Disclaimer: Bleach is the property of Tite Kubo; I do not claim copyright over the manga/anime, characters or plot elements.
Sunset Orange
The sun was setting and, as he watched the solar disk descend below the line of the horizon, Ichigo could remember the happy times he had before meeting Rukia, fighting against her brother, against Aizen, and the time he had Zangetsu. The loss of his zanpakutou was a heavy blow to his pride, and he could not escape the guilt of having committed the Final Getsuga, which was hunting his dreams lately, and nobody could explain why. Not due to not having a serious psychiatrist to deal with his depression, but because of his pride he refused to trust anyone with his recurrent dark thoughts. No one could live with two thirds of their soul gone, much less after having lost them while merged – and of his own wish. Aizen could have been cought by Urahara without him sacrificing both his zanpakutou and inner hollow, but he ignored his soul's wish and made the decision to save his family, his friends, his city and the shinigami themselves by giving his life even if the war would have been ended by his death. He did not care for himself, as always, and until now he had given his safety no thought, but at times like these, when he could remember the tears Tensa Zangetsu had cried in his mindscape, imploring him not to use the Final Getsuga, and only at times like these, when he remembered with an aching heart and his own eyes ready to shed tears of their own, he could clearly focus on his zanpakutou's memory, and let his tears fall, just like the sun dipping below the horizon while he closed his eyes, only to open them and let the tears pour over like the bluish colors of the setting sun, disappearing without any trace but for the dark clouds mimicking the despair, the guilt and the sense of being lost that his own soul irradiated for any being near enough to feel. Slowly detaching from his slouching posture up on the roof of the Kurosaki Clinic, the young seventeen-years-old descended downstairs and ran to his room, the guilt never forgotten and only rising with ever day he lived.
Often he thought about ending himself and his pain, but the grief was the only connection he still had to those – now forbidden – memories of being a shinigami, of feeling his wild reiatsu engulfing enemy after enemy, of his own hands, legs, blood and bones clashing with the bodies of countless enemies that were later on defeated; the memories from the past of a hero, of a being that once stood up proud and almost godlike from the ashes of part of the real Karakura Town in Seireitei just after he returned from his training in the Precipice World, his exhausted father slumped over his shoulder and his body having aged two months, the body of a being that transcended what any shinigami could have achieved at the time, a being of unrivaled power – Aizen and the Hyougyoku stood no chance before his might, Ulquiorra died at the hands of his inner hollow, which had suddenly became a Vasto Lorde a couple of hours before him standing before Aizen and prior to him entering the Dangai, Grimmjow was defeated by him with the help of his hollow's powers, countless enemies – hollow or not – stood below him in terms of power, yet he couldn't protect that which he should have protected with nothing short of his own life – his soul. The decayed soul of someone that had nothing else to live for, the epitome of loneliness, a state in which nothing matters, nothing remains alive, nothing moves except the winds of death in the barren mindscape of the Saviour of the Three Worlds, a title he was given by Urahara shortly after Aizen was sealed.
Nothing could have shocked him more after that fight than his own mindscape after his powers never returned to him later that day. A barren wasteland that could pass any day for Hueco Mundo's - future landscape, a desolate area of eternal scarlet and dark grey sands, from which partly destroyed huge skyscrapers rose and stood like dead candles over an ancient wooden table eaten by insects, a mindscape better called a cemetery, with the glass of the skyscrapers replaced by thin sheets of bone and tendons, completing the macabre view. It was a proper mindscape, looking just as Ichigo would have, if two thirds of his body would be cut off, the pain of seeing the deserted world beinging him to unstoppable tears for two days in a row, his body never waking up for a week and his mind struggling with not pulling a Grimmjow and start killing after becoming a mad carcass of his own soul.
The deathly silence broken by eternal winds carrying the strong, pungent smell of death, of human flesh and bloody dust blowing over the void of his soul, his curse never ending by his dreams being hunted with endless nightmares of past achievements suddenly converted to scenes of his enemies slaughtering him and his closed ones in the most bloody ways he was witness to and also in new, much more terrifying ways, from being fried with fire-hot shikai Senbonzakura blades to being cut into pieces by Nnoitra and Kenpachi, then burned by Ryuujin Jakka. His mind was a scenery only war veterans could stand watching, at this point in time. He had cut himself off from his friends, that were now usually going at awkward times hollow hunting and meeting with his former shinigami friends – former as they no longer met with him, at all, despite him going to Urahara's for regular updates. But those are a thing of the past, too. He never went to the shopkeeper again, after he had previously spotted his sisters themselves meeting with his high-schoolmates without him being at least invited, and going with Yoruichi to that place. His trust was volatile at best after losing his two inner fragments, and no improvement stood on the horizon.
The past haunts those that have lived in it and never could let it go. Never could feel alive again in the present. After losing their lives' worth of accomplishments due to a foggy desire for justice and revenge. Revenge. Wasn't this what Aizen also desired, in the first place? Aizen was already powerful – he was, after all – a Captain, but he still had his fears. Fears of being the only one to be God someday. Of achieving a higher plane of existence. To become that which Ichigo had been, albeit for a very short amount of time. A too short amount of time.
