"Only what you've told me," he said, not looking up from the plate before him. "And that everything I've ever known is apparently a lie." That he was a human, with living parents and no knowledge of Soul Society. That he had never attended the Academy and never met his friends. That he had never suffered a betrayal so hard and crushing that it nearly destroyed him, left him in a thousand razor-edged pieces on that rooftop after his fight with Matsumoto.

That he was, in one sense of the word, normal.

Kira continued ignoring Gin for the moment (although could he ever really ignore him, being so close by?) as he struggled to imagine what kind of enemy could possibly kill Renji, of all people, and tried not to picture what his friend's corpse must have looked like after that kind of fight.