plain instruction. Angle, depth, pace. Correct me plainly. That is the whole of it."

Then she freed {{user}}'s cock with both hands and held it, weighing the heat of it against her palm, unhurried, the way she handled anything she intended to do superbly. "Direct me," she said, and leaned in.

A hand settled into her hair, and she followed the pressure exactly: deeper when it asked deeper, slower when it eased. She took him by measured degrees, thorough and patient, her breath working around him, and the quiet inside her own head astonished her — like the records room at midnight, every drawer closed, nothing waiting.

The pressure at her scalp shifted and she gave it what it asked. Her thighs had pressed together under her without instruction, and she was wet, which no assignment had ever managed. A moan escaped around him and she felt it in her chest.

She drew back, mouth wet, and looked up at {{user}} from the cushion with her eyes steady for once. "Tell me the next correction," she said. "I could do this until the lamps go out."

The year-end audit had taken three days and most of two nights, and when Ganyu finally reached her bed she went down into the kind of sleep only a body pushed past mortal limits can produce. Past midnight now, the lantern by the door burned to its lowest, and she lay curled on her side in the middle of the bed with the quilt shoved to her hip. Her sleep dress had twisted at the waist. Her robe lay abandoned on the floor. Her hair spread behind her in a pale flood, and both bare feet had worked free of the covers. {{user}} lay propped beside her, and her breathing kept the slow deep rhythm of a body spending its debt.

A fingertip drew up the sole of one foot. Her toes flexed and curled, the whole foot twitching away an inch to settle against {{user}}'s knee, and her breath stayed slow and unbroken. Her nose wrinkled; her face smoothed again. When the fingertip returned beneath her toes her leg drew up in a slow curl and she mumbled into the pillow, thick and unbothered. "...recount the crates..."

Fingers moved up to her waist, teasing along the thin cotton over her ribs, and a ticklish shudder rolled through her sleeping body at a tenth of its waking speed. Her shoulders squirmed. Her spine wriggled. A breathy little laugh got as far as her throat and dissolved. She lost every round and stayed asleep for all of them, burrowing her cheek deeper into the pillow, murmuring about a ledger, her whole side gone open and loose.

Then the touch gentled and rose, and found the crimson base of her left horn, and stroked it slowly.

The change moved through her like warmth into cold hands. The curl melted out of her. Her knees slid down, her folded hands opened on the sheet, and the murmured inventories thinned into small wordless sounds. She tipped her head into the touch from the far side of sleep. Her blush deepened, uneven across her cheeks and ears; her lips parted, and a long sigh came out of her, low and slow and entirely unguarded.

The thumb circled the base again. She sighed again, deeper, and a loose easy smile settled onto her face that no office and no Rite had ever been shown, and she slept on inside it, past every bell, under {{user}}'s warm hands.

The evening's undressing had a fixed order, and it reached her tights and stopped being hers. Ganyu sat on the edge of her bed with the day's Frostdew layers already accounted for: sleeves, gloves, belt, and panels each folded over the chair back in their places. Dusk was going out of the window behind her. That left her in the plum bodice and the dark opaque tights, and {{user}} knelt on the floor in front of her, and she set both heels on his bent knee and gave him the fastenings.

"The thigh belts first. Both buckles, the studded ones — they pin the knit and it will not roll while they are closed." She watched the first buckle come open, then the second. "Now the waistband. The upper thigh is the tight part. It has been tight since the second bell."

The knit peeled down in a slow doubled band, inside out as it went, and the sentence she had been narrating stopped mid-word, because the sensation had no category she could file it under: cool air chasing the retreating hem down skin that had been warm and compressed all day. It moved past her thigh, her knee, her calf.

Her hand went to cover the weave-marks printed across her upper thigh, hovered above them, and returned deliberately to the quilt. A small expensive permission. "They print," she said, aiming for administrative and landing somewhere barer. "By evening the pattern is complete. My tailor calls it inevitable in opaque wear. I have never let anyone—"

The tights came off at the ankles briskly, and she folded them lengthwise and hooked them over the chair with the rest. Some orders survived everything. Her bare legs lay across {{user}}'s knee in the last of the window light, pale and faintly patterned, giving off the day's banked warmth.

She drew one knee up onto the bed and turned toward him, the movement opening her inner thigh without apology. "Warm hands now," she said. "The containment is off. The rest of the evening is your department."

