Qingming turns away, and stalls. Having Boya at his back, in this moment, after these words, is enough to give him— pause, in a space where there is no room for it. Boya’s name hangs heavy in his mouth, unswallowed.

He flattens his hands to the sliding silk-screen doors, grounding himself to the grain of the wood on his palms. He feels the motion to throw them open coil through his shoulders, but he does not yet go to cast himself back out into the dark from whence he snuck in.

“Boya,” he says. Speaking his name aloud does not levy its burden any. Still, just— one last time. A fool’s try. Qingming cannot convince a convicted man, so that is not the purpose of it. Then, he does not much think he can comfort this convicted man, either. Still, for the days they have had together, he owes Boya his trying and his failing both. It is the least he can do; it is everything he can give.

The clatter of Boya’s sword where it falls from his hand to meet the floor is too loud in a night that’s left hollowed out, dead for the absence of anyone still living save them.

Qingming turns back, slow, and slower still. He listens to the creak of the floorboards as Boya’s weight tips into the backs of his heels in counterpoint. As if he is on the cusp of breaking into flight. Qingming has to wonder where it is that Boya could even run to.

“Leave,” Boya tells him. His voice clearly wants for firmness, but he is shivering, now, far too much for it to take. Then, “You will need the rest.” It’s a bare plea that wishes it could be a command.

Qingming, however thought to be by nature, is not one to rebuke a reasonable request asked for earnestly. And this, raw though it might be, from the wound through to the wield, is reasonable. Boya is right to not want to see him. What is the sight of Qingming to him, at this hour, but a portent of horrible things? He has brought ruinous question to the sparse certainty Boya has been able to call his own. He has irrevocably marred the shape of his very life.

Is it him that courts such misfortune, Qingming wonders, neither for the first nor the last time in his long baned life, or is he the misfortune courted?

It is the best he can do for either of them to let Boya lie and leave this be. The light of the morning will not ease its burden, but the day has its ways to make the shape of sufferances keen.

He trusts his judgement. His path is clear. His heart feels no falter.

And yet— and yet. Qingming stalls. Again, he stalls, and he does not acquiesce; he does not leave. “It is not me,” he says, soft-voiced but sharp-tongued, “that will need luck or rest for tomorrow.”

Boya’s fraught expression, cleaved stark by the burnt low candles, contorts into something even uglier, caved in around grief and fear and half-mad anger.

Qingming has always been weak for scared raw things. Hurts know hurts; the vulnerable have ways of finding one another, out in the wide dark of the terrible, beautiful world. He takes the steps he needs to reach out, and accepts the slap to his wrist, whip quick, a bitter throbbing sting. He expects the shove to his chest that follows as Boya cracks and crumbles and crowds into him. He endures the fist of Boya’s shaking hands in his collar.

The screen door is solid against Qingming’s back. Boya is sand slipping through Qingming’s fingers, tear-wet wide-eyed and scared, mouth parted around his shallowing pants. He does not speak, though his tongue, pink and wet, flicks against the backs of his teeth; curls as though to make sense of the shape of words he can’t sound out.

“It will be all right,” Qingming tells him, because this is, often, what people wish to hear, and it is not, in a sense, a lie. Boya tenses up taut; his nostrils flare around his exhale. His eyes, now a drowned black, dart off to track after the steady drift of Qingming’s hands up from his sides. Qingming is gradual in this, gentle. He gives Boya every moment he can to draw away before he finally, at long last, closes his palms over the backs of Boya’s knuckles to snare him.

Boya whimpers, bitten off, like it has been struck out of him. His shocked flinch feels out Qingming’s grasp for give, but finds it, and mercy, to be absent.

Qingming makes a hushed sound of his own, soothing. He squeezes down when Boya’s trembling arcs, in turn, the tremors so harsh in their relentless roil that Qingming thinks he might soon shake free of his own skin.

“It will be all right,” Qingming tells him again, because the repetition gives it power. The want wills it stronger.

Boya’s jaw grits as he swallows thickly. But, surely as the turn of the hours and the flow of the tide and their march towards the inevitable, he calms. Gradual, first, and then all at once, until the clutch-creased collar of Qingming’s robe is all that is left that could evidence his almost unmaking.

He unlatches his fingers, tentative. Qingming releases his hands in trade. A fair enough equivalence.

“Leave,” Boya repeats.

This time, Qingming concedes to it. He does not linger in the recharting of the motions of departure; does not wait behind with hopeful idling. The doors part beneath his hands; he spills out, and he goes, heading back to his room, where he will soon sleep his restless sleep. He manages each of his every single steps without the preambling hesitation of a glance back, to his gladness. Another sight of Boya may well spill him over into his own unmaking, were he to fall prey to the urge to chance it.