He is somewhere in these catacombs with her. She isn't sure when she learned exactly how to tell, but it was a long time ago, and now she is as sure of his presence as she is of her complete and utter shame.
She is quiet as she slides down the dark hallway. She has perfected stealthy movement. She is a genius at hiding. And yet, he always manages to find her, somehow.
She hides anyway, like the coward she knows she is, postponing the inevitable for as many precious seconds as she can.
The first day he appeared he brought her to these caves, pushed her into them and declared that if she ever left he would show no mercy to anyone anywhere. If she stayed, he would restrain himself. He would be a good boy. All she had to do was remain inside. Remain in a place where he knew he could find her quickly.
If the threat only concerned herself she would have escaped long ago. It isn't as if there are guards or chains keeping her in place; at least not physical ones. The threat to the worlds of the dead and living is enough to prevent her from running. She is the buffer that keeps them safe, and all it costs is her freedom and her soul.
She has learned the layout of the caves so well she could navigate them blindfolded. She wanders them aimlessly, nothing else to occupy her time but thinking and eating the food he leaves for her sometimes. She doesn't sleep anymore. Instead she wedges herself into a dark corner and floats so0mewhere in between consciousness, feeling the hatred and shame and disgust well up from deep inside. She feels Sode no Shirayuki's silent shock at what she has become. The Zanpakto hasn't spoken to her since she entered the caves.
That is her life now. And it is endless.
She pauses at a corner. She senses his movement ahead of her, coming steadily. He doesn't know the caves as well as she does, but he has all the time in the world to find her. She slides into a crevice in the wall behind her and holds her breath.
He passes in front of her, prowling and smirking as usual. His hair is a shocking white in the dimness. There isn't much light in the tunnels except for the occasional torch he provides. Inside she thinks he enjoys hunting her in the dark.
Before he turns into another hallway she hears his voice sibilant and echoing, "Playing hide and seek again, are we little rabbit? Don't you ever tire of our games?"
He slips around the corner and is gone. She slides from her hiding place and continues in the opposite direction.
He fails to find her that day. She doesn't breathe a sigh of relief. There are other days.
She has been standing in the same place for god knows how long. This happens with increasing frequency. She will stop her aimless wanderings and stare at the wall until she feels his presence again, and then she melds with the shadows and slips away. Sometimes she stands for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.
"This is becoming bothersome, little rabbit."
She doesn't move.
"I'm starting to wish that you meet me when I come. We have played too long."
He is annoyed. She has gotten much better at hiding. He hasn't found her in days.
"I will leave for today, Rukia. But the next time I find you, it will be on your own head what I do to you."
He leaves. She stays where she is, hidden down some short, small hallway, and stares and stares and stares.
The first time he found her with ease, and she thought she would die.
It hurt more than anything in the world. He was heavy and he smelled like must and dirt and he was a cruel parody of the boy she used to be partners with. His teeth were sharp as he dragged them over her cheek and her throat and he murmured to her, "This is how it should and always will be, little rabbit, little Rukia."
"Rukia!"
She hears him raging in a parallel hall. She changes direction accordingly, but she isn't far enough away to not hear him screaming.
"I'll find you, Rukia! I know you're still here! I know you're still here!"
She crouches in a fissure barely large enough to fit all of her, and he stays so long this time that when she stands up her legs don't work and she falls and hits her head on the wall, and everything goes black.
"Ichigo is no longer worthy of this body. I am the new tenant."
The mouth stretched stretched stretched, more than any mouth should be able to, and he smiled at her and all she saw was teeth.
"But this doesn't have to be the end of the world. I will make a deal with you."
She heard his deal, and her insides froze solid. She cursed him and she fought him halfheartedly because on the inside she knew that her freedom meant nothing compared to the safety of the world and soul society, and he overpowered her anyway and dragged her to her new accommodations.
"I'll see you soon, Rukia!" He shouted as she staggered deeper into the caves, clutching her bleeding stomach where he cut her with a white Zangetsu. "Your friend's lives depend upon it!"
She reawakens.
Her head bursts with pain as she tries to stand. She supports herself on the wall with one hand while she feels her forehead with the other. It brushes dried blood and a large bump that throbs with fresh pain as she touches it, threatening to topple her again.
She stumbles down the hall and happens upon food that he left her. It has long gone bad, but she devours it anyway.
"I love this," He said gleefully. "I'm so happy you agreed, Rukia."
That hadn't been the first or second or third time he had come to her. The pain of earlier visits had faded. She could concentrate on disappearing now rather than the scalding humiliation. He noticed her vacancy, and he wasn't pleased.
"Don't try and hide away from this, little rabbit," He murmured.