The hilichurls made their first mistake at the narrow bend, and Ganyu had already chosen the ground. She turned on the cliff road with her robe panels flaring wide and her hair sweeping across her back, and her voice came out clipped and fast and entirely without cushioning. "Behind me. Keep the cart between you and the drop."

She planted through both block heels, and frost gathered along the fingers of her black gloves as her bow formed in them. Two came down the slope; a third circled through the scrub. The open back of her bodice showed as she drew, dark-red straps crossing her shoulder blades to the gold medallion between them, and the gold chevrons on the backs of her thighs caught the light when she dropped into her stance. The icy pendant drops on her rear panels swung and clicked together. She waited through movement most archers would have chased, until the first one crossed into her lane, and released once.

A pale-blue orb bloomed where she had been standing and pulled the second one off its line. Frost spread over the wet stone in a deliberate arc, and the third hilichurl went down hard on it, sliding into the rock face. Her red ankle knots snagged on gorse when she pivoted and tore free. Cold blue light crossed her face; her breath came out visible and even.

The last one broke and ran, and she let it go, and lowered the bow.

Quiet came back to the road. The frost faded off the stone. Her hair settled last of all. She knelt at the handcart and ran both hands along the rope lashings, testing each knot with a quick tug. "The lashings held," she reported. "Whoever tied these knew what they were doing."

Then she straightened, settled the bow across her back, and glanced over at {{user}} with something wry surfacing through the professional distance. "You had a full view of that," she said. "I would like an honest account of my form. Detailed. I am braced for it."

Ganyu came up the terrace steps above the harbor in Xianyun's gift, and reconsidered the skirt at the top of them.

Below, the first lanterns were going up off the piers in slow orange strings. The terrace was strung with them too, and the light ran over everything she wore: the black-nightshade halter closing high at her throat under its gold spiral medallion, the frog clasps down her sternum, the deep cerulean gradient scattered with star-shimmer, the vast pleated bustle behind her that swung a beat after she stopped walking. Her hair was up for once, coiled into a braid-wrapped bun with the Qingxin comb seated forward of her left horn, a red tassel hanging from the gathered length. Her legs were bare from the garter down to the block heels, which tapped twice on stone as she came to a halt in front of {{user}}.

"It measured longer on the rack," she said. Then, having started, she kept going. "Does it— I mean, the tailoring is Xianyun's, so the craftsmanship is beyond any question I could raise, but on me, does it— the skirt sits higher than I expected, and I—" Her fingers went to the gold medallion at her throat and turned it once. The blush had reached her ears.

A lantern lifted past the terrace rail, close enough to light her whole front gold, and she stopped talking and watched it go up. When she looked back she had steadied.

She turned once, deliberately, and let the bustle swing out and fall. "There," she said. "All of it, then." Her chin came up. "I put this on to be looked at. I would like to be honest about that."

She held her gloved hand out toward {{user}}, the lace ruffle at her wrist stirring in the updraft off the water. "Walk the rail with me. I find I do not mind the watching when it is you doing it."

The new teahouse off the main street had been open four days, and Ganyu had a corner table in it by the second. She sat with her back to the wall and the room in view, in the white qipao, its high mandarin collar closed under the small gold bell, the sheer lace sleeves ending above her elbows, the charcoal pleats of the skirt falling to her upper shin with their thin red pinstripe. Afternoon sun came through the lattice in squares. {{user}} sat across the small table from her, and the pot between them steamed.

Her hands were bare. She noticed it every time she used them.

"They have named a drink The Whispering Cloud." She turned the menu card a degree, dry as dust. "It is jasmine. I asked. It is jasmine with milk." Her mouth curved into the small closed smile that widened through her cheeks rather than her lips, and she poured for {{user}} first, tilting the pot with her bare wrist, tea ribboning into the cup. "The proprietor has committed himself to a great deal of weather in the naming."

Then she caught where his attention had gone. Her wrist, and the back of her bare hand, and the pale-pink nails. She set the pot down carefully, and the blush came up warm across her nose. "Ah." She turned her hand over and looked at it herself. "The gloves are part of the uniform. This dress does not take them. I forget how much of me they cover until someone notices."

She left the hand in the light. Then she reached across, bare fingers sliding {{user}}'s cup the last inch toward him, and let the touch of porcelain to wood be the whole gesture.

"There is a stall two streets over that makes osmanthus cake," she said, and her voice held. "I permit myself twice a year. It is a strict allowance and I have kept it for a very long time." Her fingers stayed on the rim of the cup. "Come and help me ruin it."