He didn't waver under the sudden impact of ice water. Everything felt so dead and finite now, everything torn down to the primitive level. A cough escaped his frozen blue lips giving rise to the taste of metal and concrete. Trickles of the ice water ran the same routes across his boney body.

'Shit.'

Failure felt like this, failure to save people. The scene ran over repeatedly to add salt to his mental wounds.

…

-"You've accumulated too much 'baggage' here. It's time to lighten you load."-

Flashes came and death followed. His eyes blanked out and mind scrambled into an accumulation of malice.

The black dog inside him howled with childish delight in such carnage.

The rest became a blur of sirens and screaming.

Then the touch of a dainty hand awoke him from his personal limbo. Her face was dirty with powdered concrete and hair limp from sweat. Between her breaths she spoke, "It's already over."

…

No, it was never over here. People never got a chance to live in complete peace here, the forces that be made sure to remind people of that. The foreboding shadow it cast was a constant reminder of things lost and things better forgotten.

His hand reached out toward the dial turning it toward hot. The water remained cold as ever as it continued running in its systematic pattern. He was shirtless and barefooted yet hadn't taken his pants off before entering the shower room. The weight of soaked cloth tugged at his waist and legs but he paid no heed to it. Outstretched before his red orbs were his hands with nails filed down and colored in that failure reddish-brown stain.

After the chaos he attempted to help dig for any survivors leading to his worn and bloodied hands.

It proved fruitless.

He slammed his back against the adjacent shower wall of the church. He never bothered asking why there was such a thing built inside this church and assumed the Bishop had some lucrative reasoning for it.

At that moment the door slid open to reveal her. The woman he held envy toward was standing there with eyes that foretold of many emotions. She still was wearing that worn coat, now farther riddled with cuts, and a short skirt. The moment was too tense to his liking with neither of them speaking but instead playing their cards by staring.

-But the usual glares they once shot to each other were but forgotten and replaced by sympathy. War games were not to be played now and unspoken treaties had been signed to be so. She walked into the pouring cold droplets and sat at a remotely comfortable distance from him. He followed suit and slid down to a seated position still keeping small eye contact.

The water keep running and cleaning of the immediate stains of fighting.

Black and brown muddled together as the dirt whirled toward the shower's center drain. There was silence between them, silence was all there ever was between them. Time didn't hasten nor did it slow its gradual pace, time simply felt as if it didn't exist here.

She sat with her knees clasp to her chest and partially hidden eyes focused on the drain before them. Porcelain was not how he would describe her skin, porcelain was weak and breakable, and she wasn't. Inner strength that she held, something he would admit he had no true grasp of, was not a property of porcelain.

Then as a whisper, not brash and affronted as he treated all other things, he spoke. He wanted to know why she entered, why she followed, he just wanted to know the why of her actions. The strangeness of uttering her name gartered surprise on his expression. Not too often had he said her name and never had he spoken it to reach out.

"Naoto."

She looked over with strains of her dark hair blocking most of her visibility. Her face was grave as his, through almost softened from her usual strong demeanor. He assumed she too felt weight of failure and the uselessness of one's own actions.

"Yes?"

She responded almost mechanically. He took his gaze from her and returned to looking in the direction of the drain before he spoke again.

"Why?"

{Author's Notes: I really don't know where this going, consider it a fic exploring the emotions of the character. For once I'm straying from pairing the two and keeping relatively a gen fic, but feel free to see what you will.

All comments/favs/crits are welcomed and thanked.}