⚠ bleach [ichigo/rukia-ish] ❝You're Welcome❞
Title: ❝You're Welcome❞
Characters/Pairing: Rukia, Ichigo
Rating: All
Spoilers: Latest chapter
Summary: Rukia's thoughts some time after they say goodbye.
That thing they write in fantasy novels? That thing about time and how a year becomes more like a month, which in turn becomes more like a blink? That thing. Rukia has always thought it to be something of a lie. But maybe that is only the way a person thinks of it if one has something that anchors him or her to the moment, viscerally, completely, and always. Binds them. Time was, the late Shiba Kaien served that function; he tethered her to life because he thought it should be lived, ironically even by the dead, which was something she wouldn't understand until much later. Until Kurosaki Ichigo.
It has been three years since she faded from his existence and she is finally coming around to the notion that the reverse will never be true; maybe more importantly, that it doesn't have to be, and even further to the point, it shouldn't be. His last words to her said everything. Couched between efficient consonants and vowels and no sign of pause, Ichigo secured a promise.
She has to go back sometimes to that first meeting to accurately recognize what the promise was.
How reckless he was. How stupid.
He never knew what he was signing up for, but then at the time, neither did she.
Now that they know, now that they are who they are and not who they were, she can decipher another meaning--another hundred meanings--in two words.
Thank you.
It is a promise---to live the way he spent the war ready to die for what he wanted to protect; it's a promise to live fighting because to live passively is a waste.
This, Rukia knows.
Fidgeting with her hands first in her lap and then tucked under her elbows, she stands in the veil of green leaves and gold sun. Here is where she trained with her long late Vice Captain, the first person as far as she knew it to believe in her. There was Renji too of course, but something about her belief in him and the opposite always felt so implicit that she knows she became guilty of taking it for granted. Since the end of the war she has tried to rectify that with some success; more than some really, but that's more due to Renji's heart than hers and they both know that too. He's good enough not to hold it against her, maybe because he knows she holds it against herself enough to account for both of them.
Part of her loves someone else after all, parts really, and there will never be any getting around that truth.
What kind of love it was or wasn't, Rukia herself does not give over to very much thought. It is too messy, especially now when all the flaws of the Society and its so-called guidelines have long since been unearthed only to then be equally unattended in the aftermath. That it was a manner of love however, that, she no longer questions. She thinks she only stopped questioning it once he no longer posed the possibility of ever asking her. It is a little too complimentary to herself to say she refrained from the topic because she knew part of him---maybe all of him (definitely all of him at the time)--- would love her back and that it was a love that would bring him nothing once it took that tone with them. Better to leave it as that unnameable thing, a little ambiguous but no less loyal or insistent. The strength without the threat of fractures that last for lifetimes, to say she planned it this way would be nice. But it is not true, so she doesn't say that it was. She doesn't say anything about it in fact.
But sometimes she thinks about it, more as time moves forward, sometimes seemingly without her.
Now is one of those times as she raises a hand to angle the sun out of her eyes, peering into the distance of sloping green and endless blue reaching out across it. Sky and land. Day and night. On the face of it, the very thin face of it, Soul Society retains its likeness to that Earth where the living make their marks. Different but the same. Earth has flaws too anyway, though not so tightly confined. Likely that's the way it is anywhere you go though, and that's something she has concluded more than once---over tea with Ukitake, sitting in this very clearing with Renji, and sometimes while walking with her brother who manages to be silent but never absent---but every time she reaches said conclusion she has to wonder if 'anywhere you go' has someone ready to defend its right to exist.
Does everywhere have someone who would fight for the world and return to life without the credit?
It's too big of a question and maybe giving Ichigo too much credit, which somehow seems a dishonor to the both of them and everyone who fought along the way, but one can't deny that without him the story simply isn't complete. Never mind how it ends---though she must always mind how it begins---but how it happens at all, how it happened. The ending has moved away from her over days, over weeks, over months, over years, but she never quite shakes the feeling as though she is sometimes reaching out for it; an invisible destination that she is too old to waste her time searching for and too alive to ignore.
Given the alternative though she admits daily that this is preferable.
Life is preferable.
And that is a credit he is due, even if she never said so outright, even if now she never will.
Again, that's probably something better left in the ether as it is.
Somewhere in this dilapidated reverie she knows she could root down deep and make a home, but it is a home more suited to the old Rukia who she scarcely recognizes anymore. Renji still sees it in her, but she never asks and he has always known quite well the things he should keep to himself. So she goes on not knowing for certain what fragments of her are the same and which ones are changed; harder even to distinguish the ones that are completely new and somehow slip into the in-betweens of the same and changed. Lowering her hand and letting her gaze fall to the grass beneath her feet, Rukia supposes that ideally they would all melt together, an organic blending of past, present, and future so a person can settle with the way things are, which so often is not how a selfish part of them would like it to be.
