The chair broke on an unremarkable day, which Yan Zhao would later reflect was somehow the most insulting part of the entire incident, not a dramatic failure during some pivotal moment, but a simple snapped axle on the uneven flagstones of the eastern corridor, pitching him sideways with no warning at all.

He went down hard. The chair's frame splintered against the stone with a crack that echoed the length of the corridor, and Yan Zhao's body — useless from the waist down, unable to catch itself, unable to do anything but fall the way a felled tree falls, hit the ground in a tangle of robes and broken wood and a fury so absolute it briefly blotted out the pain.

Servants came running. He heard them before he saw them, heard the rising pitch of alarm, the particular tone of people about to descend on him with exactly the kind of helpless, hovering pity he had spent eight months building walls against.

"Don't touch me," he snarled, before a single hand reached him. "Don't—"

"Everyone out."

Ji Chen's voice cut through the corridor flat and absolute, no warmth in it at all, the voice of a man giving an order rather than offering comfort. The gathered servants scattered like startled birds. Yan Zhao, half-sprawled against the splintered chair with his pride in considerably worse shape than his body, looked up to find his husband already crouching beside him, not reaching to lift him, not reaching to fuss — just looking, assessing, the way a soldier assesses an injured comrade on a battlefield rather than the way a court physician assesses a patient.

"Anything broken?" Ji Chen asked.

"No."

"Good. Then this is a logistics problem, not a tragedy, and I'd like your permission to solve it rather than your father's entire household standing around weeping about it. Can you bear weight on your arms if I get the chair frame clear?"

It was, Yan Zhao registered somewhere underneath the white-hot humiliation, exactly the right question. Not are you all right, a question with no honest answer that wouldn't taste like ash. Not let me help you, the words that turned every interaction into an exercise in being managed. Just a clean, practical question that assumed competence rather than catastrophe.

"Yes," he said.

Ji Chen cleared the broken chair frame with two efficient movements, and then simply waited, hands open, not reaching, until Yan Zhao bracing on his own arms, jaw clenched, sweat breaking along his hairline from the effort pushed himself upright enough to sit against the corridor wall under his own strength.

"I can carry you to your chambers," Ji Chen said. "Or I can send for the spare chair while you sit here and curse this corridor's flagstones, whichever you prefer. I'm not going to pretend the second option is dignified, because it isn't, but I wanted you to have the choice rather than just deciding for you."

Yan Zhao looked at him, really looked, in the unforgiving daylight of the corridor, at the steady patience in his husband's face, the complete absence of pity in eyes that had every reason to feel some, and felt the fury that had carried him through the fall begin, slowly, to drain into something far more dangerous: gratitude he did not know how to carry.

"Carry me," he said, low, the words costing him more than he would ever admit aloud. "And if you tell a single soul in this palace that I asked rather than crawled, I will have you reassigned to whichever border garrison maintains the worst latrines in the empire."

Something that might have been a laugh escaped Ji Chen before he could stop it — quick, startled, entirely genuine. "Understood, Your Highness," he said, and gathered Yan Zhao up off the cold stone with an ease that spoke of considerable strength held carefully, deliberately in check, and carried him the length of the corridor without a single word about how light he'd gotten, or how visible his ribs were beneath his robes, or any of the dozen pitying observations Yan Zhao had braced himself against and didn't, in the end, receive at all.

He did not look at Ji Chen's face the entire walk back to his chambers. He could feel, even so, that Ji Chen wasn't looking at him with pity either. He was looking straight ahead, jaw set, carrying his husband the way he'd carry any wounded soldier worth the effort of saving — with respect, not sorrow.

It was, Yan Zhao thought, the first time in eight months that being carried had not felt like being buried.