"You'll be fine." [softly cries I'm s o r r y]
“You’ll be fine — I promise.”
He remembered the empty words on his own tongue, the way they had melted like ashes as he spoke them. How the meal afterwards smelled like battlefield carnage, as if the poor souls he couldn’t save were coming back to haunt him.
Such was the way of war, wasn’t it? To try and comfort the dying, to make keep the living alive. They sounded the same but felt so different.
But he was worse for knowing, because he knew just how hollow the words Captain Unohana spoke were! He knew she was lying, he did.
But still he smiled from the mat he rested on. Just for her he could pretend. Pretend that he didn’t know, pretend that the words and their meaning were the same.