Chapter One
It wasn't raining the day of the funeral. Ichigo found that almost offensive.
It had been raining the day they'd found his father's body, just as it had been raining the day his mother had died years earlier. Rain, and lavender, and antiseptic - lavender because it was his mother's perfume, antiseptic because his father had been a doctor. They all reminded him of death.
His father had been found lying slumped on the ground, his back torn open and bleeding, his face in the mud. Ichigo had been called to the scene; he had forced his little sisters to stay at home even though they hadn't wanted to. He had run to his father's body, shouting things that didn't matter and weren't important because they hadn't changed anything.
Then he'd looked up - and he'd seen her.
Ichigo's mother had died when he was nine. He'd seen a girl about to jump into a flooding river on a rainy day, and he'd run across the road to try to pull her back; his mother had run after him across a street full of cars. When he'd awoken, the girl had been gone.
Well, he saw the same girl that day where they'd found his father. A flash of her out of the corner of his eye - brutally short dark hair, ghostly white skin, thin satisfied lips. He'd looked again and she wasn't there anymore.
Police said they suspected murder, but his father's back looked like an animal had torn into it. This, they couldn't explain. It had been the same way with his mother - the same back markings. With his mother, the police didn't see how they could have occurred in the few seconds between when the car had hit her, she had impacted her son's body, and her son had woken up with her body on top of him, her glassy eyes staring into his face. She'd been walking him home from karate class in a crowded place. His father's death was odder - he had suddenly left the hospital in the middle of his shift one day while his kids were at school. He'd been found off to the side of a crowded road. Nobody claimed to have seen his death happen.
Ichigo was fourteen. His younger sisters were ten.
So many things didn't add up, yet so many commonalities existed. Even in his grief, he understood that. He just didn't see what he could do about it. All he had to go off of was a face. He'd given a sketch to the police, but no one else in either case had seen such a girl on the day of either death.
Ichigo could see ghosts. He'd been able to ever since he could remember. Maybe she was a ghost.
But how could a ghost, and a little girl on top of that, be responsible for such a vicious death?
As the funeral proceeded, the incense burning and the Buddhist priest chanting a sutra, Ichigo sat in his seat in the front row dressed in a formal black suit and tried to summon some sort of tender memory, some sad emotion. Instead, all he could think of was the way his father would challenge him to random surprise karate matches, and engulf his sisters in bear hugs, and pounce on the gardener next door to prove he "still had it."
His father's face in the coffin was very still and pale, nothing like as animated and goofy as it had been in life, his yukata crossed the traditional right to left and his mouth stuffed with cotton. Maybe this was sacrilegious of him, but Ichigo wished they would close the coffin. He could hear his sisters sobbing beside him.
His father hadn't stayed. Like his mother, his father hadn't stayed behind. Some souls chose not to remain behind as ghosts, and neither of his parents had appeared to him. Both times, he had spent days pacing at the place where they had died, trying to find something, anything, to bring home and comfort his remaining family. No comfort had come.
Last time Ichigo had dealt with this by disappearing from home for days at a time, taking a train somewhere, anywhere, anywhere else, wandering unfamiliar streets. His father had still been there to look after his sisters. His father had been far more responsible than anyone had ever given him credit for: a loyal father, a doting husband, an excellent doctor with an expertise for healing people even on death's door. Ichigo realized too late that he had taken his father for granted. With his constant good humor, Kurosaki Isshin had seemed unbreakable.
But then, with her ever-present smile and gentle, loving nature, so had his mother Masaki. Ichigo was finally learning something he should have learned at nine years old: that no one and nothing was unbreakable. He had no one to intercede for him or defend him now.
Why hadn't his parents stayed behind? He knew he should be glad they had moved on with existence, but instead he was just angry that he saw all the dead people in his district of Tokyo except for the two people he really wanted.
Then he imagined his parents floating and transparent, chains hanging from their chests, and he realized that wasn't really what he wanted. He just wanted his parents back. His eyes stung. What a stupid wish. Pointless, really, in the face of everything.
After finishing their burning of incense, Ichigo and his sisters each left a flower in their father's coffin. Lilies. Yuzu had chosen white lilies. Ichigo looked into his father's dead face, closed eyes. He had been the only one standing vigil at his father's body after the wake - he hadn't wanted his sisters to go through that. Refusing to sit down, he had instead stood ramrod straight, staring down into his father's coffin. By now he had memorized every detail, and he didn't think he would ever really forget that one image of his larger than life, unbeatable father inside a coffin, the wounds on his back hidden from the world.
The coffin was sealed shut, and everyone followed it slowly out to the elaborately decorated hearse. The coffin was laid in the hearse. Ichigo turned to his sisters.
"Don't you dare tell us not to come this time," said Karin fiercely, tears in her eyes.
Ichigo didn't know what his face looked like. He didn't know what he felt either. There seemed to be something wrong with his emotions.
"Alright," he said robotically. "Then come with me."
They climbed into the hearse, and were taken away with the coffin to the crematorium. Ichigo sat between his sisters on the silent ride over. He held out a hand to each of them, and they grabbed his hands like they were lifeboats in a turbulent sea.
