Contest Entry - Fanfiction - "The Sum of All Regrets" by Kari
Title: "The Sum of All Regrets"
Author: cuervo_mariposa
Category: fanfiction
Theme: shadows and secrets
Notes: This is a bit darker than my last entry, but please give it a try. I hope people like it!
The Sum of All Regrets
It is not raining.
The pavement is hard beneath her knees, and even through the fabric of her uniform, she can feel how cool it is. Autumn, the season of death. Autumn, the season her heart broke.
He's staring at her with eyes that are all too familiar, filled with that mixture of tenderness and irritation and all those things that he's only ever shown her. He grins, razor-sharp teeth now gone and he's human and her Ichigo, and he's no longer bone-white like the sword in his chest, but coughing vermilion blood.
"Thanks," he says, and his voice is laboured. She takes his hand in both of hers and holds it against her wet cheek. It's not until his thumb brushes against her cheek that she realizes that she's still crying, crying so hard with all her sorrows and regrets, her guilts and lifetimes of worries all coalescing together into iridescent teardrops. Sodeno Shirayuki sticks through flesh and muscle, and moves with his every breath, a gentle, shaky motion.
"Idiot," she says, "I just killed you."
His eyes are no longer white on black, and his hand is cool against her cheek. He's dying…like her heart.
"Yeah." He's smiling still, breaking her heart with its familiarity. "Better me than you." He closes his eyes and reopens them with effort. "See you around."
She doesn't say, "I love you" or "I'll miss you" or any of those trite, inconsequential things. He knows, anyway; she knows he knows, and it'll never be enough, but it'll have to be. "Come back to me," she says.
"I promise."
She leans down and doesn't kiss him so much as breathes into him and he breathes into her. When she lifts her head, finally, he's gone. His eyes are closed in final repose. She pulls Sodeno Shirayuki from his chest and almost throws the sword away from her. Fresh tears spill down her cheeks as she brushes her lips over Ichigo's eyelids.
It is not raining, but Rukia can't tell the difference.
~~~~~~~~
When had this begun? Where? She can't remember anymore.
How did they end up here, on pavement not slicked with rain, and a sky that is not light nor dark, with her sword in his chest and death and unending sorrow their companion again?
Why is she doomed to kill the one she loves, not just once, but twice?
Of course. Retribution for the sins of her past.
Even if she could turn back time, she is selfish. She is not sure she could give up the things that had passed between them - the camaraderie, the faith, his clumsy kisses, her newfound laughter.
Or would she? Would she give it up, knowing that Ichigo would be alive, free to live in his world and his life? Would she, even if it would leaven part of her empty forever, a black well of despair and loneliness?
She read a fairy tale in a book once, about a princess cursed to die, who slept for a hundred years until her true love woke her with a kiss.
But even love's triumph over death wasn't absolute, could never be real. Death still came again years later and took it away, this time for good; the true love that had freed the princess felt his heart shatter like fragile glass, the sharp edges digging into his soul until the day he died.
Would he have given up the chance to know love if he had known how much it would hurt?
Rukia doesn't know, but she knows that she would have. She would give up anything…everything, to save the one she loved.
But what god is there to hear her prayer?
~~~~~~~~~
Summer drags by lazily, his head on her lap and her slim fingers tangled in his fiery hair. They fight, they argue, and at night, they go home and make love slow and aching like a butterfly unfurling its wings for the first time. Even after many nights together, he eases into her carefully, gently, almost warily lest she feels the slightest pain. He kisses her breasts (they taste of sweat and smell of home), and his fingertips trace her spine (a slope of vanilla satin). Her response is to rest her wrists behind his neck in a small, delicate embrace: It's okay. We're okay.
He trusts her, but he withdraws to instead, trail gem kisses down her stomach, then enters her with his tongue. She gasps with closed eyes, and she murmurs through a saccharine sweet smile he can almost taste as she rises to her pleasure. Her dulcet sighs as she climaxes encourage Ichigo, and he mounts her again.
Upon his own coming, he envelops her as they collapse with nothing left in them except the flush of heat and the knowledge of their love for one another.
She loves him and he loves her, and for once, just once, in this perfect, idyllic summer heat, they don't have to save the world or overthrow any tyrants, they can be Ichigo-and-Rukia and Rukia-and-Ichigo, and they're the only ones that can tell the difference.
Her favourite moments are when she takes his hand in her small one, and he says nothing, just links their fingers in companionable silence. It's these times that she notices that she can fit two of her hands into his one, just like she can fit all of herself into him.
~~~~~~~~~~
Time is ephemeral and the last vestiges of summer are all that's left of her happiness. Ichigo's laughter, the scent of his tangerine hair, the way his large, warm hands engulfed her small ones...she takes that away with her and puts it deep into the storeroom of her heart so that no one, no court or a judge can ever take it away from her.
~~~~~~~~~
Every jewel had to have its flaw, and summer's flaw lay, as it always had, in that it ended. Much, much too soon.
It all went wrong on one of those rare days where the sun is no more than a thin veneer across the sky, and the air is sour with the smell of delayed rain. Night falls, and the humidity makes the moon spread itself into a filmy shadow of itself, stretching across the sky until it is no more than a faint, luminescent smear behind swollen clouds. She lies beside him, their skin and bodies sticking with sweat. Her fingers skitter across hot flesh and trace the scar on his chest. The night is heavy with secrets, and she feels them pressing down on her like the heat.
"Do you ever regret this?" she asks, softly and raises her head slightly to look at his beloved, familiar face.
"Always," he replies and smiles. His teeth are sharp, like the jagged edges of her past, and his eyes are glazed, as though they sucked the moon's essence inside themselves.
"Ichigo?" she asks, fear slipping into her voice and heart. No, she thinks, not again, not to him. Not the one that went through death and risked everything to save me, not to the one person that I've ever really loved. She puts her hands on his cheeks. His flesh is hot, fever-hot, but his skin has no colour; it is moon-pale. "Ichigo!"
He blinks, and it's gone, the whiteness of his skin, the luminosity in his eyes. "Rukia?'
She kisses him then, so hard that she tastes Ichigo's human blood.
~~~~~~~~~~
It is raining. She is in Soul Society and her hands are wet and sticky and leaden with the weight of her sword, the weight of the blood running down them.
But the sword in her hands is Sodeno Shirayuki and yet not, her blade black instead of white, a darkness that swallows light and sings a siren song deceptive and deliciously sweet.
Kaien slumps against her and she almost buckles under his weight. It grows exponentially heavier with each step she takes, until her feet sink into ground, her knees, her waist, and she is drowning in a whirlpool of liquid sand and dust. As grains choke her, she cries out, whimpers, and closes her eyes: let this be a dream let this be a dream let this ...
"Rukia-chan," a voice whispers in her ear in Kaien's Hollow-twisted voice, and her eyes snap open.
