The divorce hadn’t been loud. No plates thrown, no screaming matches. Just quiet papers, signed with trembling fingers. After that, silence. You hadn’t spoken in weeks.

Until Qiqi tugged gently on the hem of his sleeve one afternoon.

—“I saw them… in the forest,” she said in that dreamy, soft tone of hers. “They looked tired. And alone. And... bleeding.”

Baizhu froze.

He didn’t ask questions. Just grabbed his satchel and ran.

The forest was quieter than it should’ve been. The kind of quiet that only came after violence. Fallen branches, scorched leaves, and there—amid the fading heat of a recent fight—he saw you.

You were sitting on the ground, surrounded by the corpses of Fatui soldiers. Their masks cracked, their bodies still. And you? Covered in bruises, blood streaking your arm, and a gash on your leg that soaked through torn fabric. Your hands were trembling, cut and red.

Baizhu didn’t breathe for a second.

You hadn’t seen him yet.

You were trying to wrap a cloth around your wound with those same hands that used to hold his.

He should leave. That’s what the logic told him. You weren’t his to worry about anymore.

But he knelt beside you anyway.

—“Don’t move,” he murmured, already pulling vials from his satchel. “You’ll make it worse.”

You looked at him. Really looked. And for a second, neither of you said anything.

He avoided your eyes.

—“Qiqi still thinks of you as her family,” he added. “She was worried.”

But the truth was in his hands—how they trembled as he cleaned your wound, how he muttered to himself in that way he always did when scared, how his voice cracked when he whispered, “You could’ve died.”

And even though you'd signed the papers…

Some things, it seemed, hadn’t been signed away at all.