A/N: For added effect, I highly recommend that you download "Will Of The Heart" or "Requiem For The Lost Ones" from the Bleach OST and listen to either one while you read this.
Damn it.
The stones under him were slick with a lukewarm mixture of cold rain and blood spilled from the pair of wounds through his chest. He breathed in, forcing air to flow through perforated lungs. His zanpetkou lay in front of him, the shattered blade serving as an all-too-tangible representation of the state Kurosaki Ichigo found his body in.
Damn it.
His body didn't want to move? Too bad. She needed his body to move. She needed him to get up. She needed him to fight on. Ichigo lifted his chin from the rough cobblestones and peered through the film of blood running down his face.
She wasn't looking at him.
She wasn't near him.
The rain continued to fall.
Ichigo pulled the remnants of his zanpetkou toward him. If he could just get up, maybe he could take the one who called himself Renji by surpri-
"Just try moving."
His blood froze.
"Just try… taking one step."
She… was angry with him?
"If you do… I will never forgive you!"
He knew that blood and water weren't the only things flowing down his face.
Rukia…
"You will die eventually," she said, her voice uneven, "so lay there and live as long as you will."
She turned her back to him.
The rain continued to fall.
Kurosaki Ichigo clenched his hand around the hilt of his shattered zanpetkou. His ragged breathing wasn't caused only by slashed lungs or cut flesh. What flowed down his face to splatter in the shallow puddles formed in depressions on the unforgiving cobblestones wasn't made up entirely of rain and blood.
The rain fell in his heart, too.
He drew another shaky breath.
His eyes closed, and for a moment… she was back.
The rain stopped.
They were in Ichigo's room, sitting on his bed. She lay against him, her fingers tracing absentminded patterns on his arms wrapped around her waist. She sighed.
He lifted one of his hands and ran his fingers through her soft, dark hair. She always smelled good.
Like the air after it rains.
She giggled.
Ichigo smiled into her neck. "Rukia… there's something I oughta say."
She shook her head. "Ichi, you don't have to say it. I know."
"No," he said, holding her chin in his hand and lifting her face to look into her violet eyes. "I need to." Ichigo took a shaky breath. "Rukia… I love you."
She smiled. "I know, Ichi."
She knew.
He was back on the street, back in the puddles of blood and rain from the sky and rain from his heart. Back without her.
The rains were falling again.
Kurosaki Ichigo reached out at nothing, trying desperately to reach her, to get her to come back, to save her from those shinigami bastards.
He only succeeded in capturing the rain.
She and the shinigami with red hair and the shinigami she called Nii-sama stepped through the portal. As the doors slid shut again, Rukia glanced back at Ichigo. Her violet eyes shimmered.
He collapsed.
The doors slammed.
The rains continued to fall.
"If I had known it would end like this… I never would have… told you."