He dies when he's seventeen.
It's an odd thing, to die. Death itself is something Ichigo is familiar with; he's loved death in its many forms. A father, a friend, a leader, a follower.
A lover.
He's know death more intimately than any human has any right to. He's held it away from him by the tips of his fingers, he's held it to his heart with both arms hands. He's lived comfortably in death's grasp, never afraid of it, sometimes scared for it.
And now he's dying, and it's like greeting a stranger.
It's not death in the conventional sense. His body walks around, his spirit chain remains unbroken. But he's not around, not really. He stares at the wall listlessly for hours, like he's expecting her to phase through the plaster like she did the first time they met; the silence of a hell butterfly her only precursor. She doesn't come.
He used to feel his own being as closely as one feels their flesh. He could take stock of the power coursing through his limbs, the spirit ribbons trailing after his body when he moved. He could feel his soul resting in his body, soundly stationed in his bones. None of that is familiar anymore. His soul feebly clings to his body. His spirit ribbons are frayed and tattered if they're there at all- he can't so much as feel their shadow on the back of his legs. There's no power in his body.
It's just a body.
Just a body.
He pulls his arm back. He feels the muscles move. He pushes his arm forward, fist clenched, feels it connect, feels the bruising start in his knuckles, feels the rebuttal, feels the foot in his gut, feels the fist at his jaw, feels the pull, the burn, of his body- it won't move the way he demands, it doesn't hold the capacity he searches for, but it does move, it does hold some capacity, and just as he remembers how to process, how to feel, it's gone, he's done, they're beaten, they're down, and he's dead.
It's an odd thing. To die.
He's struck out at death, laying in the street, bleeding out, cold and rain-soaked. He's run from death in circles, feeling it snapping at his heels, hundreds of feet underground with no way up again. He's looked death in its noble cold eyes and trembled. He's stared at death in its feathery form of fire and smirked. He's searched for death down marble hallways, looking to defeat it. He's watched death taken from its love, arm outstretched, wings fading to ash, body blown away on the wind. Death is every creature in the world, and death is no creature at all. He's loved death. He's hated it.
We stand in awe before that which cannot be seen. We respect with every fiber of our being that which cannot be explained.
He dies when he is seventeen, heart beating loud inside his chest.
"Tell everyone I give them my best." He says. "Bye. Rukia."
It's not a quick death.
Heroes don't die with any mercy.
"Are you…" Mrs. Oochi shifts from foot to foot, not seemingly able to meet his eye as she casts her gaze about the room. She finally looks up to his face, determined, and says, "Are you okay?"
He's not sure what to say. By nature, Ichigo is rather truthful, even if he sometimes hides behind vague truths and admissions. It's too messy to lie, too painful. He shrugs and knows it's not enough, but he's not sure what else to do.
She sighs. "I… I already talked to Inoue. She didn't tell me much, about her disappearance, she just kept saying she was fine, nothing happened. But she did say you… came to get her. You, and Sado, and Ishida."
"We did."
"Where was she?"
"… Away."
Oochi sighs. She rubs at the bridge of her nose and leans back against her desk, agitated. "You know we can't actually help any of you if you don't tell us what happened," she says, frustrated. "Ichigo. What… happened? What happened?"
You wouldn't believe me even if I told you, he thinks. "She went to stay with some relatives," he says, because some lies are necessary, and they've decided to stick by this one. "We picked her up. For a road trip."
"Uh-huh." She says. "And on this road trip, Orihime just happened to pick up PTSD?" At his flinch she says, "Oh, thought I wouldn't notice that one, huh? Thought you'd, I don't know. Slip that one past the public." She shakes her head. "There's no hiding that. You have it to, you know. You've always… you've always been like a hunted man, Ichigo. When Kuchiki was here the two of you acted like some sort of military unit. The others, too- you all acted ready."
"Ready?"
"To fight. To run. I don't know. Ready."
He doesn't say anything.
"I'm not asking you to talk for your own benefit, Ichigo. But for Orihime-"
"I've already done everything I can for her." He says. He doesn't mean to be sharp- he doesn't blame Inoue for anything that's happened. But it's the truth. Everything he could do, he's done. He's rescued her from the jaws of death. He's saved the world she lives in. He's shed his homing beacon and crawled back into his caterpillar form, leaving the horrors of the butterfly behind. Everything. "If Orihime wants to talk, she will."
"But she doesn't want to talk." Oochi stresses. "She's always been so open! And now's she's- it's. All locked up, like she's afraid to talk about it. You know what happened, Ichigo, I know you do-"
"It's her business." He says, and turns to leave. "It's up to her if she wants to share it."