That is 'ideally' though, and if nothing else she can say that she has long been familiar with making do with what one has at the beginning, middle, and end of the day respectively. Turning away from that direction, she bites her lip and then her tongue. Enough contemplating. It's time to go on patrol, and this is a comforting pattern she has never fallen out of---one she will never fall out of.
Soul Society will never stop owing Kurosaki Ichigo, but some of them have already forgotten it. He lost his sight for them. What matter could it be to him? And really to an extent Rukia knows it isn't, but that's not the point. There are only so many ways to reply to gratitude, only so many ways to make that answer stand through time and that means even more when time itself may be the only lasting witness. Thank you. That's what he said, and she didn't say anything back, not then. The shape of her words had gotten lost somewhere between the familiarity of his back and the distance he then wordlessly finished putting between them. And even then, in the midst of displacement herself, a part of her resonated with the rightness of it. He had always been strong with his decisions. It was somehow comforting that he would be that way with the last one they shared, as if he committed himself fully one last time with words that meant more to them without needing to let anyone else know even if some of them already did. What others brush aside or view as something that has lost its merit of acknowledgment because the boy himself has lost what made him instrumental before, Rukia gives special attention. There is a quietness in the understanding she cannot convey to the ex-substitute, but it is her choice to repay Ichigo's gratitude with a version of her own.
Let those who ignore the war and all it lost them do what they will. Keeping their rules, keeping their priorities in spite of it all. She will not give up her post though, not even in wordless defiance of such things, because to give up her post is to open a door to forgetting Ichigo herself. It seems altogether impossible, but it never fails to strike her breathless the way that a failure to acknowledge can almost seamlessly become an absence of the potential at all. She will not risk that. Small as it is, keeping her station in Karakura is that long overdue reply to Ichigo's retreating back. The town stays safe, safer and clearer of negative souls than it had ever been before the war, and she suspects that it's also true that just because Ichigo can no longer see or feel spiritual pressure doesn't mean he has forgotten they are there. He is different from the too-old, too-locked proprieties of Soul Society. Understatement, but some of that comes with having only lived one life too, and she factors that in with the rest of it.
Out of sight is not out of mind though, not to the people who ever really gave a damn.
It has been three years since 'Thank you'. But it has only been twenty-four hours since 'You're welcome'. She says it every day, and sometimes, when running along the rooftops she just gets this feeling that he knows. And in the end maybe that's the real reason she can never completely let go; neither can he.
Characters/Pairing: Rukia, Ichigo
Rating: All
Spoilers: Latest chapter
Summary: Rukia's thoughts some time after they say goodbye.
That thing they write in fantasy novels? That thing about time and how a year becomes more like a month, which in turn becomes more like a blink? That thing. Rukia has always thought it to be something of a lie. But maybe that is only the way a person thinks of it if one has something that anchors him or her to the moment, viscerally, completely, and always. Binds them. Time was, the late Shiba Kaien served that function; he tethered her to life because he thought it should be lived, ironically even by the dead, which was something she wouldn't understand until much later. Until Kurosaki Ichigo.
It has been three years since she faded from his existence and she is finally coming around to the notion that the reverse will never be true; maybe more importantly, that it doesn't have to be, and even further to the point, it shouldn't be. His last words to her said everything. Couched between efficient consonants and vowels and no sign of pause, Ichigo secured a promise.
She has to go back sometimes to that first meeting to accurately recognize what the promise was.
How reckless he was. How stupid.
He never knew what he was signing up for, but then at the time, neither did she.
Now that they know, now that they are who they are and not who they were, she can decipher another meaning--another hundred meanings--in two words.
Thank you.
It is a promise---to live the way he spent the war ready to die for what he wanted to protect; it's a promise to live fighting because to live passively is a waste.
This, Rukia knows.
Fidgeting with her hands first in her lap and then tucked under her elbows, she stands in the veil of green leaves and gold sun. Here is where she trained with her long late Vice Captain, the first person as far as she knew it to believe in her. There was Renji too of course, but something about her belief in him and the opposite always felt so implicit that she knows she became guilty of taking it for granted. Since the end of the war she has tried to rectify that with some success; more than some really, but that's more due to Renji's heart than hers and they both know that too. He's good enough not to hold it against her, maybe because he knows she holds it against herself enough to account for both of them.
Part of her loves someone else after all, parts really, and there will never be any getting around that truth.
What kind of love it was or wasn't, Rukia herself does not give over to very much thought. It is too messy, especially now when all the flaws of the Society and its so-called guidelines have long since been unearthed only to then be equally unattended in the aftermath. That it was a manner of love however, that, she no longer questions. She thinks she only stopped questioning it once he no longer posed the possibility of ever asking her. It is a little too complimentary to herself to say she refrained from the topic because she knew part of him---maybe all of him (definitely all of him at the time)--- would love her back and that it was a love that would bring him nothing once it took that tone with them. Better to leave it as that unnameable thing, a little ambiguous but no less loyal or insistent. The strength without the threat of fractures that last for lifetimes, to say she planned it this way would be nice. But it is not true, so she doesn't say that it was. She doesn't say anything about it in fact.
