S O L I T A R Y
K. Ichigo x I. Uryuu
Summary: It has been 3 years since Ichigo disappeared after the war and was presumed dead. Now, 3 years later, the truth is laid bare. And so are secrets that should never have been brought to light. Ishida needs to come to grips with emotions he'd hoped forgot.
P R O L O G U E
ACT ONE
The light cast by the lamp put the rest of the room into high relief. It chased the shadows into the far corners, created its own. A brown moth, attracted to the brightness, beat uselessly against the hot bulb. It would soon die.
Just as he knew he too would inevitably die.
He sat before a well-worn desk, head rested against the hard wooden back of his chair. With two of his long pale fingers he pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. A pair of glasses were laid neatly across the fold of an opened book. Milton's Paradise Lost.
Outside, a sliver of lightning in the distance split open the darkened skies. It was the same sky of three years ago. The crash of thunder had been as loud then as now, booming in his very bones.
His time had stopped then. It hadn't restarted since.
A drawer contained newspaper clippings, a few pictures, and several notebooks filled with his neat print. Heavily annotated maps and dog-eared letters addressed To Ishida were slipped in between pages. The last date recorded was June 15 of a year ago. Then nothing. No clippings. No pictures. No maps. For two years he'd spent each night combing the streets, turning at every shadow. He had looked at every passing face hoping against hope it was the one he'd been searching for. But it had been to no avail. After two years he'd given up. It was time to move on.
Except he hadn't really.
ACT TWO
The blinding rain obscured much of the scene, blurring objects into indistinguishable masses, drenching anything left exposed in sharp coldness. Nothing stirred in the various alleys and side streets. The men and women who often plied their trades along these dingy and dark corners were nowhere to be found. Instead they hunkered behind closed doors and sheltered recesses, anywhere where they could seek refuge from the downpour.
Except for one man.
He wore a black coat with its lapels turned upward to meet the ends of his rather loud orange hair, the tips of which had curled from the water running off it. The rain had soaked his clothes through and through, so much so that they clung to his body like a second skin.
The rat-tat-tat of raindrops hitting the tin roofs and the gurgle of rainwater rushing down drainpipes drowned the sounds of his footsteps as he made his way to what appeared to be a small secluded bar hidden amongst several dens of less savory character. Despite the torrential rains he appeared to be in no great hurry.
He had no reason to be.
The joint was in the basement of a dilapidated building. At some point in its rather varied history it had been semi-respectable. Now the strong stench of tobacco clung to its walls like a leech and its wooden counter had long lost its shine and had become chipped in several places. A fan whirred noisily overhead beside a rather dim bulb. There were never that many patrons but today, because of the rain, there were even less.
No one bothered with the trail of water he made as he walked in.
The bartender was a stout goat of a man with a beer belly and crooked teeth. He watched the boy take a seat on the leftmost bar stool. Every first Friday of the month for the past three years he would walk through the doors without fail. The same coat. The same chair. The same order. But he was different from the riffraff that ambled in and out of the establishment. There were no furtive glances, none of the guilty looks of someone who drank money they could ill afford to waste if only to experience a fleeting escape from a squalid existence.
He had the look of a man who had seen too much, heard too much and from which there was no escape. He always left as sober as he had come, no matter how much he'd drank.
Tonight was no exception.