They stood and watched the body slide into the cremation chamber, and as she watched her father disappear, Yuzu let out a scream. Ichigo felt an odd sense of release as his father disappeared. It was over, he realized. Over. His father's ashes would be placed in the burial plot beside his mother's.
"Come on," he said, turning away, taking his sister's hands and leading them away as well. "It will take a couple of hours."
It. His father's burning. Life went out in a blaze of fire.
They ended up sitting at a quiet cafe a fair distance away from the crematorium. Ichigo clutched his hot cup of coffee. There was a heavy silence for a long time. If Dad were here, he'd have been able to… Ichigo finally understood, for the first time, why his father had joked around so much, had constantly been laughing. Laughter would have lightened the mood significantly.
Ichigo almost wanted to fill that place, to make a joke to break the silence and get people's spirits up. But he had never been that kind of person, and he didn't know what to say. Instead, he felt an inalienable sense of awkwardness, of being misplaced in a new job he didn't know the rules to or have the skills for.
So he wasn't like his father. Not really. Then perhaps he was like his mother. What would his mother have done?
She would have comforted. She would have shown love and affection. Ichigo had never been good with open, tender emotions - though he was good at showing a particularly short temper on occasion. He'd gotten at least that much from his father.
So he couldn't show emotion any better than his father had, but he had all of the seriousness of his mother. Perfect.
He looked up at his sisters, their grieving faces - and went on instinct. "I'll take care of you. I'll protect you." Somehow. They were just the first words out of his mouth, his first instinct. Ichigo supposed in some way he had never given up on his childhood dream of protecting those important to him.
Karin and Yuzu looked up. "How?" said Karin. "They could put us into foster care or an orphanage and separate us - they could take us away from each other."
Yuzu gave a great, trembling gasp, as if she had just realized this. Ichigo leaned forward and took one of his sister's hands in each of his.
"I won't let that happen," he said fiercely. "I know kids at my school that are orphans who get to live alone - and they don't even have an older sibling or guardian looking after them! I will act as the adult, I'll take care of you. Plenty of fourteen, fifteen year olds here live on their own. And plenty of kids live with older siblings."
"... That will be one hell of a legal fight," said Karin seriously. Ichigo wondered when she'd gotten to be so wise.
"But you can make it happen, Onii-chan - can't you?" Yuzu looked at him with big, afraid eyes. She was looking for reassurance - for comfort.
"I'm good at fighting." Ichigo offered a slight, dry smile. "That's one thing I can do. I will be your mother - and your father. You're not alone." His voice was thicker than he'd like, but there were no tears in his eyes, at least. "You're not alone."
They went forward and hugged him. Only when they couldn't see did he let the tears fill his eyes.
It was the first time tears had come to him since his mother had died when he was nine.
He still had his sisters. He still had a family.
The hardest part was yet to come. Karin, Yuzu, and Ichigo had to pick the bones out of the ashes and place them in the urn - feet first, head last. Ichigo heard strange childhood songs meant to teach kids about anatomy playing through his head as they picked, and felt the bizarre urge to laugh hysterically.
Tears kept sliding down the end of Yuzu's nose, but Karin's teeth were clenched so hard they might have ground together and on her face was anger. None of them said anything. They all held the chopsticks together, picking out each bone to place in the urn one by one.
When at last it was over, they placed a lid over the urn and stood.
"Would you like to take the ashes home?"
Ichigo looked up, distracted. "... What?"
"Would you like to take the urn home for a period of time?"
Ichigo thought of that big empty house they used to share with their parents - a house they couldn't afford anymore, even if he got a job. A house that had Dad's hospital in the front of it.
"No," he said. "No, we went the urn transferred directly to the gravesite. That house won't be ours very much longer anyway."
They stood the following week in front of the family grave at the cemetery. It was a vast stone monument, with a place for flowers, incense, and water at its front, a chamber underneath for the ashes. Mom's ashes were beside Dad's ashes. They were together again at last. Their names had been carved together onto the pillar of the monument when Mom had died.
It was just more economical that way. Less expensive to pay for two engravings at once.
Yuzu was still crying - she hadn't stopped, really. She tenderly placed flowers and incense at the front of the family plot, washing over the place with water. Ichigo watched the water pour, feeling an odd sense of cleansing. Karin knelt beside her sister, scowling ferociously.
"Can we come every year on the anniversary of Dad's death and have a picnic?" Yuzu sniffled. "Like we do for Mom?"
Both Yuzu and Karin looked up at Ichigo, waiting for his assent. At some point, he had become the parent, a job he felt marvelously ill equipped for. He didn't feel qualified to make a judgment call like that. Could they?
"... If it would mean something to you, then of course we can," he said quietly, hands in his pockets, clearing his throat. He shrugged, stiff, still awkward. That hadn't stopped, either. "We can have two picnics every year."
Yuzu brightened, looking happier.
"What now?" said Karin solemnly, staring up at her brother.
Deadly seriousness filled Ichigo's expression. He thought of all those lawyers and officials and important people who wanted to take his sisters away from him.
"Now," he said, "we fight."