It should be him.
He imagines this scenario so many times, has so many nightmares that it doesn't seem real.
He should have resisted taunting her. She should have resisted tearing away the monocle and the hat. When her eyes had widened, he shouldn't have run. She shouldn't have come after him. God, she shouldn't have come after him.
Pandora sits heavy in his pocket. Snake is smirking at him.
Between them, she falls with a wet gasp, blood already pouring onto her uniform.
The breath has been ripped out of his lungs.
It's snowing.
Kaito's not sure what he does next-but he knows it's over within seconds—it's over the second Snake decided to touch Aoko. Kaito doesn't kill the other man, though he wants to—because no one is supposed to get hurt.
Instead, he drops to his knees beside her, gathering her broken body into his arms.
She's smiling and she's pulling him down and he can feel her breath, ragged, warm, shallow, against his skin. "Sorry. I messed things up again."
He chokes out her name.
She presses her lips to his and Kaito can taste the metallic tang of blood.
"It's ok," she whispers. "I forgive you."
She should hate him. God. If only she hated him.
He holds her like he'll never let go. He won't ever let go.
"Let me go," the words fall from her lips, like she can read his mind. Stupid Aoko and her stupid always knowing everything that goes on inside his head.
Well, he'll be damned if he does. Be damned if he lets her die here, cold and lonely on the roof, decades too early, bleeding out in the snow. Be damned if he has to carry the empty shell of her to her father, be damned if he never again sees the light in her bright blue eyes, be damned if he never tells her the truth—two truths, one that he can't tell her and the other he never has the courage to.
Pandora has taken everything from him.
It owes him her life, at the very least.
With shaking hands he reaches into his jacket pocket—stained with her blood, stained with the tears of the jewel that will save her life—and he shoves Pandora at her lips.
"Let me go," she repeats, voice already fading. He screams at her—a combination of begging, of cursing and her name falling like a prayer from his lips. Aoko just smiles at him, touches his cheek.
Every mask he'd ever put on to protect himself shatters to pieces and he knows beyond knowing that he cannot lose her. Let her hate him later. Let her rage and cry and scream and beat against him for stealing away her right to oblivion.
For now, all he wants is for her to live. To draw the next breath, to be able to rage and cry and scream, to continue existing.
She still doesn't drink, so he raises the jewel and he lets the tears slip between his own lips, lets the bitterness gather in his mouth and pool beneath his tongue. His gloves are soaked with his tears mixed with hers, mixed with the jewel's, and blood, still warm, and all Kaito can think as he reaches to catch her chin, to tilt her head up toward him is not here, not now, not on my watch-
Kaito's never denied that he's selfish.
He bends to kiss her, parting her lips with his tongue. She's too weak to resist and he covers her mouth with his own until he hears her swallow.
And then-and then he drinks from the jewel himself-because though he's never wanted immortality, despised it since the beginning, he can never stand the thought of her being alone.
When Nakamori-keibu finally manages to get past the lock on the door to the roof, he finds nothing except traces of blood already frozen in the snow.
Kaito's already stolen her away, nausea burning at the pit of his stomach, Pandora burning in the pocket of his suit jacket.
He sits by her bed all night, watching as her chest rises and falls, over and over, as if he looks away for a single second she might stop.
She wakes at dawn the next day. He's fallen asleep and wakes when her fingers tangle through his hair.
"Kaito?" She sounds confused-her voice is hoarse. Pandora might have kept her alive, but there's still a bullet hole in her throat.
He thinks he might have cried-might have sobbed her name and then thrown his arms around her, might have buried his face in her shoulder-might have kissed her again-but then she asks how she's still alive and his stomach plummets.
He tells her everything. Tells her about his father's murder. Tells her about the mantle he takes up. Tells her about Pandora. About what he did to her, what he did to himself.
When he's done, she's in tears.
His heart sinks even though his chest is lighter than it's been since he stumbled into his dad's portrait so many months ago.
Aoko doesn't yell. She shakes, she whispers. She asks how could you? like she doesn't want to know the answer. She touches the the raw, new skin where her collarbone and her neck meets and she whispers I shouldn't be alive.
He doesn't know if he tells her out loud that he did it because he knows he's too much of a coward to live in a world without her. He's not sure it would have mattered.
She calls him a selfish bastard. He's inclined to agree, and somewhere between "you're a filthy thief" and "I never want to see you again," between Pandora's tears and his and hers, between footsteps on the stairs and doors slamming, Kaito finds himself alone again, heart as empty as his house.
It's ironic, he thinks. The thing that makes her hate him isn't Kaitou Kid, or even the gem that he had been after.
It all comes down to a simple thing.
Stealing.
In retrospect, he reflects that he really should have known. Aoko hates thieves.
And he's just stolen her death.
Eternity is a long time to go when the person you love the most hates you.