I'm a little nervous about this one, because I've never done a story like this before. I kind of have been inspired by the lack of chapters lately, as Kubo Tite has said it's the last big break before The End, and it got me wondering what After The End will look like. Please note, I have no idea what's actually going to happen in this arc, so I'm allowed movement.

It's still pretty readable if you only know until the end of the anime, I think.

But I would really appreciate feedback on this new kind of style, as all I've written for the past year has been essay after essay.

Happy reading.

It can take a while for the dust to settle after such an epic battle.

Because of this, it can take time before you realise the repercussions.

He must have known before he stormed that icy palace just what exactly he was leaving behind, and I doubted Captain Commander Shunsui would have denied him the explicit knowledge of what would befall him.

He couldn't go home.

Maybe it just hadn't occurred to him in the days following the battle, or maybe it just hadn't bothered him yet. His father was there, his little sisters, his friends, celebrating, some of them in particular taking advantage of the ability to drink underage. He still frowned, but it didn't reach his eyes: he'd lived up to his namesake, he'd protected, all he'd been desperate to do in those long 17 months powerless. He had inactively managed to make my brother uncomfortable at every meeting, he had swerved his father's attacks, recounted his story to some and told others who were bothering him to fuck off. He had managed to upstage the collective Squad 0 and the Captain Commander, transcend all known power limits. He had empathised with Ishida, having hoped for comradeship when stripped of his Shinigami status and been frustrated when there had been none, and had helped fight his friend's corner when he had been held at trial before Central 46. He'd even filled the appropriate paperwork that he'd been handed from all Divisions, had jokingly offered to change his surname to Kurosaki-Shiba, and had helped wherever possible in a physical capacity in the rebuilding of the Sereitei and the section of the Rukongai that had been damaged in the crossfire.

As I said, the dust took a while to settle.

I didn't see him a lot. I was at my division, filling in paperwork, overseeing repairs, recovering from a few wounds myself. In any case, I wouldn't know what to say to him: he'd been young before he'd lost his powers, cocky, loud and brash. From the few times we'd communicated since then, I'd only seen flashes of the boy I used to know; he seemed more mature now, and, in an odd way, I couldn't help but feel that I'd been left behind, like a safety blanket that a child grows out of, unnecessary and restricting. Even physically, he'd grown even taller, shoulders broader, torso filled out so he looked built rather than the skinny of a young teenager, whereas I was still under 5 foot, still small and childlike and the exact same as when he left.

I was sad that this was what we'd become, but I was glad he was making his own way in the afterlife, even if I couldn't help but wish I was back in his closet in his room.

In any case, every time I remembered he couldn't go back, I got this aching in my chest and extreme guilt that, no matter how supposedly engineered the situation was, it had been me that had made him this way. I had effectively ruined a 15 year-old human's life because I couldn't release my sword and freeze that stupid hollow in its path fast enough. So I tried not to think about it, which of course meant that I tried not to think about him, and with the amount of work to be done it was easy enough.

So when he trudged into my division and plopped himself in front of my desk a week or so later, with all the ignoring of the situation I'd been doing, it was kind of hard to look him in the eye. Or say anything.

... Or even look up and acknowledge his presence.

I kind of ignored him for as long as I could, but his effect was obvious in the shaking of my hand as it signed off another signature regarding the reconstruction. He stayed patient for quite a few minutes, which I'm sure was a fair feat to him even after such a battle, probably assuming I'd get to him in a moment, but eventually must have been so bored that he cleared his throat pretty audibly. I don't know what I'd been hoping for him to do – well, I did, as ignoring a situation until it goes away had become my specialty not just over the last 17 months but ever since I'd been adopted – but obscurely I hadn't thought at all what I'd say to him. So I took a deep breath as surreptitiously as I could, shoved what I hoped would be the fabled Kuchiki mask on my face so he didn't see what I'm sure was a painful amount of guilt and self-loathing in my eyes, and looked up.

He didn't even pause as soon as our eyes met to start the completely justified accusations, asking me why the hell he'd had to actively look for me just to talk to me. We'd both – and everyone else – nearly died, nearly never seen each other again, and he didn't even get a quick "hi, how are you?" just to let him know she was okay?

Of course I knew he had an absolute right to say this to me: the few times I'd left my division I'd noticed his reiatsu honing in on mine, seeking me out, sometimes even heading towards me, before I'd duck out of his senses and return to the 13th. Of course I knew this, but it was easier to quarrel with Ichigo than to try and have an actual meaningful conversation, and it'd always been this way. It wasn't necessarily a good thing though, never knowing if he was just asking if I was alright, if he was taking me ice skating just because he'd seen me staring at it or if him asking me to send his regards to everyone back in Soul Society had something below the surface.

