His throat is tight. Ridiculous to feel this way, with the joy and lassitude all through him, as close to someone he loves as they can get without crawling into each other's bodies; to feel on the razor's edge of tears grieving something that never happened with come still drying on his drawers. But he feels Francis nodding against him, and remembers what were the last words of the man in front of him until they weren't, and still expects the way he's pressing against the side of Francis' chest now to be careless, breaking through a boundary he hadn't realised he'd built between himself and this man.

The move to get close enough to Francis that Francis won't see the tears is instinctive the moment they start to spill over. Raju doesn't know where he'd intended to put his face: the side of Francis', with the odd angle and the plains of the side of his head not the shape his face needs to press itself against, the curve between the softness of Francis' jaw and his neck that needs an odd angle to get to, and Raju's hand against his side stops its pressure to spread out over all the space that it can cover instead, feeling the heat and softness of the skin there and the bones deceptively solid beneath it. He takes a hard breath, lets it out openmouthed.