Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach nor do I make any profit from this fanfiction.
Summary: The Winter War had a greater impact on Ichigo than he is willing to admit to anyone other than himself. He didn't die, but he's not living either.
Warnings: ANGST, spoilers
In Sleep, Silence
Ichigo doesn't dream anymore. He hasn't since the end of the Winter War when he returned to his body powerless, ordinary, and dying. At night, instead of dreaming, he slips into his inner world and studies the ruin that was once his soul.
Tensa Zangetsu had berated him once for allowing the reflection of his psyche to become little more than a hovel drowned beneath a sea of sorrow.
Ichigo is glad his sword can't see his soul now. If it can, Ichigo doesn't know it.
The city full of gleaming skyscrapers that thrust proudly into the sky—no matter how skewed the perception of gravity—has fallen into decay. Hollowed-out skeletons of metal are all that remain of those once tall towers. The streets are cracked, asphalt jutting into the sky at awkward angles, and in some areas there is nothing but blackness; the ground—the foundation of his soul—has collapsed into nothing. There is absolutely no sense of gravity at all. It makes walking through his mindscape a terrible chore.
Ichigo doesn't know why he bothers to walk through the city. No matter where he goes, everything is the same. There is no sound. None at all. Not even when Ichigo scrabbles over crumbled stone and decayed steel sending pieces tumbling into the void. In the real world, the noise would be enough to wake the dead. In his inner world, he can't even raise a whisper.
Ichigo feels like a ghost in his own soul.
It is always dark in Ichigo's inner world. A blackened crescent moon hangs overhead like a dark omen, the sign of a forsaken vow and broken dream. The rest of sky is stormy-gray, and it rains there from time to time. The rain is always the faded red-brown of old blood. Rather than renewing his inner world, the red rain eats away at his soul like acid. Ichigo is sure that, were he able to feel anything in that place, the rain would burn and eat him away too. Sometimes, he wishes it would.
Once Ichigo stumbled across a park in his search for life. The trees were dead, truly dead not simply having shed their leaves for winter. The grass and flowers had withered. He didn't remember a park there before. But Old Man Zangetsu, not the bratty kid he had only known for a few months (a handful of hours in reality), had told Ichigo that he liked trees. Maybe his soul had made the park to accommodate that desire before the end.
After an hour of wandering—something that could have been either a few minutes or a whole night of sleep—Ichigo decides the park reminds him of the graveyard where his mother's body is buried. He finds gravestones after that. All the names are washed away. Ichigo is still trying to decide who they might have belonged to when he wakes up.
Occasionally, Ichigo is in his inner world when the ground breaks. The earth shudders and heaves and splits in twain. Wreckage from ruined skyscrapers tumbles down and shatters into tiny fragments sharper than glass. He thinks they're sharp anyway. Once, fear drove him away from a growing hole and into a great multitude of falling debris. The pieces shredded him into nothing. He didn't feel them, and when he woke his body was whole, but those shards of what might have been memories once upon a time affected him more than anything else in that barren world.
Ichigo never wonders what happened to his inner world that destroyed it so thoroughly. He was the one that caused the destruction.
In his fight with Aizen, Ichigo recognized the sorrow in his blade, the sorrow of being alone on an unreachable pinnacle. He vowed to himself that such a thing would never happen to him. As he released his Final Getsuga Tensho, he used that energy not devoted to destroying Aizen—in that regard he used very little after all was said and done—to pull his soul apart. But he rushed and the end result was messy.
The pain he doesn't feel now is all his fault.
The ruined skyscrapers are from his own energy, like an atom bomb, exploding in his soul. The terrible earthquakes ripping apart the streets are the remnants of his Hollow and shinigami powers ramming into each other like tectonic plates under the surface of the Earth. But in his inner world, there is no magma waiting to bubble up and replace what is lost, and so his once vast strength is ripping itself apart.
Ichigo can feel nothing in that place because the Final Getsuga Tensho separated him from his spiritual power. He is certain that with even the littlest bit of reiatsu he could stop the destruction, or at least slow the process down.
There is no power in the world that can repair the damage to the soul except his own.
When Ichigo wakes in the morning after spending the night in his inner world, he is even more tired than when he went to bed. He wonders how long it will take for his outside body to reflect what he sees on the inside. If he dies unexpectedly, will there be enough of him left to go to Soul Society? And if he doesn't die unexpectedly, if his soul grinds down to nothing, while his body chugs along, what will happen then? He'll leave his body to Kon to watch over his sisters if that's the case.
Ichigo draws away from his friends and family. They are all sensitive people even without their spiritual gifts. They know something is wrong, even if they don't know what, and grow concerned. He wanted to spend his life with them and knows to his chagrin that his actions have prevented him from doing so.
Most of the time, Ichigo feels like a ghost in his own life.
When he receives an offer to maybe, possibly, gain back his powers, Ichigo leaps on the chance no matter how small. He is going slowly insane. He will either succeed and save himself, succeed and destroy himself, or fail completely and die. Any option would satisfy him at this point.
Ichigo doesn't dream. He hasn't since the end of the Winter War. But sometimes, under the bright noon-day sun, when he is as far from his inner world as it is possible for a person to be, he allows himself to hope.