A/N. Just a quick one shot for Bleach. I don't make many of those…
Warning! Fem!Ichigo Fanfic!
Disclaimer: I own nothing!
All She's Ever Wanted
It's not like she knows where she's going, or maybe it's not that she doesn't know, but that she knows very well. Because she's walked the streets of Karakura Town and has them memorized, and can get away with saying "I know that like the back of my hand." Because she really does.
She knows a lot of things like she knows the backs of her own two hands. How to run, how to stop, when to stop, where to go, how to fight, how to swing a sword, how to humiliate a man twice her size and more than three times her own weight, what blood looks like and what it sounds like when a person screams because their whole entire world is crashing down around them and there is nothing they can do. She knows how to run, how to run away, and the winding maze of streets that is Karakura Town have no end of places to run to.
By now she knows every little nook and cranny, hidey-hole and storage space, closet and backyard shed.
She knows them like the backs of her own two hands. Knows them like water run red with blood on a rainy night in June.
But she knows the streets of Karakura better than anything else. Because she doesn't know when she should stop running, just that eventually she'll reach a place where it's no longer an option. Which is okay, really, because she's tired of running with and without direction, tired of winding up in the same place with a different route taken every single time, tired of running away instead of running to.
She doesn't know where else to run though, so she guesses that that's okay too.
So if she winds up in front of her poor mother's grave more often than not, instead of say the arms of family or maybe some cute boy who's stolen her heart and has her giggling like an idiot, well no one has a right to say anything to her about it. She's helped them clean up their own messes one too many times for them to have any say in anything she does. Regardless of how self-destructive it might seem.
It's midnight in the rain in some dark alley with bleeding knuckles and hands wound so tight into fists her hands go pure white that knows her best of all. Not shinigami who blame themselves for deaths that couldn't be avoided, because pride and honor mean everything to them when they're alive, but they seem to forget it means nothing when dead. The dead don't have any pride or honor to worry about after all, they're too busy being dead.
Or maybe that's the cynicism talking again. The kind that makes her bite sharp insults, tear a person's throat out with her own teeth and cut them with razor sharp tongue. Drive the wounds in deep, pour salt, and then throw in their face how they got it in the first place. Rubs dirt in the faces and spits on them because she's just that bitter with herself and everything else, and if no one will let her gouge her own skin out, then she'll just take it out on everybody else.
She used to have separation anxiety, would burst into tears when her mother wasn't around and clung to woman's side like a leech. She used to get anxious when her father held her and not her mother, when her sister's played with her instead of her taking naps on a nice warm lap that made for the perfect pillow.
But she's not four anymore, or five, or six for that matter. No, she's much older than nine with an angry expression weighed with grief and a constant scowl that only ever seems to make people stay away instead of coming closer to make sure she's okay.
But that's fine with her too because that means she can run away all the easier. No one will care if she just mysteriously vanishes one day.
So she knows how to cut through a darkened soul swallowed whole by their own sorrows, knows how to charge into an army with just herself, a cat, and a couple of friends to save a person she barely even knows. She knows how to carve into the enemy and just as well as she knows how to carve swaths into herself. And so maybe she runs a little too much and in all directions with no goal at all, but that's okay because she knows the darkened, puddle filled streets of Karakura Town like she knows the backs of her own two hands, knows every thug and lowlife, every delinquent and renegade because she's one of them too and has planted each and every single one into the pavement and concrete like it's her job.
She'll never get lost if she runs away, because she lost her way in all the little nooks and crannies far too often. And that's a real bad shame, really.
Because that's all she's ever really wanted.