They're standing on top of a mountain. Distantly, she thinks that the scene is appropriately dramatic. The snow cloaking everything: a white so blinding it could be flame. The stone below: blacker than the drowning sea that haunted her childhood nightmares. The sky: she can't see anything but his pale winter eyes.

He stands so tall but his shoulders cave in like a boy's. In his gaze, there's no more emotion than that of a wild beast.

She kind of wants to scream but the wind would drown her out anyway. (He always makes her feel this way: like a fucking animal trapped in a cage.)

"That boy loves you," he says calmly. Voice barely above a whisper and yet she hears him so clearly.

"Yes." It's true, and she's not a liar.

His eyes flicker, and for a moment she thinks she sees more than the hollow man in front of her. The vision vanishes just as quickly as it appeared.

Just a trick of the light, she thinks. It's easier, and maybe sometimes she is a liar.

She blinks and he's saying something again, but it's torn away by the wind. She doesn't want to hear it anyway.

Still, her heart speaks before she gives it permission, as hearts are wont to do.

"What?" She asks, a little stupidly, a little desperately.

His breath escapes him in a cloud of white. She really wants to believe that it's proof, final and unavoidable, that she makes him feel anything comparable to what he makes her feel, but she learned that lesson what seems to her to be eons ago. A bright summer, the end of childhood and the beginning of unlimited possibilities. (The end of innocence, of idealism, and the death of the girl she used to be.) She knows better, despite herself, and so she closes her heart against all that wishful thinking.

"Do you love him too?" He doesn't seem angry, or jealous, or even curious. He doesn't seem anything at all.

At his words any hope she ever had shatters like ice. Her heart goes with it, and that feeling is back again. The one that makes her want to throw herself at him, cling to him, dig her fingers into the mountain ridge of his shoulder blades and never let go. That feeling, the one that makes her feel like ANYTHING but the young woman, hero, champion, that she is.

She could just die.

Instead she answers him as steadily, and as pitifully truthful, as she can.

"I think I do love him," she says, "but he'll never be my soulmate."

The smile he offers her in return is paper thin and icy cold.

"And me?" He asks, in a way that she can almost imagine as spiteful.

"I hate you," she spits out at him viciously. She wants to believe it just as much as all the other damn lies she tells herself, but that's just what she is: a damned liar. And that guilt? The guilt that hits her only seconds later? It pierces her like a thousand shards of light.

He doesn't even flinch. She's not sure she wanted him to.

"But am I your soulmate?"

She doesn't answer him.

Correction: she doesn't say a word. That's answer enough.

Her hand trembles at her side, and despite herself, despite all that lies between them and the cynicism that has crept into her bones like a wintry wind, she desperately hopes that this isn't the end of anything.

"Goodbye, Touko." His voice is so soft, it hurts her more than if he'd held a blade to her heart.

It's the end of everything.

She closes her eyes. She closes her eyes so that she won't have to see it.

The sky is a deep, clear blue.