"But it's not just her business!" Oochi rushes to block his way to the door. "It's you, too. It's." She pauses. Looks at the floor again. Does not speak, does not go on, does not look him in the eye.
"It's what?"
"… Your eyes." She says, eventually. "You've lost your purpose."
He doesn't speak for a moment. "Orihime's business is hers." He says, eventually. "And my business is mine." He brushes past her and out the door.
That's the last she says of it.
Poison would have been preferable. With poison, you can tell where the digression is going- maybe your vision fades, or you lose control over your limbs. Your skin might bubble, your lips may bleed, and everything- it's all a big glowing neon sign with a countdown and an arrow pointing to a grave.
He doesn't have a countdown, and it's a damn shame. He wonders how much longer it will drag on, how many more breaths he will take. He can't tell anyone to start digging a grave when he doesn't know when he'll lay in it. It's miserable, waiting for it all to be over- if it had to drag on, why couldn't it have a definite point in time drawn before it?
He thinks a lot about the people he's probably killed. He knows it's not really killing- it's cleansing. They'll be back. It's hard to accept, though, because that's the case with the regular killing. They'll be back, in one form or another. Death is never the end, but all ends can be death.
Yuzu cooks him dinner, but he's never really hungry.
Karin tries to get him to come out with her, but he's too tired to move.
His father explains that he has depression, that it doesn't have to drag on like this.
But it does.
It will.
It always has.
Who is he without purpose? He was a man of importance, a man with reason and life. He was a warrior, a savior, a protector. And now he's nothing. Just another clueless human, unable to see the danger to run from, unable to help, or speak, or scream.
He sees a fluttering of dark wings, graced by moonlight. His heart begins again, his blood begins to flow- he can feel heat behind his eyes as he throws himself forward, soul clicking into his body again as he throws open the wind, hands outreaching as if he's grasping for the stars.
He might as well be trying to touch those lights in the sky. It's a large moth, lazily making its way through the heat, gray wings darkened by the night.
He closes the window and feels his heart slow. He feels his blood turn to syrup in his veins. His eyes go cold and his joints feel stiff again; he has no soul clinging to his body any longer.
He lays back down and goes to sleep.
"Come out to dinner," Mizuru says, "My treat!"
"Maybe some other time." He replies.
"Come with us to the concert!" Keigo begs. "It's going to be so wicked-"
"Busy." He lies.
All his human friends try to engage him.
"We saved you a seat."
"I thought you might like to come."
"You should get out more, you know?"
"It would be fun if you came."
"We miss you, you know."
They stop asking him out after a while. It's for the best.
"You know," his father says. He lights up his own cigarette next to Ichigo, where he's slouching against the outside of the clinic. Two Kurosakis, in the night, smoking next to each other- both of them undead. "That's a nasty habit to pick up."
Ichigo takes a long drag in and looks up at the sky. The moon's out and full and he can't remember why it matters. "Got fired again." He says. "Can't hold onto a fucking job working the register at a gas station. Imagine that."
His father sighs.
Ichigo finishes off his first cigarette and pulls out another.
"That'll kill you, you know."
Ichigo laughs. "I sure fucking hope it does."
He gets into a knife fight the day before graduation.
He wins.
Orihime makes him a sweater that's two sizes too big and more homely than his own skin. It's blacker than any other fabric he can find in their realm, and he wears it with a feeling like the ghost of pride, and can almost face himself in the mirror again.
It's just a sweater. It doesn't bring anything back.
But it makes it easier to look at her still-trembling hands and her scarred up lips.
"Thank you," he says.
She leans forward to whisper in his ear, almost looking like she intends to seduce him. "You're still my hero." She says, but there's no lust or love behind it- no worship. She draws back and puts a hand on his shoulder, eyes nearly pity-fucking him, but not there just yet.
He draws away from her touch.
"I don't envy you." She says.
He almost wants to laugh. "That's funny," he says, because she's died, too. She's lost; she's been thrown so far out of her body she can never really crawl back inside. "Because I envy you."
She smiles at him like she's lacing up the dark and he thinks that maybe, in another life, if they were all that they each had left, maybe they could survive on mutual pity-fucking. Maybe they could have stitched the black blood cuts in each others' stomachs. Maybe they could have used each other to put on a play of human life.
Not this time.
"Take care of yourself, Ichigo." She says, and she doesn't say it like she's telling him to get more sleep like everyone else does. There are secrets in her feet as she tip-toes back into the swing of the Christmas party crowd, eyes like broken neon letters in the night.
