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I am the one without hope, the word without echos,
he who lost everything and he who had everything.
...Here is the solitude from which you are absent.
It is raining.
-- Pablo Neruda, “Abeja Blanco”
--
If Yahwach was going to come back at Ichigo's happiest moment, his thinking went, then he needed to make sure that he wasn't truly happy ever again. A tall order, to be sure. Yahwach had caused too much death, too much destruction. Everything was in ruins and he knew they would never be strong enough to handle this, handle him, these powers that broke everything they knew and left it in smoking ruins. He had to do something, and that was it.
He kept this thought to himself, at first, in the immediate aftermath, as the dead were found and the injured cared for, and the costs tallied. Ichigo didn't need to know the numbers. All he knew was that it was all far, far too much. He could never let it happen again. He had failed to protect everyone this time, and he wouldn't fail again.
To figure out what would make him unhappy, he thought, he had to figure out what made him happiest first. Another hard thing, that, for a boy of eighteen, cusped on the edge of adulthood by the reckoning of the living world. But how many boys of eighteen had killed, had died? Had borne the weight of worlds on their thin shoulders and not broken under it (until now)? Surely, he thought dully, if he was old enough to kill and be killed, he could figure out what might make him unhappiest. Or at least stumble upon what would make him happy, and so work it out from there.
The answer came to him gradually and all at once, like a lightning bolt ahead of a summer storm. He'd been spending nights in the aftermath in Soul Society, wherever there was room, wherever there was a clear bit of ground and a piece of quiet. The others, they wanted to treat him with some kind of deference, like he was the savior of them all. He couldn't make them understand that that wasn't so. He was no savior, No hero. He had lost. He was still trying to figure out how to win this one.
Except her. Rukia understood, understood without him even having to put it into clumsy words. So when she told him he ought to stay in the 13th's compound, where she was working so hard to keep the division running while her captain was down for the count (no one knew if he'd ever recover), he came. And that first night when he'd seen her there, sitting out by the railing in the moonlight, the dark softening the ruins and rubble into something almost bearable to look at, he knew. When she smiled up at him, tired but true, he knew.
This was what would make him happy, truly happy. It was always this, her, this place, this power gained for her sake. Just to be by her side, forever, and protect her and all the others out there, and help rebuild Soul Society not as it was, but as it could be. They had always been drawn by such great gravity, and however much Aizen or Urahara or Yahwach or any of a hundred other forces wanted to claim credit for it themselves, it had always been outside of that. If it wouldn't have been the cheesiest thing he'd ever heard, he might admit to himself that it seemed something like destiny.
He looked away from her then, afraid she'd hear when his heart cracked in two. Because she was what would make him happy, and she had been since the night they met, and it could never, ever be. Not if he wanted to protect her, protect everyone, all the worlds.
"What's wrong?"
Her smile had faded, eyes dark and wide and worried in the shadows as she gazed at him.
--
"There has to be another way," she insisted, rejecting the idea.
But here was despair that she couldn't lift him out of, because it just proved the measure all the more. "There can't be. Even after that arrow... we couldn't beat him. He disappeared. He'll be back and..." His head hung heavy.
Rukia hated feeling powerless, hated the way his despair was seeping into her bones this time, because she could not disbelieve it fully. She'd always been able to before, there had always been something else. But no, here was a monster she couldn't fight against. Neither could he, except by cutting out his own heart.
"You don't have to be, you know."
Rukia's head whipped around so she could stare at him incredulously. He wouldn't look at her, staring at his hands in a pool of shadow as he spoke. "You could be happy, here. You've got the division, your brother, Renji..." He trailed off, hating himself for the unsaid things in his voice. All the things he could want for her, him aside. And god, did he want him for her.
"What a fool you are." The tightness of her voice got him to look at her, finally. She wished he wouldn't, she hated the tears in her eyes, the tears she was trying to swallow down before they swamped her and spilled hot down her cheeks. She couldn't. "Every version of my happiness has you in it."
And in the moonlight and the rubble, he kissed her, feeling tears and not knowing whose they were.
--
"We can't, what if..."
"We'll know that this, that we can never happen again. That's sadness enough to be the splinter for any joy." A silence, broken by a shuddered breath. "If I cannot have you, if you cannot have me...at least let us have this."
He was silent.
Morning came with rain.
--
He tried to be as happy as he could, to live the life that he had once intended to live, when he was fifteen and foolish and full of life. He studied, he graduated, he saw ghosts. He helped only so far as he told the good ones to move on, and move on fast. He went out of his way to avoid Hollows.
