The bathing chamber had become, over the weeks since the wedding, a quiet battleground of its own, the one space in the palace where Yan Zhao's pride and his body's limitations met without any audience to perform for, and where he had, for the first month of his marriage, insisted on managing entirely alone, locking the door against servants and husband alike with a stubbornness that left him exhausted and occasionally bruised from the effort.

It was Ji Chen who finally, gently, refused to let the standoff continue.

"You nearly drowned last week," he said, standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and an expression that held none of the pity Yan Zhao had braced for and all of the calm, unbudging practicality that had slowly become familiar. "Jiang Wu found you because you called for him, which means some part of you already knows you need help in here. I would simply rather be the one who helps, since I don't intend to treat it as anything worth flinching over."

"This is not a negotiation."

"No," Ji Chen agreed. "It's a husband telling another husband that he'd like to help him bathe without either of them pretending it's an act of charity. That's all this is. No pity, no fuss, just hands that are useful and willing. You can throw me out if you truly can't bear it, and I'll respect that. But I'd ask you to actually consider it first, rather than refuse out of habit."

Yan Zhao, soaking in water gone lukewarm from the time he'd spent arguing rather than bathing, found he had no honest counterargument left. He was tired — bone-tired, the particular exhaustion of a man who had spent eight months treating every small task as a battle to be won alone or not at all and some quiet, weary part of him had simply run out of will to keep fighting this particular war.

"Fine," he said, low, and hated how much it cost him to say it.

Ji Chen entered without ceremony, rolled his sleeves with brisk efficiency, and set about the task with the same matter-of-fact competence he brought to everything, washing Yan Zhao's hair with careful, unhurried hands, supporting the weight of his upper body when the angle required it without once making the support feel like rescue, working in a silence that asked nothing and judged nothing.

It was, Yan Zhao realized somewhere in the middle of it, the first time in eight months that another person's hands had touched him without an agenda attached, not a physician assessing damage, not a servant performing duty, not a court official measuring his usefulness by what remained of his body. Just hands, careful and competent, doing a task because it needed doing and because the man doing it had decided, apparently without complicated motive, that Yan Zhao was worth the doing.

"You're staring," Ji Chen observed, mild, working a tangle free from the ends of Yan Zhao's hair.

"I'm thinking."

"About?"

Yan Zhao was quiet for a long moment, water dripping from his hair, his husband's hands steady against his shoulders, and found that the thing he wanted to say was both entirely true and entirely too dangerous to voice aloud.

"About how long it has been," he said instead, carefully, "since anyone touched me without wanting something from the touching."

Ji Chen's hands stilled, just briefly, against his shoulders.

"I don't want anything from this," he said, quiet, careful in turn. "I want you to be comfortable. I want you to stop treating every kindness like a trap waiting to spring shut. That's the whole of it. I promise you, Yan Zhao, that's the whole of it."

"You keep using my name."

"Would you rather I didn't?"

Yan Zhao considered this, considered the careful, patient man behind him, the warm water, the strange unfamiliar quiet of being cared for without cost attached, and found, to his own quiet astonishment, that he did not want Ji Chen to stop at all.

"No," he admitted, voice rough. "I find I don't mind it."

It wasn't much. It was, he was beginning to understand, exactly the kind of small admission that was, for a man like him, enormous — and judging by the way Ji Chen's hands resumed their careful work with a new, deliberate gentleness, his husband understood that too.