I often think of touch starvation, and being so deprived that you don't even realise it's missing. Take LWJ, all those years with his robes, and his sticky-fingered son, being the only things to touch his skin. You get used to it. You don't really know how else it could be like.

It's not as if Hanguang-jun is a vast consumer of erotic literature, but even in the poetry he does like to read the descriptions of a lover's touch sound a bit implausible to him, a bit improbable. A bit too much. Surely not like that.

His body is as much his instrument as his qin, or as his sword, and he takes care of it – knows it well, knows it intimately.

And his body is never caught unawares by his own touch. Oh, maybe the stray brushing of hair against his back (where the sensations perpetually numbed and distorted, extremely uncomfortable at times), a hand trailed across skin may leave a lingering tingling trail...

Sometimes the unexpected wetness of a rabbit's damp, velvety nose.

But really, Hanguang-jun in clinical and methodical in his approach to his needs. There is little room for whimsy there because there's little room for whimsy in the rest of his life.