Ivory discs upon ebony orbs lock her into an inescapable stare, wide and madly grinning, and the Hollow screeches as it laughs in her face, but only now, now ...
It wears her face.
"Murderer," her other self cackles, mocking, into her stunned, horrified face. It stands smugly on solid ground above her as she drowns deeper in her living grave, and screams accusingly, "Traitor! He's dead! You loved him and now you've killed him and it's just the two of us now, Rukia-chan." She hears traces of a lover's voice as her other mutters her name with the same loving contempt.
"No," she says. "no, no, you can't..."
The Hollow's face changes again before her eyes, twists and warps so her stomach turns to watch and she's going to be sick but she can't look away, can't deny the horror that is her own doing. She thinks she glimpses a familiar face, Kaien's wife, but it is swallowed again and then Hollow throws its head back and screams, and Hell Butterflies pour from its mouth to crumble and dissolve in the rain.
And then it's Kaien standing before her again.
"Fukai-taichou!"
"You killed me," he says to her in her voice, and smiles, ghastly and grotesque, crumbles limb by limb (was that a wisp of red?), and dies violently once more, and again, before her disbelieving eyes.
She closes her eyes and breathes. Opens them.
Ichigo, face hidden behind a mask of bone, still and dead with Sodeno Shirayuki's black blade thrust through him. She reaches wildly for her sword, to draw it out, but it's too late - the colour is already leeching from the blade, black to white, night to day, sin to innocence... False innocence.
"Ichigo!" she cries, but he is still, and his eyes behind his mask are wide and empty and his and this is her retribution, her unwanted salvation, her crime magnified once, twice, a thousand times in an unending spiral of destruction.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Kaien's ghost has imprinted itself onto her soul, but it is not what wakes her, breathless with guilt and shaking with fever madness. Her cheeks are alabaster cool under her hands, but she splashes water on her face anyway, shivers, and crawls back to bed, a child seeking an impossible refuge in a mother's womb.
~~~~~~~~~~~
The rest of the summer drifts in and out of Rukia's consciousness. Her moments with Ichigo, each precious moment of happiness, is marred by the shadow of her guilt, the secrets that eat away at her very soul. There are days when she thinks she sees Ichigo's eyes darken. One particular evening remains branded in her mind. Ichigo is standing with his back to the sunset. His hair is almost the same shade as the flaming sky as he looks down at her, his eyes serious and shifting with the shadows of the trees and air around them. She is aware of how very small and defenceless she is against him, against this giant, rash, crazy love of hers, and when he smiles, she does not recognize him.
"Ichigo?" she asks. "What's wrong?"
He leans forward and catches her lips with his, snarling when she refuses to submit. She thinks she feels the edges of his teeth graze her tongue, and his tongue, strangely alien, scraped the roof of her mouth.
Later that night, he hurt her for the first time, battered down her defences to bend her to his ruthless will, as Ichigo would never have done. Her tears, her entreaties, do not move him, only his dark, consuming desire.
"Don't move," he murmurs in her ear, his belt binding and cutting into her wrists high above her head and legs kept apart by his cruel hands that were white like cold, cruel snow. "Don't even think about it."
When he drives himself into her, she stops breathing, stops thinking, stops even trying to do anything except forget and not to scream when pointed teeth stab into the skin of her shoulder like assassins' daggers, or when, even worse, he whispers into her ear.
"Dance, Shirayuki," he mocks, and she feels something inside of her die, sliced by a sword black with sin. "Dance with me, my love. Let me melt the ice in your heart." And then, when she's stopped hearing or thinking and everything is just blank, he rolls gently into her mind. Let me back in, my beautiful Rukia-chan.
Breath, cool like moonlight draws maps of desire and hate across her skin; he whispers false endearments, endearments that remind her of a time she had tried so very hard to make up for. Despair, not lust, coils in the pit of her belly, and there are times when she forgets why she loved him.
That is the worst.
When he's done with her, she curls into herself and away from him. She can hear his jackal grin, even in the night, when he tells her in an undertone, don't move, don't flinch. The words echo in her head through what seems like an eternity, yet they wake up together the next morning, he with no recollection of the night before. She doesn't tell him what had transpired, just hugs him, thankful that her Ichigo has come home to her.
Even Karin and Yuzu have noticed the changes, and while Ichigo's father never says anything, Rukia's sees him watching his son with eyes that are much too keen to be mortal.
"Rukia-nee," says Yuzu one day while Ichigo is out of earshot, "Has Ichi-nii been acting weird lately?"
Rukia pauses and brushes a coil of ebony hair behind her ear. "Not really," she lies. "Did he do anything to you? I'll beat him up if you want."
Yuzu doesn't say anything for a long while, and then smiles sunnily, a smile that looks as if it has been practiced too many times. "No, it's nothing."
Regretting her lies but too much of a coward to retract them, she gives Yuzu a wan smile in turn and lightly promises to beat him up anyway.
~~~~~~~~~
Rukia discovers too late the way secrets can fester and come back to haunt you; guilt eats at her like a Hollow.
~~~~~~~~~
Leaves crunch beneath Rukia's shoes, dry like tinder. All it would need is flame to set the world a-blaze, and Rukia is tempted.
Orihime and Chad are looking as well, but they can't find him. It's as if he's vanished completely from their lives, taking everything with him...or at least, that's how Rukia feels. There's nothing to fill up the empty spaces in her now.
"We'll find him, Kuchiki-san," said gentle Orihime. "He's our friend."
"Why are you talking to her?" Karin had asked, bitter. "This is all her fault."
Rukia shivers at the memory. Yuzu's missing and Ichigo's not Ichigo anymore and all that's left is an old man with a smile as fragile as crushed autumn leaves and a girl who missing her other half. And it was all Rukia's fault, and they know it now. It broke her to see their trust shrivel, like a rose beaten by winter's frost. She had coated the remnants of her heart in ice so that she would be numb when she saw them withdraw from her, but still, it hurt.
There's nothing left now but the frost in her heart.
Sometimes, she goes to the park by Ichigo's house and sits beneath their favourite tree, imagining that he'll come and lay his head on her lap, the way he used to. The cold cuts through her skin but she ignores it, and waits there in her summer dress, her legs heartbreakingly thin and the angles of her face as sharp as the broken pieces of her heart.
But still, she sits and waits... What she waits for, she does not know.
She falls asleep sometimes, lulled to a shivering sleep by the crackling of the dead leaves around her and the spidery branches that reach out to enfold her in its arms. When night falls, she looks at the sky and at the wane, dull moon before slowly making her way back home.
Ichigo's bed still smells like him. She hugs his pillow at night and tries not to cry. There's nothing left in her to cry anymore, just empty space and the memory of a summer that she will never have again.