Tokyo had better shinigami patrolling the place, evidently, than Karakura had ever had. It was easier to avoid the Hollows there, while he studied, while he lived, then it ever had been at home. It was something close to normal.
But there were always ghosts.
--
It was like when destiny had been thwarted so thoroughly, it didn't know what to do to fix it, and so everything got tangled up. Not just for him, though he was the only person he'd wanted, needed, planned to be unhappy. Everything went wrong.
Even his dad left, without telling Ichigo the real reasons why. He didn't need to. Said he was overdue for a vacation and then he and Ryuuken had taken off, apparently friends (again? For the first time? Ichigo couldn't tell, couldn't bring himself to ask the details), for “active retirement”, globe-trotting, leaving their sons to their own lives that they had made for themselves.
Before that though, Ishida and Ryuuken had made up, at least, mended things in a patched up way that was the one thing it seemed fate could still work right. They had come to terms with each other as Ishida applied for schools, different programs, throwing in applications for the top fashion design programs in the country alongside the top medical programs, all with his father's good graces.
Thwarted fate could only work her magic so far though, it seemed. All his applications came back with accepts (and high hopes on the part of admissions, given his father being who he was) for the medical programs, and politely worded no's from anything else. The fact that he had so mended things with his father was the reason he accepted one of the yeses, one of the best programs in the country, and didn’t look back.
--
Chad hadn't meant to become a boxer. His band was going to take off any day now, and if it didn't, well, he was ok with that. There were always jobs for a big guy like him, construction being just one of them. He was good at it, and even managed to get the good notice of the foreman on one site when he pointed out an issue with one of the beams that no one, up until him, had apparently noticed. Maybe there was a future in planning and architecture for him, the man had commented, his gray hair and authoritative mustache reminding Chad of his Abuelo, in a sideways sort of way.
Except it all came falling apart when his skills caught the notice of some yakuza, and one night Chizuru showed at on his door, bloody and bruised, with the threat that unless he did as they said, well, he could imagine, couldn't he?
Caught between the rock and hard place of protecting his friends by going along with their demands or finding another way, he tried to ask Ichigo for advice. Which might have been effective if Ichigo wasn't drowning in his own personal tangle of fate at that time. And so Chad decided to protect his friends. It was only boxing, after all, not life and death. Just a game with willing participants. He tried to tell himself those things, and buried the ache in his heart under the aches of the body.
--
Of course he knows about Inoue, the way she looks at him. (The way he doesn’t look at her.) He’s known for a long time. He may have started out as a dumb, loud, brash teenage boy with the powers of a spirit, but he can see, and she’s been there, on the edges, for years. She’s Tatsuki’s friend, her best friend, especially as Ichigo moved further away from her. The one who, if he hurt her, Tatsuki would pretty much break his spine because he and Tatsuki may be best friends but there are things you do not Do to your friend's friends.
She’s become more than that, of course. Orihime helped them rescue Rukia, gave herself up to give them a little more time, has been there with them all through thick and thin and, well, he’d rescue her in a heartbeat if she was in trouble, like he’d do for any of his friends. Chad sure doesn’t look at him that way though.
He knows that whatever she's pinning on his want to protect people and his tall stature isn't really what's there, whatever it is. He has his suspicions, but bringing them up brings up the spectre of Tatsuki threatening him with castration and it's safer to just not bring these things up.
Until she’s visiting and staying at his place and suddenly seems to have mustered all that courage that took her through the streets of the Seireitei and from the towers of Hueco Mundo into a stammering confession and it’s all there in front of him.
He’s grateful, that she thinks of him so highly, of course, and is about to try and let her down gently when a part of him thinks, well, why not? If he can’t be happy, if none of the others seem to be happy, why can’t she have a little happiness, even if it’s just for a little while.
--
She loves Renji enough that she never tells him the details of that night, not even the innocent parts. She gets the feeling that he understands anyway. Maybe not fully, but he is there to help her pick up the pieces of a broken heart, even if it was broken by too much love, instead of not enough. It's not that her heart is really broken, if she were to be picky about the words. It's just that there's this hole at the bottom of it now.
Her daughter is born with a shock of black hair and Rukia names her the only thing she could ever name her firstborn, even if it's a compromise with a different last name than she thought she'd get, before everything. Renji decides that this is how he reaches Byakuya, this is how his fang comes. Not with the blood of battle but the water of the womb. The Kuchiki heir bears his last name. He tells himself it's enough.
