The moment the second beast collapsed, Renji dropped flat onto the ground.
He didn't choose to. His legs simply stopped working, and the earth came up to meet him with a dull, graceless thud. He lay there face-up, staring at the patch of darkening sky visible through the broken canopy, chest heaving, every muscle in his body reminding him simultaneously that it existed and that it was furious about the last hour of his life.
The adrenaline left him all at once, like water draining from a cracked vessel. What replaced it was a bone-deep exhaustion that pressed him into the ground with something close to affection.
"We're alive," he muttered, mostly to himself.
A grin spread across his face despite everything. He couldn't have stopped it if he'd tried. It was the kind of grin that had nothing to do with finding something funny — equal parts relief and a wild, irrational exhilaration that always came on the other side of something that could have gone very differently.