She wakes up, and shivering, climbs out the window. Her white dress sticks to her skin, clammy with nightmare's sweat and a clinging cold that she wants to never feel again.
She lands lightly on her feet, like the year's first snowflake, wrapping her arms around herself. It is bitterly cold, and her finely-tuned senses knows that there are spirits watching her, their eyes round with anticipation.
"You let your guard down." Her heart beats furiously fast. It's his voice, but Ichigo would never have spoken to her with a sneer honed to a knife-edge, nor looked at her with eyes that were blacker than the night skies. "Haven't you learned better by now, Rukia-chan?"
And she stands there in the empty street, looking at all her past regrets and guilts, remembering the small bits of happiness that she had with him. She loves him so much that it hurts.
"Aren't you going to say something, Rukia-chan?"
"Ichigo," she whispers, and draws closer to him, a moth drawn to a flame. She reaches out and touches his face; his skin is much too warm beneath her fingers and the stretch of his face unfamiliar when he bares his teeth at her. Her body shakes at his proximity and from fear, but she can’t bring herself to move away.
"Isn't this what you always wanted? To get rid of the Hollow inside of you, to be normal?" asks not-Ichigo. His skin is pale beneath fading moonlight and near-invisible stars. "You never could control your powers with me in you, but now," he leans close so that his lips are almost brushing hers, butterfly-light and monstrously cruel, "you are nothing without me."
She kisses him then, desperately trying to bring back the Ichigo she had once loved, still loves. He kisses her back and his hands hold her arms so tightly that they leave bruises that'll take weeks to fade, and scars on her soul that'll never heal properly.
"Kaien says hello," breathes not-Ichigo into her skin. "So does Yuzu."
~~~~~~~~~
She stares at her hands and at Yuzu's broken and mangled body, eyes that were once bright with laughter and effervescence now dead, killed by a brother that had been betrayed by the one that loved him most.
Karin is crying so hard that she can barely walk. Rukia half-carries her to Urahara's shop, where the old ex-captain is not saying anything. He looks a lot older than Rukia has ever seen him. Ichigo's father is missing, and Rukia prays to whoever is listening that he is still alive and will remain that way.
"This is my fault," whispers Rukia, so numb that she can barely speak.
Murderer. Traitor. You killed him, a ghost hisses...disappears. Her conscience, maybe, malleable like the past.
There is no condemnation in Urahara's eyes, even as he examines Karin and sedates her. Karin collapses as though a twin to her sister even in death, but the shallow dip and rise of her chest show that she is still breathing. Karin will hate Rukia when she wakes up. Rukia will not blame her.
Ururu offers her a cup of hot tea. Rukia accepts it and drinks, and it slides down thick and bitter as the moon's tears, or Kaien's blood.
She hopes it's poison.
~~~~~~~~~
Twins are supposed to be two halves of one person; half of Karin is gone, lost in the void of darkness and a world that she could never understand. Rukia knows how Karin feels, but says nothing. She has no right to.
~~~~~~~~~
This is what Urahara tells them: There is a way.
Ichigo's soul can still be saved, the Hollow within him now destroyed once and for all.
"He's hi-ding from us," he says, sing-song, almost to himself. "But he's still in Karakura. We're sure of that. He wants to be found."
Rukia closes her eyes and wishes she could not hear the words and the hope they could mean. Or is it really despair? Does a small part of Ichigo still fight the monster that has consumed him, does it still bind him to Karakura and his family and, she doesn't dare hope, her?
Or is the darkness within him waiting to destroy them all, to destroy Ichigo's heart completely?
Urahara circles the shop, still speaking, but she has missed the words lost in her wild, confused thoughts. She starts and looks up when he stops before her.
"It's not enough just to kill him, of course. Kuchiki should know this better than anyone," Rukia flinches at the words, because she knows so well... "But if we can exorcise the Hollow, then Kurosaki's soul will be cleansed of its influence."
Rukia looks into Urahara's shadowed, enigmatic eyes and sees what he doesn't say. She swallows, and the words stick in her throat. "But it will kill him too," she whispers, her voice cracking under the words.
She cannot read the expression in his eyes, but then he smiles; it is a small, thin thing. "Well done, Kuchiki."
"I'll do it," Isshin says, his now-quiet voice cold and hard and unbreakable as iron, coming forward to look Urahara in the face. He's changed. They've all changed, except Rukia, who only adds this to the growing mountain of guilt on her shoulders. "My son..."
"No!" Rukia bursts out. So much pain, so much death and destruction already; she cannot let this last, final duty fall into Ichigo's father's hands, cause even more pain than the endless sea of torment she has already unleashed.
"I'll do it," she says, desperate, and they look at her. "I have to be the one to do it," she whispers under their stares.
"No. Never." Karin interrupts, her voice hard like granite and unmoving in its sorrow. "Why should we trust her?"
Rukia closes her eyes. "Karin, if you only knew how sorry I was."
And she was. Rukia will never forgive herself for the wounds she’s inflicted on Ichigo’s family. Isshin will never be anything but a tired old man now, spent with the effort of raising three children, two that he will never see grow up, and a third child that would grieve forever for a lost half of herself.
"I don't want to hear it." Ichigo's sister, the only one left, turns away from her. "It's your fault that Yuzu's dead."
"Kuchiki-san is right. She should be the one to do it." Urahara's voice, no longer sly or cunning but weighed with secrets and regrets that are almost as heavy as Rukia's, breaks through the fogs of their regrets.
"He's my son," whispers Isshin, but Urahara ignores him and reaches out to take Rukia's trembling chin in his hand.
"And his love shall be your strongest weapon; he will come to you, Kuchiki."
Rukia sets her teeth and does not doubt his words.
"I will need your sword," Urahara tells her, and she hands Sodeno Shirayuki to him with numb hands, unquestioning.
He draws the pure-white blade from its sheath, his respect for its beauty unmistakable, then turns and nods to Tessai. From the back of the room they draw out a vat of liquid, black and iridescent as midnight's broken tears, and Rukia watches, frozen, as he dips the blade in, draws it out again. It gleams with obsidian light, and she should ache to see such travesty done to her own blade, to see her sins manifested whole...but she is too numb to feel anything, and in her heart, she mouths a silent apology Sodeno Shirayuki will never hear.
She is so sorry for so many things.
Urahara hands the blade back to her. She is still slim, but now heavy with Rukia's past. Sodeno Shirayuki was once known to be the most beautiful zanpakutou in Soul Society, her edge sharp and the white blade slim. She used to be as light as the first snowfall.
Rukia closes her eyes and remembers a long ago dream. If she had only known she had played Cassandra to her own denying heart then, could she have done more?
But it is too late for such questions now.
"You're ready, Kuchiki-san."
"I know," she replies but her heart says otherwise.
