She was on the floor.
Azrael stood in the doorway with the vegetables still in his hands and looked at her and his mind did the thing minds do when they encounter something they are not willing to process. It went very still and very quiet and for one second he simply stood there.
Then he was on his knees beside her.
Her clothes were soaked through. Her hands were shaking with the particular tremor of a body that has been working too hard for too long just to stay present. Her eyes were open. She was breathing. Each breath had a sound to it that he had never heard from her before and would never forget.
Old Woman: "Boy." Her voice was rough. Almost unrecognizable. "I'm sorry... that you have to see me like this."
Azrael: "Don't." The word came out before he could shape it into anything else. "Don't speak. I can — there has to be something I can — just don't speak."
She coughed. A thin line of red at the corner of her mouth.
He pressed his hands against her and did not know what he was doing. He had survived things. He knew how to stop bleeding, how to endure, how to keep moving when the body wanted to stop. He did not know this. He had never needed to know this because he had never had anything that could be taken from him like this.
Old Woman: "I always tried to hide this part of myself from you." She was still talking. He wanted her to stop talking. "I sinned, boy. I stole. I took things that weren't mine because I didn't know another way. I never knew how to free myself from it."
Azrael: "Stop. Please stop. You're going to be fine, just — stop talking and let me —"
Her hand found his arm. Frail. Steady despite everything.
Old Woman: "In finding you I tried to repent. I don't know if I managed it." A pause. The breath with the sound in it. "Take the money. The envelope. Go. Begin your life." Her thumb moved once against his arm. "Let me achieve my repentance through you, my son."
He pressed his forehead against the bloodied fabric of her clothes and made a sound he had never made before. Not a word. Not a scream. Something that came from a place he had not known existed until this moment. The place where the year had lived. The folded clothes, the morning light, the laugh over eggs, the silence that asked nothing.
All of it suddenly located in his chest and suddenly gone.
He was still there when the voices started outside.
He lifted his head.
The crowd had formed the way crowds form. Quickly, drawn by the particular frequency of disaster. Faces at the window. Then at the door. Then inside.
Voice in the crowd: "It's him. That's Azrael."
Voice in the crowd: "Look at his hands."
Voice in the crowd: "He killed her. For the money."
Voice in the crowd: "Seize him!"
He looked at his hands.
They were covered in her blood. He had been pressing them against her trying to do something, anything, and now they were covered in her blood and he was kneeling over her body and the crowd was saying what crowds say when they find a scene and need it to make sense immediately.
Azrael: "I didn't —"
The words went nowhere. The noise swallowed them before they formed completely. He could see it happening in real time. The conclusion already reached, the verdict already written, the faces already certain. He knew this. He had grown up in this. The world deciding what he was before he opened his mouth.
He grabbed the envelope.
Then he moved.
Not thinking. Not choosing. Just moving the way the body moves when it has been trained to survive and survival has a direction and that direction is away. He pushed through bodies, through doorways, through the crowd that grabbed at him and missed, out into the street and then the alley and then the dark.
He ran until the sounds faded.
Then kept running.
The city he had spent a year beginning to understand turned foreign under his feet. Every corner a memory he no longer had the right to. Every shadow the shape of something that had just been taken. The cold got into his clothes and stayed there. His hands would not stop shaking.
He collapsed against a wall in an alley he didn't recognize and stayed there.
The envelope against his chest.
Her blood drying on his hands.
He did not cry. He had learned very young that crying required a belief that something would be different afterward. He had no such belief. He sat in the cold and the dark and felt the thing that had been building in him since the doorway reach its full size and settle.
Not grief exactly. Something beneath grief. The specific weight of someone who had finally, after years of refusing, allowed themselves to believe in something. And been shown immediately and completely why they had been right not to.
He looked at his hands.
The blood was already darkening at the edges.
He had one thing left. An envelope. A chance she had bought with money she had stolen, sins she had carried, a life she had spent trying to repay a debt she felt she owed to a world that had just killed her for it.
He stayed there until the cold became something he could not feel anymore.
Then he stood.
Envelope in hand. Blood on his fingers. Eyes the color of something that has decided not to want anything ever again.
He walked.