In the wake of Qingming’s revelation, the night bleeds out into a sombre quiet.

It is not silent, of course, but none of the sounds from the subdued hour that wisp and wander their way through the pavilion can compete with the noise of Boya’s head. Can hold a flame to the echoes remnant of memories that are now Boya’s, too, in testimonial witness.

Boya had misjudged Qingming, and so he had misread him. Of all his misrepresentative estimations, though, one has proven itself to hold every drop of its water: Qingming’s tongue is a clever one. His mastery of wielded word may very well be second to none.

Only one ever showed me kindness, he had said, and I killed him. And in the rawest sense, yes, he had. His master is dead. Qingming’s hand had dealt that fate unto him. But the truth is not so simple. The truth can be told in any number of ways and still ring hollow alike any lie. Boya has seen Qingming’s tears in an elsewhere past, and his sad, pensive smile shaping around the lip of his cup in this present, and he knows: yes. Qingming killed his master, just as admitted, and it was a mercy that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

“Have you lost your taste for the wine?” Qingming’s ask is gentle, jovial; it mutes all else underwater.

Boya stirs back to himself. He didn’t realise he had left, but he must have. His mouth tastes tart; stale. His free hand is now fisted against his knee. His cup is half empty, resting all but discarded on the table of his lap.

“The princess should be awake by now,” Boya says. At least, so he has faith enough to believe, and so he hopes for in the spaces where that faith is lacking. The terrible truth of it is that she is the furthest thing from his thoughts in this moment, and so she is the safest to speak of.

“She will keep a while longer,” Qingming says. It is not entirely teasing, but it is not— Qingming must know he’s pricking ire when he speaks in this way. He cannot be blind to the welts his words can leave, nor unreasoned to how they sting.

Boya wonders if Qingming knows where his head truly is; can see the wander of his heart. He feels here, present, with Qingming, yet nowhere known or nearby. Turned towards the light of his displacement, he can’t help but think he is being— played with, not unkindly, but to distraction. The skin of his face is drawn too-tight across his bones. The chill that’s bitten in beneath his robes has sunk under the meat of him and met with his marrow. He can’t seem to shake it free again.

Perhaps it is the pause that itches its own accord beneath Qingming’s skin that moves him to so disrupt it again before Boya can regather and respond. “There can’t be more than a cup left each, if that,” he adds. “It would be a waste to leave it to spoil.”

It’s beseeching, and Boya feels his cheeks burn with it, hotter to every word. “Yes,” he says, setting his cup down on his table. “All right.” His reply is too ready, betraying that there was never any alternative at all to begin with, no argument, no opposition.

Qingming smiles, a crooked, ducking shy curl of his mouth, and when he leans forward, up onto his knees, Boya is strung forward, too, to meet him halfway. Have you bewitched me? he thinks, and does not ask. He can’t debase himself with the speaking of it, not when he already knows its answer.

His body does not feel like it is his own, the blade of its hilt slipped free of his grip. The gust of Qingming’s surprised exhale is warm where it brushes his mouth, damp. The press of his lips is anchoring and fracturing all at once. “Boya,” he murmurs, and murmurs, and murmurs again, lips shaping it against his skin until Boya finally hears it. Then, “Is that so?”

Boya chokes roughly on his own scoff, drawing back a sliver of a flinch. What a thing to be asked. How can he be sure of anything else but this? He had never realised in all his years to the day of now that he had been bent so to loneliness until Qingming had come into his life and curled around him. Until Qingming had fit them together; reshaped them each to bound totality.

There is too much of Boya, now, to keep held down in the make of his own body. He's grown out of his own bounds. There is nowhere for him to put his unmaking excess.

Boya’s tongue is too thick in his mouth, leaden behind his teeth, but he has always best spoken his pieces through physicality, and so his answer is more aptly given in action. Qingming predicts him, preempts him; he slips his hand beneath the fan of Boya's hair, threads his fingers through the sheaf of it and parts it from his nape. When Boya stutters forward again, swaying spellbound and shivering, the mouth that meets his there is parted open, waiting ready. It is all he can do to reach, blind, until his hands moor on Qingming’s knees, in his lap, fisting tightly around the handholds he can find.

There is nowhere else for him to go; there is nothing else for him to do. He can only push in, and push in, shaking and fog-headed and somehow made purer than he’s ever been. He can only hope that the gentle, guiding coax of Qingming’s mouth against his own will remedy the ruinous undoing spilling out of him and return it back in a form that is not so utterly overwhelming.

Boya spares a parting final thought, at least, for the dregs of wine that will waste after all.