~~~~~~~~~
She loves Ichigo so strongly that it is almost tangible. She can taste it on her tongue, feel it against her skin and hear it when the wind brushes against her cheeks. This is her destiny, to be so happy that she’ll have to be the one to destroy it. She’ll know heartbreak because she’s had her summer of happiness.
~~~~~~~~~
Leaves fall, and so do the innocent and the damned.
Yuzu is dead, buried beneath clean earth and crumbling leaves. Rukia kneels by her tombstone and begs for forgiveness. It has been weeks since she left Urahara with a tainted Shirayuki and steel in her tattered and shredded heart, and Ichigo has not come for her. Yet.
He'll come back for her. He always has. She knows this.
She is now in her shinigami robes, a symbol of her never-ending duty. She will face monsters and loved ones alike and she will kill them, even though it kills her. Rukia knows that she is not justice, just a toy of fate. But never again, she swears. Secrets have a way of festering and turning into uglier things, things that could suck the very soul from you.
She stands then, her hand resting uneasily on the hilt of her sword and with a heaviness of heart that she could never hope to erase.
"You still haven't learned to watch your back," he says to her. He's left no footsteps in the snow, and his skin is shining so white that he almost blends with the landscape. If she could not see his black eyes or the fiery brightness of his hair, she would have thought that he was a ghost. "It seems as if you really want me to kill you."
She has steeled her will, and the balance of power between them has shifted ; where once they were black and white, sun and moon, light and dark, now Rukia has drawn the darkness of her own scarred, bleeding soul to face him this one last time. Drawing Shirayuki, who is as black as the never-ending night of Ichigo's eyes, she says, "You can't kill someone that's already dead." Sodeno Shirayuki sings her siren song, and Ichigo answers.
She does not flinch when Ichigo laughs, keening and mocking, only strikes, again, and again, and again. She's only ever had two weaknesses, and they wore the same face and shared the same fate. She only wishes that she weren't the one destined to be their executioner.
He blocks every blow, but Rukia does not break her onslaught. One last time, she tells herself, this is the ending, and if she breaks now she will never forgive herself. His Zangetsu draws a line of crimson blood down her arm, but in the fury of battle she does not feel it, drawn ever onwards by Sodeno Shirayuki's battlesong.
"Can you do it, Rukia-chan? he suddenly says in her ear. She spins to face him but he is gone, dancing out of her reach yet again. "Look at yourself! You can barely raise your head to look at me. Can you look him in the eye and kill him?"
She could fight him with her eyes shut, but she doesn't tell him that, him who is not him, this grotesque other half of the soul she loves so helplessly.
"And what about you?" she asks. "Have you forgotten already? Ichigo! I know you're still there! Remember last summer, when we," her voice cracks, "loved each other? You know..."
But she can't continue - her vision blurs and she barely manages to defend herself when he takes the opening to strike once, twice, three times. She lifts a hand to her face, draws it across her eyes, and brings it away thick with blood for all that she has not been hurt there. Her tears, she realises, and see at last how very close she is to death, to the end.
Yes, she finally thinks, and when he screeches a battle cry, leaps up to strike her from above, she does not turn from the killing blow.
Ichigo's technique was always flawed, and now she slides Sodeno Shirayuki past his scant defences (and never against her), even as Zangetsu cuts deep in her shoulder. She closes her eyes, and surely, easily, her swords finds his beating, twisted heart, sliding past skin and muscle into his soul.
She opens her eyes, but she can barely see through the film of red crowning her vision, but Sodeno Shirayuki is no longer black, but now unstained and pure again. She looks at Ichigo, her Ichigo, and wipes her eyes.
"Thanks," he says, and his voice is laboured. She takes his hand in both of hers and holds it against her cheek.
"Idiot. I just killed you."
"Yeah." He's smiling still, breaking her heart with its familiarity. "Better me than you. See you around."
She loves him more now than she ever has. Her heart swells, and she knows that despite her wrongs and her past, he forgives her and loves her too. "Come back to me."
"I promise."
~~~~~~~~~
Spring rain soaks through Rukia's uniform, making her shiver as she dispenses with another Hollow with ease.
It's almost like a game now; see a Hollow, purify it. See a lost soul, send it to Soul Society. It is as if those few, fleeting months with Ichigo were a training ground; she understands what it is to be happy and to feel lonely. She doesn't wish that fate on anyone.
It's been years since he left. Oniisama and Renji think she's a fool for waiting, but she always says, "He promised."
The circles under her eyes have grown more prominent, dark rings creasing the snow-white beauty of her skin, but when she draws Shirayuki now, she no longer sees the shadows of her dark twin...but this doesn't stop her from wishing that Ichigo and Zangetsu could see this now. Sometimes, Matsumoto and Kyouraku-taichou will ask her to come out with them, and once in a while, she'll accept, even though Hitsugaya-taichou will grumble to her about encouraging his subordinate. She's getting used to their boisterous company and the sour-sweet taste of alcohol, but she feels...lighter. Happier. Not happy, but happy enough.
In Rukongai, sometimes she leaves bowls of clean water. She knows that Yuzu is there, somewhere, and likes to think that this is a small repayment for the wrongs that Rukia's done towards her. Yuzu is almost as intractable as her brother, and Rukia knows that if she were a young girl that had died too young, she would not want to be found by her killer either, so Rukia leaves small things out in places that she thinks Yuzu might find them. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn't; it comforts Rukia anyway.
She knows that it is her fault that Ichigo's dead. She's accepted that some things are inevitable; Kaien loved his wife, and he lost his soul to her ghost. Rukia very nearly lost Ichigo to Kaien's ghost.
Nearly.
Ichigo always keeps his promises. He's coming for her, she can fell in the beating of her heart, the way white Shirayuki cuts through the air, singing softly and gently, a lady waiting for her knight to come home from his long battle.
Sometimes, when she's in the mortal world, she goes to the park by his house and sits under their favourite tree, her fingers reaching out blindly for their carved initials. I + R, her fingers trace before they skim over the crude heart. The tree grows slightly bigger every year, and the letters have been worn away until she can barely feel them, but she knows that they are there.
The rain has stopped now, and the setting sun is bright and warm against her skin. Watching the sunset, she thinks how it matches Ichigo's hair.
A breeze makes her robes swirl around her, her hair falling away from her face. She looks to the distance, and feels her heart stop, just for a second.
His hair is brilliant still, his scowl the same, and there's a new scar across his cheek, just under his eye.
She takes one step towards him, then another. Stops. He's there, standing in front of her, the culmination of that brief, perfect summer and an autumn that was too long.
"You kept your promise," she says, her voice steady but eyes shining.
He shrugs. "Don't I always?"
"Idiot," she replies and now tears are slipping down her cheeks.
He takes her hands into his, and it's just like the way it was before; Rukia-and-Ichigo and Ichigo-and-Rukia and the promise of perfect and imperfect summers ahead.