She ignored that voice, who cared about that voice, she was deep inside some sort of gray limbo, and she had heard all his words before. She thought.
He chuckled and leaned down to her ear, nipping the lobe between his teeth and whispering, "Do you miss Ichigo?"
She choked and came crashing back from her sheltered world at that. The hollow never talked about Ichigo.
He noticed her return by her suddenly bright eyes and grinned crazily. "Would you like to know how he's doing? He doesn't want to come out again. He's too ashamed of his weakness."
He grabbed her neck and forced her to look at him. His eyes were black and empty.
"He's ashamed he's letting me do this to you."
She closed her eyes against the burning wetness inside them, but the tears came anyway, and Ichigo's hollow lapped them up with his abnormally long tongue and whispered to her about Ichigo, and what Ichigo was doing, and how he was feeling and how he felt, how he loved her and how it festered in his heart and gave his hollow fuel until he could at last take over, until finally the hollow finished what he'd come to do and he left, and she cried for herself for the first time, naked and dirty and curled on the floor.
She thinks long and hard. (What else is there to do?)
Does she hate Ichigo? She doesn't know. She hates his hollow. She is mad at Ichigo for being weak. And she's not stupid; the hollow isn't keeping her for his own pleasures, he's keeping her to punish Ichigo every time he touches her with the boy's own hands.
The fact remains that Ichigo is no longer the ruler of his body and his mind.
But she has been weak before as well, and her weakness cost a nakama his life. She is not new to being weak. She knows how easy it is to fail.
Does she hate Ichigo?
She doesn't know, and since she has all the time in this life to contemplate it, she thinks she will figure it out eventually.
There is one time she thinks of the most when she is floating in between consciousness.
Ichigo's hollow was in a good mood that day, and she was too scared to ask him why in case it had to do with killing someone close to her.
"I thought I would give you something today," He croons, pushing her to the floor and tearing her clothes from her. She doubted it, but when he pressed his face between her thighs she panicked, and he had to hold her down until she tired herself out from struggling. He cut her with his nails in retaliation, slicing her shoulder open with an inquisitive expression on his face as if she was a fascinating a science experiment.
"I'm trying to be nice today, Rukia. Don't spoil it."
She panted hoarsely, eyes wide and terrified but still. He returned to her thighs, biting along the insides until he reached the cleft between her legs, and then he pushed his mouth and tongue and teeth against her and lapped at her until she couldn't take it anymore. Without his black eyes staring at her, it was different. She felt different. He looked less like a hollow, and more like the real one. Against every rule she ever set for herself she cried out, and the hollow drew it out as long as he could.
She was weak and damp with sweat and breathless when he lifted his mouth from her. He dragged his lips across hers in a parody of a kiss and whispered, "For you, Rukia."
But it wasn't for her, never for her, it was for him, he knew what it did to her, how she spent the whole time until his next visit hating herself, and how it haunted her when she floated in her corners, the tingling remnants, the brush of what used to be Ichigo's lips against hers, how she could never go fully back to her gray limbo because what if that happened again, and then quietly, in the very back of her mind, what if she missed it?
Ichigo had told Rukia he wasn't sure he could hold his hollow off much longer.
She had nodded, not sympathetically or knowingly because she didn't have a clue what it was like to have your evil side personified and constantly fighting you for dominance and she knew it, but with trust, because at that point she didn't think Ichigo could ever lose.
Later, as she walks the same places she has walked ten thousand times before, she thinks back to that conversation and curses, half at Ichigo, and half at herself.
"Found you."
She doesn't react. After she hit her head she has been feeling frozen, as if she is being forced to watch a movie with no control over looking away from it.
His fingers trace along her collarbone from behind, then trail downwards to grasp at her breast through the thin cotton of her clothes. She has been wearing them since she got here. They are practically nonexistent. She keeps them mainly for warmth purposes than modesty.
"I haven't seen you for days, Rukia. You are quite skilled at not being found."
He withdraws his hand. She doesn't move, or say anything, or blink.
"So… what punishment is good enough for this?"
It is bad. It is the worst thing he could do.
He comes to her broken. The most broken person she thinks that has ever existed.
"I don't exist," He whispers.
She doesn't say anything. She is too busy staring at him, at the sudden vibrant orange of his hair, so familiar from so long ago. The sickly white pallor of his skin has changed back to a healthier color. The whites of his eyes are shocking. She is used to black. She revels in his voice, the old voice that she remembers from back when, except it is filled with nothing.
"Rukia."
She can't seem to stop staring at him. He doesn't meet her eyes.
"I'm sor-"
"Don't."
It comes out sounding like a hoarse bark. The sound of it scares her. Ichigo winces and takes a shuddering breath.
