Although it technically counts as obedience, to Xiao, when he replies to Zhongli's instruction, it is as much a gift as a compliance. Everything feels many times the impression an ordinary person might experience; the intersection of a creature who has been touch starved all his life but also never thought he wanted that to change until this specific person crossed that threshold. Because Zhongli holds his face, and Zhongli draws him close by the waist, and Zhongli tells him to open his mouth but all of it feels like Zhongli responding to Xiao's almost painstaking trust. It overwhelms him, elicits the thin needy gasps from the caged bird as much as the kisses do, the acknowledgment of existing not as a thing but as a living being...wanted for himself and not only nor merely what he is supposed to do or embody.

Zhongli's touch carries weight with it but also heat, a molten core to the earth or the sun basked mountainside. Xiao shivers almost violently, the beading trill of a keen in his throat with the longer deeper kiss, soft little sounds that escape him in a flurry so unlike his usual stoic decorum, like he's being unraveled in a way only his general can achieve. Small hands grasp with near desperation with fists full of beautiful silk, clinging to him as if somehow afraid he will disappear or change his mind, Xiao's legs pinned in even tighter in a way that makes it impossible not to notice both his own body and Zhongli's. He doesn't really understand, only that it incites something in him to want to chase that feeling that's both uncomfortable and dizzily pleasant, acting on instinct, craning his thin neck back to better kiss him while grinding his hips down in a way that sends heat flooding from the tips of his toes to the crown of his head.

In the past, any touches he received were those of demand and expectation as the kingdom's oracle. A golden king but only in name. The priests held the real power and because Xiao was raised to recognize this system as the truth, despite his prowess that protected this country at his own cost, despite everything, he never questioned it...or at least, not enough to change it. Those times he has found any enough courage to wonder a little more, wound themselves up with the visitations of his general, most of which he did not fully understand either for the longest time, the shred of comfort golden lit and yet the very firmament of the land on which they all dwelled: ageless and undaunted. Not swayable as the wind, which had Xiao not been taken so very young, perhaps not capturable either, but the pieces on the board fell where they had.

Still, Xiao doesn't know if he can regret any of it if it has brought him to this place and time now, Zhongli's touch a scalding brand he wishes would scar to help him never question if it is real or not. The glow of his own mark is effervescent even in the dark, and indeed the light of Xiao itself almost seems incandescent with a barely-there sound, a song no one else can hear but the general who holds him. When the kiss stops for breath alone, Xiao is dizzy, only the dark saving him from showing the full pink flush across his skin, though the swollen nature of his mouth is obvious still, and eyes dilated so widely that the gold of them is like the crown of a solar eclipse. One hand stays curled in Zhongli's garment, the other tentatively, shakily reaching up to touch his face, fingertips dancing across his cheekbone: this is real, you are real, you are here.

This is what the bird seems to say without saying, trembling with want he did not know he was capable of.