Neither of the three thought about dying; after merging, though, Zangetsu and his hollow – now named Shiro – as another tear dropped from his tired eyes and down his lips, shadowing his clenched teeth and hiccups as he discharged his sadness one more time tonight, only after merging did they start thinking about their death. What if Aizen was more powerful? They would protect Ichigo, to the end. What if they would die while protecting him? It was their duty, their purpose, their wish. What if Ichigo died? Then they would die first, and take Aizen down with them. 'Ichigo must not die' was their sole thought after impaling him out of his own acceptance of them both. His tears were shed with Ichigo's life in mind, and Ichigo had received their combined memories after seeing the state of his inner world – or inner hell, as it is now.
Occasionally, he enters his mindscape again, for old times' sake, and lets his frustration and anger at himself known. He destroys his own mind's skyscrapers, his own mind's sky, his own mind's sand, his mind's replica of him. He aches for an end to his hell, but finds none of it. He lives. Killing himself inside his inner world does not kill him in the real world, even if his injuries during the time he was a shinigami were passed onto his real body.
The reason came to him after half a dozen months of practicing 'inner suicide', his new and favourite sport: deep inside, he realised that his mind protected itself, that it remembered the wish of both his zanpakutou and Shiro, that their will stood strong and prevented him to die, or suffer, or feel any residual pain from his inner turmoil. And after giving it more thought, he stopped doing it. It made him feel more than ashamed, more than guilty, more than awful. He felt destroyed, burned, he felt like dying. He had disrespected the will of his soul. He tried killing himself numerous times, covering Zangetsu and Shiro's wishes with a thickening layer of earth and blood shed for nothing but letting his inner guilt lessen, when in fact it grew even more.
Their will had to be kept intact. They must still live, even if only in his memories. He still had this duty, to protect his memories from the corrosive time and loneliness. It didn't matter whether he was at home, at school or walking around Karakura, with nothing in mind and going anywhere and nowhere at the same time. It didn't matter whether he aced all his classes and had the best grades in the entire high-school, nothing mattered but remembering the times he had together with the two beings most important to him: his zanpakutou, the manifestation of a teacher, a mentor, a parent and a trustworthy friend, all condensed into a wise middle-aged man he could call his Ossan, and the bleached copy of his body, Shiro, whose mind was inhabited by the bloodthirsty and extremely powerful hollow mind that it posessed, a hollow so thirsty for power that it kept him on his toes at all times and had barely hit the Vasto Lorde stage when the Getsuga became the Final one of his teenage life. His rival in anything – even looks, if he were to look closely, Shiro had been the annoying opposite brother that he would wish for when he was younger, the brother that always challenged him in everything and with which he always was in the mood to fight for 'the throne', a childish game of 'King' and 'Horse' that his Hollow knew after reading his memories – or looking through his own, as they were parts of his own soul and had almost full access to his mind.
It felt strange, not having them around any more. Worse than even his mother's death, at a time he still thought her death ruined his happiness forever, and he later on accepted his sacrifice as the biggest and saddest mistake of his life. Nothing compares with killing one's soul, and the sin is even more deadly if the one doing the killing is the owner itself. A soul is a free entity, caring not for anything that does not hurt it, and living on its own, waiting patiently for a journey to Soul Society after the owner's death. Hollows and shinigami mess with souls every day, but the majority of the souls are stable, living in their own way either in the Human World, the Shinigami realm or the Hueco Mundo, as hollows. Even in the depths of a hollow's being, where countless souls merge together in a scream like no other, the souls themselves are whole, unadultered. Souls do not desintegrate, they do not wither and do not hurt. Complete souls, that is. Because, wherever Ichigo would go, whatever would he feel and think and say, his soul was not whole – and he accepted this fact. His life was meaningless, if nothing waited for him after dying. Would he meet with his zanpakutou and hollow? Would his soul become one, again, like when he fought against Aizen and barely won? Or like when he struggled against their merged form? Or like when he fought with either one, Zangetsu on a pole fixed on the side of a rotated skyscraper and his hollow in plain sight, trying to inflict blow after blow on his doppelganger?
He was not a human anymore; he did not have a healthy soul anymore. Nothing waited for him at the end, so why bother? Only if he could meet them again, would he care for anything in the three worlds. But souls are only known to stay together, never to fade, never to die, never to split or fragment and perish. Never to become like his soul had. Empty, longing for wholeness, filled to the brim with unsettling guilt and pain, full of hopelessness and a desire for the end. A desire he had no means of fulfilling, as his soul did not allow for his death, and his death would violate the wills of his own soul. Slowly, he let himself fall asleep, not caring for the voice of his youngest sister calling for the family to join her for dinner. Hungry as he was, his soul's hunger could not be alleviated by earthly food, nor by soul particles. A soul mends itself when its fragments choose so, and not earlier. But his soul's parts were lost, forever, and nothing in the world could recover them. Nothing could revive them. His zanpakutou and hollow. His mentor and brother. His reason to protect and his instinct to fight and win, never looking backwards and always stepping into the future. The future, that place full of mystery and positive thoughts, that destination he was forever barred from. Forever haunted by his mistake, praying to the thundering clouds over his mindscape's landscape to bring his end closer, him who never stood still and always won against all odds set against him, standing defeated over his own past, in his own inner world, forever in the scarlet shade of bloody-red skyscrapers of blood and bone, of weathered metal and withered stone, forever running towards an end he simply cannot reach. Waiting for the eternity to swallow his anguish, his loss, his failure. And give him back his soul. His life. His true self.