Author: cuervo_mariposa
Category: fanfiction
Theme: shadows and secrets
Notes: This is a bit darker than my last entry, but please give it a try. I hope people like it!
The Sum of All Regrets
It is not raining.
The pavement is hard beneath her knees, and even through the fabric of her uniform, she can feel how cool it is. Autumn, the season of death. Autumn, the season her heart broke.
He's staring at her with eyes that are all too familiar, filled with that mixture of tenderness and irritation and all those things that he's only ever shown her. He grins, razor-sharp teeth now gone and he's human and her Ichigo, and he's no longer bone-white like the sword in his chest, but coughing vermilion blood.
"Thanks," he says, and his voice is laboured. She takes his hand in both of hers and holds it against her wet cheek. It's not until his thumb brushes against her cheek that she realizes that she's still crying, crying so hard with all her sorrows and regrets, her guilts and lifetimes of worries all coalescing together into iridescent teardrops. Sodeno Shirayuki sticks through flesh and muscle, and moves with his every breath, a gentle, shaky motion.
"Idiot," she says, "I just killed you."
His eyes are no longer white on black, and his hand is cool against her cheek. He's dying…like her heart.
"Yeah." He's smiling still, breaking her heart with its familiarity. "Better me than you." He closes his eyes and reopens them with effort. "See you around."
She doesn't say, "I love you" or "I'll miss you" or any of those trite, inconsequential things. He knows, anyway; she knows he knows, and it'll never be enough, but it'll have to be. "Come back to me," she says.
"I promise."
She leans down and doesn't kiss him so much as breathes into him and he breathes into her. When she lifts her head, finally, he's gone. His eyes are closed in final repose. She pulls Sodeno Shirayuki from his chest and almost throws the sword away from her. Fresh tears spill down her cheeks as she brushes her lips over Ichigo's eyelids.
It is not raining, but Rukia can't tell the difference.
~~~~~~~~
When had this begun? Where? She can't remember anymore.
How did they end up here, on pavement not slicked with rain, and a sky that is not light nor dark, with her sword in his chest and death and unending sorrow their companion again?
Why is she doomed to kill the one she loves, not just once, but twice?
Of course. Retribution for the sins of her past.
Even if she could turn back time, she is selfish. She is not sure she could give up the things that had passed between them - the camaraderie, the faith, his clumsy kisses, her newfound laughter.
Or would she? Would she give it up, knowing that Ichigo would be alive, free to live in his world and his life? Would she, even if it would leaven part of her empty forever, a black well of despair and loneliness?
She read a fairy tale in a book once, about a princess cursed to die, who slept for a hundred years until her true love woke her with a kiss.
But even love's triumph over death wasn't absolute, could never be real. Death still came again years later and took it away, this time for good; the true love that had freed the princess felt his heart shatter like fragile glass, the sharp edges digging into his soul until the day he died.
Would he have given up the chance to know love if he had known how much it would hurt?
Rukia doesn't know, but she knows that she would have. She would give up anything…everything, to save the one she loved.
But what god is there to hear her prayer?
~~~~~~~~~
Summer drags by lazily, his head on her lap and her slim fingers tangled in his fiery hair. They fight, they argue, and at night, they go home and make love slow and aching like a butterfly unfurling its wings for the first time. Even after many nights together, he eases into her carefully, gently, almost warily lest she feels the slightest pain. He kisses her breasts (they taste of sweat and smell of home), and his fingertips trace her spine (a slope of vanilla satin). Her response is to rest her wrists behind his neck in a small, delicate embrace: It's okay. We're okay.
He trusts her, but he withdraws to instead, trail gem kisses down her stomach, then enters her with his tongue. She gasps with closed eyes, and she murmurs through a saccharine sweet smile he can almost taste as she rises to her pleasure. Her dulcet sighs as she climaxes encourage Ichigo, and he mounts her again.
Upon his own coming, he envelops her as they collapse with nothing left in them except the flush of heat and the knowledge of their love for one another.
She loves him and he loves her, and for once, just once, in this perfect, idyllic summer heat, they don't have to save the world or overthrow any tyrants, they can be Ichigo-and-Rukia and Rukia-and-Ichigo, and they're the only ones that can tell the difference.
Her favourite moments are when she takes his hand in her small one, and he says nothing, just links their fingers in companionable silence. It's these times that she notices that she can fit two of her hands into his one, just like she can fit all of herself into him.
~~~~~~~~~~
Time is ephemeral and the last vestiges of summer are all that's left of her happiness. Ichigo's laughter, the scent of his tangerine hair, the way his large, warm hands engulfed her small ones...she takes that away with her and puts it deep into the storeroom of her heart so that no one, no court or a judge can ever take it away from her.
~~~~~~~~~
Every jewel had to have its flaw, and summer's flaw lay, as it always had, in that it ended. Much, much too soon.
It all went wrong on one of those rare days where the sun is no more than a thin veneer across the sky, and the air is sour with the smell of delayed rain. Night falls, and the humidity makes the moon spread itself into a filmy shadow of itself, stretching across the sky until it is no more than a faint, luminescent smear behind swollen clouds. She lies beside him, their skin and bodies sticking with sweat. Her fingers skitter across hot flesh and trace the scar on his chest. The night is heavy with secrets, and she feels them pressing down on her like the heat.
"Do you ever regret this?" she asks, softly and raises her head slightly to look at his beloved, familiar face.
"Always," he replies and smiles. His teeth are sharp, like the jagged edges of her past, and his eyes are glazed, as though they sucked the moon's essence inside themselves.
"Ichigo?" she asks, fear slipping into her voice and heart. No, she thinks, not again, not to him. Not the one that went through death and risked everything to save me, not to the one person that I've ever really loved. She puts her hands on his cheeks. His flesh is hot, fever-hot, but his skin has no colour; it is moon-pale. "Ichigo!"
He blinks, and it's gone, the whiteness of his skin, the luminosity in his eyes. "Rukia?'
She kisses him then, so hard that she tastes Ichigo's human blood.
~~~~~~~~~~
It is raining. She is in Soul Society and her hands are wet and sticky and leaden with the weight of her sword, the weight of the blood running down them.
But the sword in her hands is Sodeno Shirayuki and yet not, her blade black instead of white, a darkness that swallows light and sings a siren song deceptive and deliciously sweet.
Kaien slumps against her and she almost buckles under his weight. It grows exponentially heavier with each step she takes, until her feet sink into ground, her knees, her waist, and she is drowning in a whirlpool of liquid sand and dust. As grains choke her, she cries out, whimpers, and closes her eyes: let this be a dream let this be a dream let this ...
"Rukia-chan," a voice whispers in her ear in Kaien's Hollow-twisted voice, and her eyes snap open.
