She reaches, and the space between them holds more than air.
He was never taught to want. That is the cruelty of it, millennia spent ferrying the dead, and only now does his hand tremble reaching back toward the living. The light between their fingertips is not magic so much as refusal: the last inch neither of them will ever close.
She weeps because she knows what he is. He does not weep, because he cannot, and that may be the greater grief.
The crow watches. The bat wheels past, indifferent. The moon has seen this before and will see it again, a banshee who cannot stop announcing endings, and Death, who cannot stop arriving for them, meeting in the one place built entirely for goodbyes.
Some distances are not about space at all.