There's a dead thing on the ground.
His stomach is like a flat sack and aching. He knows the curve of her emaciated shoulder, the defeated extent of her half-opened palm.
She's eaten the skin off her lips, and he gives he just enough to keep going.
He walks off, deliberately slow.
She pulls herself up, and comes after him.
"I get scared when you leave me," she confesses once, when it's just the two of them and the middle of the night. Her arm is tucked against his back. She always falls asleep facing him, and he watches the door.
"Why?"
"Because I know that one day, you won't come back."
He thinks about rolling over and pulling her face against his neck, so that she can feel him swallow, can hear his heart beating, can know that he's there. But he doesn't, and in time her fingers clutch tentatively at the back of his shirt, before they slacken with sleep. And still, he doesn't move. Still, he watches the open door, the silent snow.
"Not today," he murmurs.
She comes to the academy for him. She becomes a Shinigami for him. She leaves her life and her fear and her sadness behind, for him, and pretends to be a person. The night before they make him into a captain he meets her for a drink or eight and rests his head against her hip, silent while she pulls her fingers rhythmically through his hair.
"You've gone somewhere untouchable," she sighs, trying to make a mockery of the real sadness in her voice. He wants to tell her how much more real her statement is than she realizes. He wants to tell her she shouldn't wait for him. He doesn't, because he knows she could never stop.
"You are always with me," he says instead of all these things, because this more than anything is true.
She turns on him with wide and shining eyes, "Really?"
No, he thinks, not where I'm going. He grips her hand. Their bones grind together, as close as they can get. "Always."
Her face is the last thing he wants to see. Not the blood leaking from his wound, not the ripple of energy in the air, not the monster a man needed to become for power. Her face. Her face that bends over him, clutches at him, curls around him. Her mouth leans against his ear, "All I wanted," she whispers, and he hears her broken heart, "All I ever wanted was for you to stay with me."
He lets his fingers get lost in the burning tangle of her hair. It slips away the more he tries to grip it.
"I loved you too much for that," he confesses, and closes his eyes.