Ivory discs upon ebony orbs lock her into an inescapable stare, wide and madly grinning, and the Hollow screeches as it laughs in her face, but only now, now ...
It wears her face.
"Murderer," her other self cackles, mocking, into her stunned, horrified face. It stands smugly on solid ground above her as she drowns deeper in her living grave, and screams accusingly, "Traitor! He's dead! You loved him and now you've killed him and it's just the two of us now, Rukia-chan." She hears traces of a lover's voice as her other mutters her name with the same loving contempt.
"No," she says. "no, no, you can't..."
The Hollow's face changes again before her eyes, twists and warps so her stomach turns to watch and she's going to be sick but she can't look away, can't deny the horror that is her own doing. She thinks she glimpses a familiar face, Kaien's wife, but it is swallowed again and then Hollow throws its head back and screams, and Hell Butterflies pour from its mouth to crumble and dissolve in the rain.
And then it's Kaien standing before her again.
"Fukai-taichou!"
"You killed me," he says to her in her voice, and smiles, ghastly and grotesque, crumbles limb by limb (was that a wisp of red?), and dies violently once more, and again, before her disbelieving eyes.
She closes her eyes and breathes. Opens them.
Ichigo, face hidden behind a mask of bone, still and dead with Sodeno Shirayuki's black blade thrust through him. She reaches wildly for her sword, to draw it out, but it's too late - the colour is already leeching from the blade, black to white, night to day, sin to innocence... False innocence.
"Ichigo!" she cries, but he is still, and his eyes behind his mask are wide and empty and his and this is her retribution, her unwanted salvation, her crime magnified once, twice, a thousand times in an unending spiral of destruction.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Kaien's ghost has imprinted itself onto her soul, but it is not what wakes her, breathless with guilt and shaking with fever madness. Her cheeks are alabaster cool under her hands, but she splashes water on her face anyway, shivers, and crawls back to bed, a child seeking an impossible refuge in a mother's womb.
~~~~~~~~~~~
The rest of the summer drifts in and out of Rukia's consciousness. Her moments with Ichigo, each precious moment of happiness, is marred by the shadow of her guilt, the secrets that eat away at her very soul. There are days when she thinks she sees Ichigo's eyes darken. One particular evening remains branded in her mind. Ichigo is standing with his back to the sunset. His hair is almost the same shade as the flaming sky as he looks down at her, his eyes serious and shifting with the shadows of the trees and air around them. She is aware of how very small and defenceless she is against him, against this giant, rash, crazy love of hers, and when he smiles, she does not recognize him.
"Ichigo?" she asks. "What's wrong?"
He leans forward and catches her lips with his, snarling when she refuses to submit. She thinks she feels the edges of his teeth graze her tongue, and his tongue, strangely alien, scraped the roof of her mouth.
Later that night, he hurt her for the first time, battered down her defences to bend her to his ruthless will, as Ichigo would never have done. Her tears, her entreaties, do not move him, only his dark, consuming desire.
"Don't move," he murmurs in her ear, his belt binding and cutting into her wrists high above her head and legs kept apart by his cruel hands that were white like cold, cruel snow. "Don't even think about it."
When he drives himself into her, she stops breathing, stops thinking, stops even trying to do anything except forget and not to scream when pointed teeth stab into the skin of her shoulder like assassins' daggers, or when, even worse, he whispers into her ear.
"Dance, Shirayuki," he mocks, and she feels something inside of her die, sliced by a sword black with sin. "Dance with me, my love. Let me melt the ice in your heart." And then, when she's stopped hearing or thinking and everything is just blank, he rolls gently into her mind. Let me back in, my beautiful Rukia-chan.
Breath, cool like moonlight draws maps of desire and hate across her skin; he whispers false endearments, endearments that remind her of a time she had tried so very hard to make up for. Despair, not lust, coils in the pit of her belly, and there are times when she forgets why she loved him.
That is the worst.
When he's done with her, she curls into herself and away from him. She can hear his jackal grin, even in the night, when he tells her in an undertone, don't move, don't flinch. The words echo in her head through what seems like an eternity, yet they wake up together the next morning, he with no recollection of the night before. She doesn't tell him what had transpired, just hugs him, thankful that her Ichigo has come home to her.
Even Karin and Yuzu have noticed the changes, and while Ichigo's father never says anything, Rukia's sees him watching his son with eyes that are much too keen to be mortal.
"Rukia-nee," says Yuzu one day while Ichigo is out of earshot, "Has Ichi-nii been acting weird lately?"
Rukia pauses and brushes a coil of ebony hair behind her ear. "Not really," she lies. "Did he do anything to you? I'll beat him up if you want."
Yuzu doesn't say anything for a long while, and then smiles sunnily, a smile that looks as if it has been practiced too many times. "No, it's nothing."
Regretting her lies but too much of a coward to retract them, she gives Yuzu a wan smile in turn and lightly promises to beat him up anyway.
~~~~~~~~~
Rukia discovers too late the way secrets can fester and come back to haunt you; guilt eats at her like a Hollow.
~~~~~~~~~
Leaves crunch beneath Rukia's shoes, dry like tinder. All it would need is flame to set the world a-blaze, and Rukia is tempted.
Orihime and Chad are looking as well, but they can't find him. It's as if he's vanished completely from their lives, taking everything with him...or at least, that's how Rukia feels. There's nothing to fill up the empty spaces in her now.
"We'll find him, Kuchiki-san," said gentle Orihime. "He's our friend."
"Why are you talking to her?" Karin had asked, bitter. "This is all her fault."
Rukia shivers at the memory. Yuzu's missing and Ichigo's not Ichigo anymore and all that's left is an old man with a smile as fragile as crushed autumn leaves and a girl who missing her other half. And it was all Rukia's fault, and they know it now. It broke her to see their trust shrivel, like a rose beaten by winter's frost. She had coated the remnants of her heart in ice so that she would be numb when she saw them withdraw from her, but still, it hurt.
There's nothing left now but the frost in her heart.
Sometimes, she goes to the park by Ichigo's house and sits beneath their favourite tree, imagining that he'll come and lay his head on her lap, the way he used to. The cold cuts through her skin but she ignores it, and waits there in her summer dress, her legs heartbreakingly thin and the angles of her face as sharp as the broken pieces of her heart.
But still, she sits and waits... What she waits for, she does not know.
She falls asleep sometimes, lulled to a shivering sleep by the crackling of the dead leaves around her and the spidery branches that reach out to enfold her in its arms. When night falls, she looks at the sky and at the wane, dull moon before slowly making her way back home.
Ichigo's bed still smells like him. She hugs his pillow at night and tries not to cry. There's nothing left in her to cry anymore, just empty space and the memory of a summer that she will never have again.
She wakes up, and shivering, climbs out the window. Her white dress sticks to her skin, clammy with nightmare's sweat and a clinging cold that she wants to never feel again.