But sometimes she thinks about it, more as time moves forward, sometimes seemingly without her.
Now is one of those times as she raises a hand to angle the sun out of her eyes, peering into the distance of sloping green and endless blue reaching out across it. Sky and land. Day and night. On the face of it, the very thin face of it, Soul Society retains its likeness to that Earth where the living make their marks. Different but the same. Earth has flaws too anyway, though not so tightly confined. Likely that's the way it is anywhere you go though, and that's something she has concluded more than once---over tea with Ukitake, sitting in this very clearing with Renji, and sometimes while walking with her brother who manages to be silent but never absent---but every time she reaches said conclusion she has to wonder if 'anywhere you go' has someone ready to defend its right to exist.
Does everywhere have someone who would fight for the world and return to life without the credit?
It's too big of a question and maybe giving Ichigo too much credit, which somehow seems a dishonor to the both of them and everyone who fought along the way, but one can't deny that without him the story simply isn't complete. Never mind how it ends---though she must always mind how it begins---but how it happens at all, how it happened. The ending has moved away from her over days, over weeks, over months, over years, but she never quite shakes the feeling as though she is sometimes reaching out for it; an invisible destination that she is too old to waste her time searching for and too alive to ignore.
Given the alternative though she admits daily that this is preferable.
Life is preferable.
And that is a credit he is due, even if she never said so outright, even if now she never will.
Again, that's probably something better left in the ether as it is.
Somewhere in this dilapidated reverie she knows she could root down deep and make a home, but it is a home more suited to the old Rukia who she scarcely recognizes anymore. Renji still sees it in her, but she never asks and he has always known quite well the things he should keep to himself. So she goes on not knowing for certain what fragments of her are the same and which ones are changed; harder even to distinguish the ones that are completely new and somehow slip into the in-betweens of the same and changed. Lowering her hand and letting her gaze fall to the grass beneath her feet, Rukia supposes that ideally they would all melt together, an organic blending of past, present, and future so a person can settle with the way things are, which so often is not how a selfish part of them would like it to be.
That is 'ideally' though, and if nothing else she can say that she has long been familiar with making do with what one has at the beginning, middle, and end of the day respectively. Turning away from that direction, she bites her lip and then her tongue. Enough contemplating. It's time to go on patrol, and this is a comforting pattern she has never fallen out of---one she will never fall out of.
Soul Society will never stop owing Kurosaki Ichigo, but some of them have already forgotten it. He lost his sight for them. What matter could it be to him? And really to an extent Rukia knows it isn't, but that's not the point. There are only so many ways to reply to gratitude, only so many ways to make that answer stand through time and that means even more when time itself may be the only lasting witness. Thank you. That's what he said, and she didn't say anything back, not then. The shape of her words had gotten lost somewhere between the familiarity of his back and the distance he then wordlessly finished putting between them. And even then, in the midst of displacement herself, a part of her resonated with the rightness of it. He had always been strong with his decisions. It was somehow comforting that he would be that way with the last one they shared, as if he committed himself fully one last time with words that meant more to them without needing to let anyone else know even if some of them already did. What others brush aside or view as something that has lost its merit of acknowledgment because the boy himself has lost what made him instrumental before, Rukia gives special attention. There is a quietness in the understanding she cannot convey to the ex-substitute, but it is her choice to repay Ichigo's gratitude with a version of her own.
Let those who ignore the war and all it lost them do what they will. Keeping their rules, keeping their priorities in spite of it all. She will not give up her post though, not even in wordless defiance of such things, because to give up her post is to open a door to forgetting Ichigo herself. It seems altogether impossible, but it never fails to strike her breathless the way that a failure to acknowledge can almost seamlessly become an absence of the potential at all. She will not risk that. Small as it is, keeping her station in Karakura is that long overdue reply to Ichigo's retreating back. The town stays safe, safer and clearer of negative souls than it had ever been before the war, and she suspects that it's also true that just because Ichigo can no longer see or feel spiritual pressure doesn't mean he has forgotten they are there. He is different from the too-old, too-locked proprieties of Soul Society. Understatement, but some of that comes with having only lived one life too, and she factors that in with the rest of it.
Out of sight is not out of mind though, not to the people who ever really gave a damn.
It has been three years since 'Thank you'. But it has only been twenty-four hours since 'You're welcome'. She says it every day, and sometimes, when running along the rooftops she just gets this feeling that he knows. And in the end maybe that's the real reason she can never completely let go; neither can he.