He was torn and he was bleeding but he was still alive. His heart was still beating and he was still tearing breaths, however ragged, from the air in even intervals. He was alive.
Something swelled within him and even in his state of half-consciousness he laughed. He was alive.
It wouldn't last long. He'd been shot - ruthlessly, he thought, but what more did he deserve? This was justice in action, his death a reward for those he'd just as easily shot or stabbed or flung out of high school windows. His mind was cloudy but he could even think of the others now, of Narumi Kiyotaka, of Narumi Ayumu...
Yes. His hope. This was his hope. His death would be sweet for the boy. No more killings, no more whispers of murder in the ears of the Blade Children. If he could survive Hizumi...
(His heart was slowing and he felt a twinge of annoyance at the sluggishness of his thoughts. Not yet, not yet, not yet - )
... if he could survive Hizumi, he could survive anything. He could save them. If anything could save them, if anything could prevent the death and despair and eternal darkness that awaited the others (and it was a shame; Eyes especially was special to him, the person he had loved the most), it would be the Narumi Ayumu. He would be the one strong enough to kill Mizushiro Hizumi.
An alarm sounded somewhere in the distance and he laughed again, so weakly that the sound was barely a cough. They would come, now, and find him bleeding on the floor, shot to death by a cat-eyed teenager -
But it was beautiful, so beautiful to be massacred in this hail of bullets and widsom, to be shot down by the hopes and dreams of another without a fight. He had always wanted to die this way. It needed to be ended like this.
What was hope? Was there really such a thing?
He expired on that thought, his body frozen in the pool of blood and a smile painted on his lips.
If there was hope, surely he would find it.