She lands lightly on her feet, like the year's first snowflake, wrapping her arms around herself. It is bitterly cold, and her finely-tuned senses knows that there are spirits watching her, their eyes round with anticipation.
"You let your guard down." Her heart beats furiously fast. It's his voice, but Ichigo would never have spoken to her with a sneer honed to a knife-edge, nor looked at her with eyes that were blacker than the night skies. "Haven't you learned better by now, Rukia-chan?"
And she stands there in the empty street, looking at all her past regrets and guilts, remembering the small bits of happiness that she had with him. She loves him so much that it hurts.
"Aren't you going to say something, Rukia-chan?"
"Ichigo," she whispers, and draws closer to him, a moth drawn to a flame. She reaches out and touches his face; his skin is much too warm beneath her fingers and the stretch of his face unfamiliar when he bares his teeth at her. Her body shakes at his proximity and from fear, but she can’t bring herself to move away.
"Isn't this what you always wanted? To get rid of the Hollow inside of you, to be normal?" asks not-Ichigo. His skin is pale beneath fading moonlight and near-invisible stars. "You never could control your powers with me in you, but now," he leans close so that his lips are almost brushing hers, butterfly-light and monstrously cruel, "you are nothing without me."
She kisses him then, desperately trying to bring back the Ichigo she had once loved, still loves. He kisses her back and his hands hold her arms so tightly that they leave bruises that'll take weeks to fade, and scars on her soul that'll never heal properly.
"Kaien says hello," breathes not-Ichigo into her skin. "So does Yuzu."
~~~~~~~~~
She stares at her hands and at Yuzu's broken and mangled body, eyes that were once bright with laughter and effervescence now dead, killed by a brother that had been betrayed by the one that loved him most.
Karin is crying so hard that she can barely walk. Rukia half-carries her to Urahara's shop, where the old ex-captain is not saying anything. He looks a lot older than Rukia has ever seen him. Ichigo's father is missing, and Rukia prays to whoever is listening that he is still alive and will remain that way.
"This is my fault," whispers Rukia, so numb that she can barely speak.
Murderer. Traitor. You killed him, a ghost hisses...disappears. Her conscience, maybe, malleable like the past.
There is no condemnation in Urahara's eyes, even as he examines Karin and sedates her. Karin collapses as though a twin to her sister even in death, but the shallow dip and rise of her chest show that she is still breathing. Karin will hate Rukia when she wakes up. Rukia will not blame her.
Ururu offers her a cup of hot tea. Rukia accepts it and drinks, and it slides down thick and bitter as the moon's tears, or Kaien's blood.
She hopes it's poison.
~~~~~~~~~
Twins are supposed to be two halves of one person; half of Karin is gone, lost in the void of darkness and a world that she could never understand. Rukia knows how Karin feels, but says nothing. She has no right to.
~~~~~~~~~
This is what Urahara tells them: There is a way.
Ichigo's soul can still be saved, the Hollow within him now destroyed once and for all.
"He's hi-ding from us," he says, sing-song, almost to himself. "But he's still in Karakura. We're sure of that. He wants to be found."
Rukia closes her eyes and wishes she could not hear the words and the hope they could mean. Or is it really despair? Does a small part of Ichigo still fight the monster that has consumed him, does it still bind him to Karakura and his family and, she doesn't dare hope, her?
Or is the darkness within him waiting to destroy them all, to destroy Ichigo's heart completely?
Urahara circles the shop, still speaking, but she has missed the words lost in her wild, confused thoughts. She starts and looks up when he stops before her.
"It's not enough just to kill him, of course. Kuchiki should know this better than anyone," Rukia flinches at the words, because she knows so well... "But if we can exorcise the Hollow, then Kurosaki's soul will be cleansed of its influence."
Rukia looks into Urahara's shadowed, enigmatic eyes and sees what he doesn't say. She swallows, and the words stick in her throat. "But it will kill him too," she whispers, her voice cracking under the words.
She cannot read the expression in his eyes, but then he smiles; it is a small, thin thing. "Well done, Kuchiki."
"I'll do it," Isshin says, his now-quiet voice cold and hard and unbreakable as iron, coming forward to look Urahara in the face. He's changed. They've all changed, except Rukia, who only adds this to the growing mountain of guilt on her shoulders. "My son..."
"No!" Rukia bursts out. So much pain, so much death and destruction already; she cannot let this last, final duty fall into Ichigo's father's hands, cause even more pain than the endless sea of torment she has already unleashed.
"I'll do it," she says, desperate, and they look at her. "I have to be the one to do it," she whispers under their stares.
"No. Never." Karin interrupts, her voice hard like granite and unmoving in its sorrow. "Why should we trust her?"
Rukia closes her eyes. "Karin, if you only knew how sorry I was."
And she was. Rukia will never forgive herself for the wounds she’s inflicted on Ichigo’s family. Isshin will never be anything but a tired old man now, spent with the effort of raising three children, two that he will never see grow up, and a third child that would grieve forever for a lost half of herself.
"I don't want to hear it." Ichigo's sister, the only one left, turns away from her. "It's your fault that Yuzu's dead."
"Kuchiki-san is right. She should be the one to do it." Urahara's voice, no longer sly or cunning but weighed with secrets and regrets that are almost as heavy as Rukia's, breaks through the fogs of their regrets.
"He's my son," whispers Isshin, but Urahara ignores him and reaches out to take Rukia's trembling chin in his hand.
"And his love shall be your strongest weapon; he will come to you, Kuchiki."
Rukia sets her teeth and does not doubt his words.
"I will need your sword," Urahara tells her, and she hands Sodeno Shirayuki to him with numb hands, unquestioning.
He draws the pure-white blade from its sheath, his respect for its beauty unmistakable, then turns and nods to Tessai. From the back of the room they draw out a vat of liquid, black and iridescent as midnight's broken tears, and Rukia watches, frozen, as he dips the blade in, draws it out again. It gleams with obsidian light, and she should ache to see such travesty done to her own blade, to see her sins manifested whole...but she is too numb to feel anything, and in her heart, she mouths a silent apology Sodeno Shirayuki will never hear.
She is so sorry for so many things.
Urahara hands the blade back to her. She is still slim, but now heavy with Rukia's past. Sodeno Shirayuki was once known to be the most beautiful zanpakutou in Soul Society, her edge sharp and the white blade slim. She used to be as light as the first snowfall.
Rukia closes her eyes and remembers a long ago dream. If she had only known she had played Cassandra to her own denying heart then, could she have done more?
But it is too late for such questions now.
"You're ready, Kuchiki-san."
"I know," she replies but her heart says otherwise.