As she ages, Ichika’s hair lightens, until Rukia almost hopes that it keeps going, getting lighter and lighter until it resembles someone other than her father. But Ichika is several months too late for that and her hair settles into the howling red of Renji’s by the time she’s three years old. Rukia thinks it's beautiful all the same and tells Ichika so as she helps her put it up, ‘Just like daddy’s’. Rukia knows to never voice stupid hopes, foolish thoughts, packing them away down in her heart with everything else.
--
When his son is born, Ichigo thinks that surely, this is it, this is as happy as he can be, right here, this moment. But even as he looks down at the small, scrunched up face with all the love in his heart, he feels at the bottom of it that hole that he put there himself. It's a relief, it really is, that his son will be safe because of that choice that he made. For his son, he can bear all the pain in this world, as long as Kazui never has to. Ichigo will make sure of it.
--
Her heart still hammers in her chest when Ichika announces that she wants to try for the Academy’s entrance exams, too many years too early for her mother's fearful heart. Rukia is learning to let go, but it's hard. She and Renji argue about it, in voices that carry no further than their paper thin walls. In the morning Renji presents his daughter with the news she's been hoping for, and Rukia smiles to see her so happy. Even as her heart sits like a hard stone in her chest. She is learning to let go, but gods, she wishes she could protect her daughter. She buries that too, underneath the smile that matches her daughter's.
--
One day they find out Kazui inherited his powers...sort of. It's odd, they seem to be mixed with something of Orihime's ability, the extraordinary masked by the mundane. He doesn't have to leave his body to turn into a shinigami, which is good, because Ichigo agrees with Urahara (and his sightless eyes that nonetheless seem to see too much, still), that that would be far too rough on the kid. All it takes is the willpower, and Kazui changes.
It still scares him though, the thought that his son might be in danger because of this, that some destiny he can't control is coming for his kid and he's powerless to stop it. When Orihime suggests that she use her fairies to keep an eye on him, Ichigo immediately agrees. A weapon as a babysitter isn't the worst idea ever, after all. Even if she hasn't used it as a weapon for a long time now.
--
She sends him a hell butterfly. When he sees it flutter into the room his stomach twists in a way he can't name. It settles on his finger, and the news that it has been ten years now, and Rukia is becoming captain of the Thirteenth reaches him. "About time," he mutters quietly. They had let him know, years ago, when Ukitake had decided to semi-retire, and a year or so ago when he was finally in what seemed to be his final decline and a decision was forthcoming. Neither of those updates had come from Rukia. Just keeping the old hero current, it seemed.
This one had come from her.
Maybe ten years was enough time. Maybe it was enough.
He replies.
--
They had to correspond some, to set up the party. That's what it was, really, an excuse to get everyone together--or at least everyone they could--and be a little happy, at least for a little while. At first it was by hell butterfly, then he sent his new phone number, along with his regrets that he wouldn't be making it to the ceremony itself. What he didn't say was that he wasn't sure he trusted himself not to want to stay there, if he stepped through the gate.
She knew that was the reason anyway.
--
When he sees her face is the happiest he has been in ten years.
--
Kazui mentions, in passing, in his little kid talk, something about a hole, and bad feelings, and how'd they'd gone away when he touched it. Ichika asks him what it felt like, and when Kazui says "A very bad man, but he wanted to find happiness?" The kid, understandably, is confused, as are Ichika and Aunt Karin, to whom he is relating this.
It goes through Ichigo like an electric shock, and as Karin asks Kazui more questions that are met with shrugs from his son, Ichigo’s eyes find Rukia's across the room.
They are wide and bright and he knows that he's right, that they did it, that finally, after ten years, they've won. If that was anything else but the last bit of Yahwach's power he'll eat his own sword.
Then Renji laughs at something in the other room, and reality comes crashing in on him, the fluttering, false hope he'd held in the pit of his stomach crushed out.
Rukia won't look at him, all of a sudden. He's always been able to read what's written in her eyes and ten years was not nearly enough to change that fact. He doesn't know if ten lifetimes would be enough to not know her. She won’t let him see the thoughts that echo his.
They won, alright. They built a reality so unlike everything they ever wanted that Yahwach could find no crack, no way to edge himself in. And like the most perfect of traps, they had caught themselves all in it too. Unraveling it would unbind their lives that they had so carefully built, and Ichigo knew none of them would do that. None of them could do that. Rukia wouldn't look at him, not with that killed hope between them, couldn't bear to see it laid out and bloody where it wouldn't be washed away by the rain.
He hears the first drops outside the clinic on the hot June pavement.