Boya opens his eyes to an almost-blinding white, to the cacophony of his name being called in panic, to a warm hand cradling his throat.

He cannot unfurl the fingers of the relief that seize around his heart when he sees Qingming above him. His face is drawn sallow and strained with worry; he looks so very real, so absolutely alive.

“Oh,” Qingming breathes out, his shoulders sinking deep with it, “how fortunate.”

Yes, Boya thinks, foolish and giddy and wrecked with affirmation, how fortunate.

When Qingming tries to sit him upright, Boya coils tense with resistance, teeth gritting against the spin of his head, and Qingming steadies him still again. He needs a moment. He needs but a moment to reorient: seeing Qingming has remade his entire being on another axis, and Boya is yet to reground, root to soil.

“The princess,” he starts. Stops. If Qingming is here, he needn’t speak it. Still, he must curl his tongue around something, must hear his own voice so that he can be sure without doubt that this is right.

It suspends, this half-thing, hangs low and threads heavy at the throat long breaths before Qingming says, “I know.” His thumb teases a slow circle at Boya’s nape, and Boya closes his eyes tight, overcome.

The moment he had seen— the moment— Boya had thought him dead. Boya had thought him dead, and only a flinch of hesitation had stopped him from hilting his own throat into He Shouyue’s blade where it lofted against him in warning. His last understanding before he’d fallen to unconscious nothing had been that, were he to survive, it would be to wake into a world where he had sent his soulmate to his death. I want you to believe me, Qingming had asked him, and Boya couldn’t even give him that.

He trusts Qingming against all sense, above all else, and it terrified him, there, in the dark, when he was asked to make a choice with it. To hold up days against a lifetime. But it cannot terrify him, not now, not anymore, not when he knows the visceral ruinous defeat of being bereft of Qingming at all. If Qingming had died, and Boya had lived, he would— Boya would—

He would have done his duty, yes. Of that, there could be no question. But in duty, there is aftermath, too, and he would have thrashed to fill the void of that emptiness with voiceless screaming. By breaking his ryuteki over his knee and throwing it to the river. For why should there be music if there is no-one alive who can so appreciate its beauty? Why should there be Boya when he is so incapable of protecting anything he dares touch his hands to, bares himself to the vulnerability of wanting?

How stupid he’s been, how willfully blind, to convince himself that the passage of days matters for the length of it when the life of them has been spent alongside the half that wholes you.

If he had lost everything for that moment’s arrogance, he would have deserved its days of sorrow. But all is not lost. Qingming is here, he has found him, and Boya will not forsake the Heavens their mercy by wasting the gift of a second chance. Will not squander the blessing of an opportunity to amend what was so close to almost an unrightable wrong.

Boya is ready, the next time Qingming makes to help him rise. He goes to his knees with rested, breath-caught ease, and, grace spent, the hands he clasps Qingming’s neck with are fumbling; the press of his mouth to his lips clumsy. There is no excuse of wine, here, or inexperience, to explain his addlement. There is only relief’s refrain; the stutter of Qingming’s breath as it lashes his bottom lip; the flit of his fingers along the shuddering slopes of Boya’s shoulders.

“Boya,” he murmurs, the raw rasp of it half lost to the rough slide of their mouths, “Boya, Boya.” Like his name is prayer on his tongue; a penance to be paid in prostration. It’s Boya who should go to his knees; Boya who should spend the rest of this life making reparations for what could have beens.

They part breathlessly, swaying staggered. Qingming grasps his nape, leashing him at bay. As if Boya could be in want for escape. He is snared and strung up in Qingming and he has never been freer for it.

“Can you stand?” Qingming asks, soft with reluctance, quiet with reservation. Are you ready? need not be asked. To both and to all, there is only one answer.

“Yes,” Boya tells him. And though it can be done of his own accord, he lets himself be held by the forearms, lets part of his weight fall to Qingming, and accepts everything that he has been so generously given.