"Please… I have no right to ask you for anything… but please."
He shuffles forward on his knees and grasps her sleeve. She stares and stares.
"Say something."
She says, "There is nothing to be said."
Her voice isn't even a voice. It is the crackling of leaves, or the shifting of pebbles. It hurts to talk. She hasn't talked in forever.
He edges closer and presses his face into her stomach, and on the inside she is surprised with the warmth of it, but on the outside she remains stoic.
He kisses her there, brushing his lips over the thin fabric.
"I am your punishment. I no longer serve any other purpose."
He brings his hands to her hips, holding them weakly.
"If you can, kill me."
He kisses her again.
"He's been waiting to do this. He's using me to hurt you."
She brings her hands to his head and threads her fingers through his hair, but she doesn't take her eyes off the rock she has been staring at.
"I am nothing. He has taken my identity from me."
He is the warmest thing she has felt since she came here. He pushes his face against her again, and she feels wetness against her skin.
"I'm being selfish one last time…ok?"
She nods and tightens her grip, and they both stay like that until the soft kisses turn to bites, and the hair her fingers are buried in turns from orange to gray.
"Did it hurt to see him again? I bet it did. That's what I was going for."
He is atop her, stroking the wound on her forehead with his cold, white fingers.
"I hope you've learned your lesson Rukia."
He lowers his head and tests his incisor against her neck.
"You seem to be trembling, little rabbit."
It's true. She is trembling. She can't seem to stop. Any warmth left from Ichigo has long since disappeared to his hollow, but she can still feel the ghost of his lips pressing against the skin of her stomach, his hands against her hips. His tears on her shirt are still damp.
She ignores the hollow. It isn't the apathy she usually dons when he does this to her; It is her concentrating, grasping deep deep in her mind for her sleeping power, because Ichigo wants her to kill him, and how can she disappoint?
"You loved him, didn't you?"
That jars her, almost right out of her head, but she concentrates all the harder, digging, begging, for Sode no Shirayuki to answer her.
I see you are finally looking for me, Rukia. It sounds like a radio going in and out, but its there.
She thinks, yes I am.
The hollow shucks the fragile clothes from her body, whispering, "Did I take your love away, Rukia?"
There is no reason why I should help you. You are a disgrace.
She thinks, yes I am.
He has explored her body enough, so he wastes no time and pushes into her immediately, sighing with triumph. She doesn't break her concentration.
She thinks, will you help me?
Yes. On one condition.
She can feel the stirring, her power starting to flow through her, icy and good.
And that is you will do what is necessary, Rukia.
She thinks, I will, because anything is worth feeling you with me again.
It is what must be done.
I know. I am not afraid.
The hollow senses the change, the charging energy pumping through her veins. He looks at her in surprise, his movement faltering.
"Rukia?"
She clasps her hand to her heart and draws her sword. Shirayuki thrums with all her power, cold and savage and vibrantly exuberant that she is outside again, and she stares straight into his black eyes and whispers, "First dance."
It is cold. But then, what else would it be like, frozen in ice?
It is also very black. Rukia glances around and sees nothing, and she thinks, huh, this is what happens when you die again.
"Rukia."
She looks up, and there is Sode no Shirayuki.
Where are we?
"The end of your life as Rukia Kuchiki. "
Ah…
"There is time."
What?
"Time for atonement. Time for healing. There is eternity for such things, other lives. That is a lot of time."
Oh.
What about-
"There is healing for him as well … … … is that what you wanted?"
… Yes.
"Do you forgive him?"
Rukia thinks for a moment, unsure, and then shakes her head, not in negation, but in doubt.
Shirayuki inclines her head to her; The first time she has ever done so.
"You should get started."
Rukia nods, and closes her eyes. When she opens them again Shirayuki is gone.
"Good bye, Rukia," Like a whisper, like it was never there.
She sees him before he sees her because he is curled with his head on his knees, drifting in the black.
"Ichigo."
He looks up and sees her. He stands quickly. There are tears in his pleading eyes.
"What can I do?" He begs, desperate.
She (walks? Not really, this is the ether,) forward and places her hand on his shoulder. He hesitates, and then touches it with his own. The guilt in his eyes weighs more than the universe.
"I am not forgiving you."
He nods at his feet. He has expected this.
She smiles. Small, but she smiles.
"Don't worry. There is time."
He blinks at her. He is confused, and broken, but she slips her hand into his and pulls him forward anyway, and he follows because it's the best thing he can do.
Believe it or not, this was meant to be much, much darker, but this popped out instead. Maybe I'll do that version someday. Criticism is very much appreciated, gals and pals.