She's cold. It's the middle of the night and she's cold, and for the first time in forever he's not there to warm her.

She thinks that forever is a long time, and he hasn't always been there, surely not always. But she can't quite recall a time when he wasn't. Can't bring up a memory of herself alone in the bed, a memory of who she was, before him.

Strength, she thinks. She had been strong, independent. She'd had friends, they'd been her family. Now, now they were more like distant relations, the people seen on holidays or at funerals, certainly not every day, or perhaps that's wishful thinking on her part?

She stretches her legs out and encounters nothing but space, nothing but sheets, cool, crisp, clean. He hasn't come into her room, then, she thinks, wonders if he's with *them*, with the rest of the team. Wonders if each day she sees them is a holiday, or a funeral.

And laughs -- bitter or hysterical, she's not the one to judge that -- because when had it stopped mattering, when had it all changed?

The moment he slipped into her bed? The afternoon he came back, roaring on the motorcycle he'd borrowed? Before that, even - the day he arrived, with the girl with the bruised eyes and skin translucent as mist?

They're all so frightened of touching the girl, she thinks, of letting their hands slip through the skin to what lies beneath, so afraid that they might not discover gossamer and delicacy, but steel and strength.

She knows that *she* once had that kind of strength, but they've always seen it, because they've always needed to. An abundance of strength, that's what the girl has, and beauty. She remembers when she had been regarded as the fairest of them all, or very nearly. She wonders how a girl whose very life embodies death inspires poetry, devotion, love. She has seen how one look from beneath the dark lashes grants her any wish she might have, has not been unaffected herself by the well of dark misery barely echoed in those centurion eyes. The younger girl, she reflects, has the looks for it, the kind of pure adoration she generates with nothing more than a sigh. For she's lovely; achingly, hauntingly beautiful, drifting through the hallways, ethereal, heartbreakingly alone.

And yet...

She's never truly alone. He follows her as a man would the ghost of his dead love, *would* follow her over the edge of the earth with his eyes still locked to her form, a smile on his lips as he falls to his doom and catches sight of her once more.

She shifts as the door opens and he enters, silently, the hazel of his eyes still reflecting the fall of dark hair, the shock of white he has seen in the corridor mere moments before.

She opens her arms, because she knows what he needs, knows that this is what he's come to her for. The comfort to forget himself, the pretense that he's loving the one woman he can never have.

She closes her eyes, and pretends that he's thinking of her, can almost let it overwhelm her, become the truth, but then he tenses, and as he comes, he calls out, "Ro-" and it's close, so *damn* close.

But not nearly close enough.