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Shinji had been alive for too long. He was nearly a millennium old, and had seen too much. He was tired and nearly empty. Hiyori once said that she couldn't imagine anything ever hurting him; Shinji had never thought of himself as invulnerable in any way, but he does wonder if there was anything left in him to hurt.
He gives one final cough and looks down at the round white petals in his hand. They came up bloody, but he’s fairly certain that that has nothing to do with the painful squeeze in his chest when he recognizes the flowers, and what they mean.
Guess there’s still something after all, he thinks drily to himself.
—
It’s a disease of the soul. It doesn’t matter that he’s no longer human—his heart is.
—
Hiyori finds out.
Shinji had been careful about it—he never slept around the other Visored, for fear of coughing something up in his sleep, and he always washed his bloodied shirts at night. But being the first to wake and the last to sleep while you're slowly losing function in both lungs has been extremely taxing on his body, and he’s getting sloppy. He slipped up; he assumed the rest of the Visored had all retired to bed and didn’t bother to check. Hiyori finds him in the warehouse bathroom, hunched over himself, flushing the bloody flowers away as he tries to catch his breath.
Shinji watches her expression tighten as she spots the strawberry blossoms scattered across the red-streaked bathroom tile. She holds Shinji’s gaze for a long moment, eyes wild and searching. When she finally speaks, her voice is hoarse.
“How long?”
Shinji takes a few deep breaths before answering, but they don’t help much. He tries for a laugh to lighten the mood, but it comes out airy and strained.
“Dunno. Maybe a year?”
Hiyori bristles and Shinji braces himself for the inevitable noisy scolding, but it never comes. Instead, she goes quiet and steps past the doorway of the bathroom.
“A year?” Her voice is shaky, coming out as barely a whisper. “A year, and you didn’t even think to tell me?” Hiyori isn’t familiar with the timeline of the disease, but she’s sure that a year is too long. People haven gotten surgery for less. People have died for less.
Shinji can’t bear to look at her torn expression, so he turns away. This is exactly why he had tried to hide it; what’s the use in telling his friends, in telling anyone, really, and cause them the unnecessary pain? He was never going to get the surgery, and he was never going to tell Ichigo.
He knows that Hiyori knows this; she’s always known him too well. She knows that he had planned to die from this from the moment he coughed up the first petal. She knows that if he could have kept this hidden from them up until the end, he would have. She knows that no matter what she or anyone else says, he would never change his mind.
She sinks into a crouch and buries her face in her knees, breath hitching as she feels herself tear up. Next to her, Shinji makes a small noise of surprise. Hiyori never cries. Too many people take one look at her and see a weak child, a fragile little girl; she hates seeming weak, hates it more than anything.
But for the first time in a long time, she allows herself this small moment of frailty, because her best friend is dying and there’s nothing she can do—nothing he will let her do—but watch him unravel. She cries because she’s frustrated, because she’s hurt. She cries because she wants to hate Ichigo, and then she wants to hate herself for the ugly thought. She cries because Shinji will never cry for himself, so she has to do it for both of them.
She cries.