~~~~~~~~~
She loves Ichigo so strongly that it is almost tangible. She can taste it on her tongue, feel it against her skin and hear it when the wind brushes against her cheeks. This is her destiny, to be so happy that she’ll have to be the one to destroy it. She’ll know heartbreak because she’s had her summer of happiness.
~~~~~~~~~
Leaves fall, and so do the innocent and the damned.
Yuzu is dead, buried beneath clean earth and crumbling leaves. Rukia kneels by her tombstone and begs for forgiveness. It has been weeks since she left Urahara with a tainted Shirayuki and steel in her tattered and shredded heart, and Ichigo has not come for her. Yet.
He'll come back for her. He always has. She knows this.
She is now in her shinigami robes, a symbol of her never-ending duty. She will face monsters and loved ones alike and she will kill them, even though it kills her. Rukia knows that she is not justice, just a toy of fate. But never again, she swears. Secrets have a way of festering and turning into uglier things, things that could suck the very soul from you.
She stands then, her hand resting uneasily on the hilt of her sword and with a heaviness of heart that she could never hope to erase.
"You still haven't learned to watch your back," he says to her. He's left no footsteps in the snow, and his skin is shining so white that he almost blends with the landscape. If she could not see his black eyes or the fiery brightness of his hair, she would have thought that he was a ghost. "It seems as if you really want me to kill you."
She has steeled her will, and the balance of power between them has shifted ; where once they were black and white, sun and moon, light and dark, now Rukia has drawn the darkness of her own scarred, bleeding soul to face him this one last time. Drawing Shirayuki, who is as black as the never-ending night of Ichigo's eyes, she says, "You can't kill someone that's already dead." Sodeno Shirayuki sings her siren song, and Ichigo answers.
She does not flinch when Ichigo laughs, keening and mocking, only strikes, again, and again, and again. She's only ever had two weaknesses, and they wore the same face and shared the same fate. She only wishes that she weren't the one destined to be their executioner.
He blocks every blow, but Rukia does not break her onslaught. One last time, she tells herself, this is the ending, and if she breaks now she will never forgive herself. His Zangetsu draws a line of crimson blood down her arm, but in the fury of battle she does not feel it, drawn ever onwards by Sodeno Shirayuki's battlesong.
"Can you do it, Rukia-chan? he suddenly says in her ear. She spins to face him but he is gone, dancing out of her reach yet again. "Look at yourself! You can barely raise your head to look at me. Can you look him in the eye and kill him?"
She could fight him with her eyes shut, but she doesn't tell him that, him who is not him, this grotesque other half of the soul she loves so helplessly.
"And what about you?" she asks. "Have you forgotten already? Ichigo! I know you're still there! Remember last summer, when we," her voice cracks, "loved each other? You know..."
But she can't continue - her vision blurs and she barely manages to defend herself when he takes the opening to strike once, twice, three times. She lifts a hand to her face, draws it across her eyes, and brings it away thick with blood for all that she has not been hurt there. Her tears, she realises, and see at last how very close she is to death, to the end.
Yes, she finally thinks, and when he screeches a battle cry, leaps up to strike her from above, she does not turn from the killing blow.
Ichigo's technique was always flawed, and now she slides Sodeno Shirayuki past his scant defences (and never against her), even as Zangetsu cuts deep in her shoulder. She closes her eyes, and surely, easily, her swords finds his beating, twisted heart, sliding past skin and muscle into his soul.
She opens her eyes, but she can barely see through the film of red crowning her vision, but Sodeno Shirayuki is no longer black, but now unstained and pure again. She looks at Ichigo, her Ichigo, and wipes her eyes.
"Thanks," he says, and his voice is laboured. She takes his hand in both of hers and holds it against her cheek.
"Idiot. I just killed you."
"Yeah." He's smiling still, breaking her heart with its familiarity. "Better me than you. See you around."
She loves him more now than she ever has. Her heart swells, and she knows that despite her wrongs and her past, he forgives her and loves her too. "Come back to me."
"I promise."
~~~~~~~~~
Spring rain soaks through Rukia's uniform, making her shiver as she dispenses with another Hollow with ease.
It's almost like a game now; see a Hollow, purify it. See a lost soul, send it to Soul Society. It is as if those few, fleeting months with Ichigo were a training ground; she understands what it is to be happy and to feel lonely. She doesn't wish that fate on anyone.
It's been years since he left. Oniisama and Renji think she's a fool for waiting, but she always says, "He promised."
The circles under her eyes have grown more prominent, dark rings creasing the snow-white beauty of her skin, but when she draws Shirayuki now, she no longer sees the shadows of her dark twin...but this doesn't stop her from wishing that Ichigo and Zangetsu could see this now. Sometimes, Matsumoto and Kyouraku-taichou will ask her to come out with them, and once in a while, she'll accept, even though Hitsugaya-taichou will grumble to her about encouraging his subordinate. She's getting used to their boisterous company and the sour-sweet taste of alcohol, but she feels...lighter. Happier. Not happy, but happy enough.
In Rukongai, sometimes she leaves bowls of clean water. She knows that Yuzu is there, somewhere, and likes to think that this is a small repayment for the wrongs that Rukia's done towards her. Yuzu is almost as intractable as her brother, and Rukia knows that if she were a young girl that had died too young, she would not want to be found by her killer either, so Rukia leaves small things out in places that she thinks Yuzu might find them. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn't; it comforts Rukia anyway.
She knows that it is her fault that Ichigo's dead. She's accepted that some things are inevitable; Kaien loved his wife, and he lost his soul to her ghost. Rukia very nearly lost Ichigo to Kaien's ghost.
Nearly.
Ichigo always keeps his promises. He's coming for her, she can fell in the beating of her heart, the way white Shirayuki cuts through the air, singing softly and gently, a lady waiting for her knight to come home from his long battle.
Sometimes, when she's in the mortal world, she goes to the park by his house and sits under their favourite tree, her fingers reaching out blindly for their carved initials. I + R, her fingers trace before they skim over the crude heart. The tree grows slightly bigger every year, and the letters have been worn away until she can barely feel them, but she knows that they are there.
The rain has stopped now, and the setting sun is bright and warm against her skin. Watching the sunset, she thinks how it matches Ichigo's hair.
A breeze makes her robes swirl around her, her hair falling away from her face. She looks to the distance, and feels her heart stop, just for a second.
His hair is brilliant still, his scowl the same, and there's a new scar across his cheek, just under his eye.
She takes one step towards him, then another. Stops. He's there, standing in front of her, the culmination of that brief, perfect summer and an autumn that was too long.
"You kept your promise," she says, her voice steady but eyes shining.
He shrugs. "Don't I always?"
"Idiot," she replies and now tears are slipping down her cheeks.
He takes her hands into his, and it's just like the way it was before; Rukia-and-Ichigo and Ichigo-and-Rukia and the promise of perfect and imperfect summers ahead.