"Take care of yourself," he whispers at her back, and wishes he could knit her a sweater far, far too white for this life. "Orihime."
He doesn't drink. He doesn't like being even more removed from his body than he already is. He smokes out in front of the clinic and scrolls through his cellphone, wondering if he'll hear back from his latest job interview.
"We hire happy, healthy people." They say.
"That's me." He lies. "I'm your guy."
They can smell the rot on him.
They don't call back.
Uryuu gets into a fight and gets kicked out of med school. He comes by the clinic the night he comes back to Karakura and leans back against the wall with Ichigo, staring up at the sky.
"Orihime says hi." He says.
Ichigo pulls the night air into his dead lungs and wonders if he used to be able to taste the cold in his throat. Back before.
"Hi," he says back.
"She's liking med school. Better than me, anyway. … She's got a stronger stomach for it." He rubs the back of his neck, stressed but trying not to show it, and says, "I don't blame you, you know."
Ichigo doesn't turn to look at him.
"For what happened."
"That guy who stabbed you back in Hueco Mundo isn't alive anymore." Ichigo says. "I don't blame me either."
Uryuu looks like he'd been hoping that Ichigo would put up a fight. Insist it was his fault. Throw himself on the pryer like the martyr he was, is, isn't. "I'm glad," Uryuu says, but the lie comes out false and flat, like soda left out on the porch all night long.
"Me too," Ichigo says, but he hasn't been glad in a long, long time.
He tries going out on a couple of dates when he finally decided he'll just work at the clinic, for his father. He's got a job and money enough that he can't spend it all on Menthols. He takes a couple girls out, a guy or two.
It's not the same.
The sex is good- he doesn't let his corpse waste away completely. He's a ghost in his long-dead body, but he keeps the act up. His dates say he's smart, and funny, and almost charming, and above all, he's a god in the sack.
But it never really lasts.
He supposes he doesn't want it to, anyway.
"Pull yourself together!" Karin screams. "You're here, now, with us, Ichigo! Get your fucking act together!"
He listens to her slam the door and doesn't move from his place at the table.
He bows his head and runs his hands through his hair, remembering that the last time it was so shaggy he'd struck a god from the sky. He makes his way upstairs to cut it all back off, Sampson with the scissors, Delilah in her grave.
Soon, he thinks, and he watches his hair coat the bathroom floor. Soon, he promises.
Death was not meant to take this long.
He saves a woman from getting mugged on his way out to get milk.
It's not the same.
Orihime sends him a post card from school and a package.
The post card says "Wish you were here!" on top of the nearest national monument. The back says, "not really, you'd hate it." but she signs it, "thinking of you." and the period is a little heart.
Orihime doesn't love him like she used to. To be fair, though, she doesn't love anything like she used. She loves him in her own way, and she at least loves him as the man he's died to be, and not the one who lived before.
The package has white fingerless gloves, knit perfectly to his style. "For your knuckles," she says. "Mine hurt in the cold weather, too."
He forgets that their teacher's not the only one that Orihime lied to.
He doesn't want to know the truth, anyway.
"I wish you could remember what it used to be like." Yuzu whispers. "When Rukia stayed with us. You were happy back then. You could be happy again, you know."
He wants to tell her not to count on it, but he can't. He ruffles her hair and works up a smile for her, dropping a kiss on her forehead. "You make me happy," he says, truthfully. "As happy as I could be."
Just not happy enough.
Ichigo dies at seventeen. It's a slow death.
Ichigo is buried at nineteen. It comes at a surprise to no one.
Ichigo wakes up at nineteen, alive. He wakes up without a body, without any pain brewing deep in his bones. He'd been in so many fights beyond himself as a human that his bones and his muscles had begun to wear down before their time, and for a while, he'd forgotten about the pain- until now, that it's gone. He wakes with a real spirit, and a heart that doesn't feel like lead inside his chest, and that purpose, that power, that love, reborn and dancing alive in his blood like fireworks in the night sky.
Ichigo wakes up and she's there again, tears slipping down her china-doll cheeks and staining his neck with warmth. "Ichigo," she says, nearly blubbering. "Oh, Ichigo, you fool."
Ichigo dies at seventeen.
Ichigo dies at nineteen.
Ichigo dies again the moment he's born, but it's a wonderful feeling.
"Hey," he says, and pushes his hand through her hair. He can see her spirit ribbons, swirling in the breeze their power creates behind her, twirling together like the dance of her sword. "Rukia."
It's an odd thing, to die.
But it's not all bad.
Fin