And now the title won't come up again until the very end, when they're both floating in space after the end of the universe, with the sun streaked with void above them and the Ocean of Angels' Tears below.
Mahiru is the first to speak, muttering softly through the blood filling her throat. "I'm sorry," she says, drawing Amane's attention from the flashes of distant supernovae to the sound of her voice.
Though he doesn't have enough energy left to turn to face her, he responds after only a few seconds. "Sorry for what?" he asks, not a hint of sarcasm or mockery in his voice. What he says is genuine, and though Mahiru is no longer in a condition for such a gesture, she can't help but feel tears form beneath her eyes.
"For everything," she says, "For killing you. And being killed by you. And coming back just when you had found peace. I must have ruined your life."
The two are silent for a moment, Mahiru waiting for her partner to say something and Amane acting as he always has— As he always will, for the rest of his life and hers.
Eventually, in what must have been at most a minute, and yet felt to the two like an eternity, Amane speaks. He speaks in a quiet voice, his words enunciated, as if they were back in the apartment in which they had spent so much time together. Where she had cooked and he had ate what she served him. He speaks in as close to a normal voice as he can muster, and in the state she's in, Mahiru can hardly tell the difference between it and the voice of a god.
"Mahiru," he says, "You didn't ruin my life at all. Even after all this time, the one thing I know to be true is that... you spoiled me rotten."
After that, no words were spoken as the two spent their final moments in peace— together. And when the end came, everything set itself back to how it began, the only evidence of the World That Was being the words drifting on the horizon, uttered with a girl's last breath:
"Then we're both rotten, aren't we?"
And though the plurality below's eyes were shut to remnants, when they were to open untold eternities later, when many become one, those lingering feelings would remain, and though what came next was of no concern to we who came before, that they could persist into the new reality born from the remains of the fruit's corpse was her only wish.
Because a world without rot is hardly a world at all.