Like I said, we didn't do outright talking and confessions and whatever else.

Or at least, we didn't when he was younger.

Now he did stuff like not talking smack about my drawings and telling me they were great instead, and not necessarily just to escape a beating, and just generally being nice.

So when I tried to just start up some banter to avoid the situation, telling him he was a self-important jerk, who the hell did he think he was, I was trying to do some work here, rebuild my home while he was swanning around being talking up onto a pedestal by just about everyone, surely he was the one who was avoiding me even though he knew where I was, he didn't try and answer back. Not even once.

And I knew the entire time that stupid little vein was popping in my forehead that I was painfully, painfully wrong. He couldn't walk more than 5 feet without being intercepted and talked at and congratulated and being led away to somewhere else to being congratulated by some others, and these weren't just nameless shinigami he could tell to 'fuck off'. He probably had been waiting for me to show up at some point to whisk him away from all that crap with all those important people in a way that only someone who'd been trained to be a noble, with the grace and intuition that he lacked, could do without seriously offending someone and jeopardizing his future.

Or maybe that's not why he hadn't approached me. He knew me better than anyone, somehow. Maybe he knew this was my territory, and I was running back here for a reason. Perhaps he was giving me time.

I had no idea. But it didn't really matter anyway, because I hadn't gone to him in any case, and he was here know looking at me like I was crazy after yelling at him for something that wasn't his fault, with the stance of indifference but with this little look of insecurity in his eyes that not many would be able to recognise. That just made the guilt worse. I don't know why I did this to him. He'd clearly come to repair us, make us both feel better, I'd been on his thoughts, and I'd just yelled at him.

Now it was out of my system, and he hadn't responded, I calmed down a little. I'd stood up sometime during my tirade, my hands on the table, leaning over toward him whilst he'd remained seated. Weirdly, my use of height difference to shove my points in his face made me feel another ten times worse, and I waited a few seconds hoping for the ground to swallow me up.

This was another new feature of our relationship since he'd regained his powers. I used to be so comfortable with him, more so than anyone else in my life, and now I felt either awkward or embarrassed whenever we did talk. He never seemed embarrassed though, and had actually taken to tactfully ignore me if we were in a conversation with others and he noticed my redness.

"Sorry," I said quietly after another few moments of silence.

"S'okay," he responded, and I was pretty sure this was the most guilty anyone had ever felt. He met my eyes again when I found the courage to lift them up from the table, but then broke the connection and sighed, moving around the room with his eyes, and leaning back with his hands behind him on the floor.

"So... you've been avoiding me, huh?"

"Only as much as you've been avoiding me-" Bullshit. Why do I do these things to myself?

He leaned upright again, and rubbed his neck. I felt a little better when he did that – I wasn't the only one in the room feeling awkward, for once. To be honest, I'm not sure why he'd even tried to fix us. We were painfully broken together. We'd only connected at the beginning out of necessity, and he'd only come after me from obligation; he'd done everything now on his own. He didn't need me.

But I still couldn't shove this stray thought from my head: he probably knew all this. He definitely knew he didn't need me. So why was he still here?

I didn't realise I'd asked him that until I realised he was now looking at me, his eyes wide and a little surprised. They softened a little, and he had a ghost of a smile on his face.

"Because I want to be here."

Which, it turned out, suited me pretty well. Because I wanted him to be with me too.

'Cause it doesn't really matter what everyone else thinks about it. That I'm holding him back, that I abandoned him, that I practically killed him myself, because he doesn't really seem to care or agree. The point is that we both want to still be with each other. He wanted me to come back after he rescued me, and it took me a little longer to realise that it was what I wanted too. I could've just been gone to him, but I went back, I don't know whether for me, or for him. Then when he didn't function well after he'd lost his powers, it took me a heck of a lot longer to realise it was because I'd gone too. He told me that he was lonely, back then. I shouldn't have been, it should have been going back to normalcy for me, but I didn't function well either.

See, we kind of need each other to function right, and that's why we keep jumping in front of various attacks aimed for the other.

So, after that day when I yelled at him in my office because I was more cowardly than he was, I stopped running.

It was kind of interesting, getting to know new-him. He didn't tease me as much, but when he occasionally did, instead of responding with violence I'd have to work out how to stop being so red. As he became more of a permanent fixture, people didn't think us so odd anymore, and when he became a Captain and practically led a campaign against my brother to let me be his lieutenant, Nii-sama was the only one who was laughed at, for delaying it for so long.

So, within about 6 months of that day I yelled at him, so soon after the end of the war to end all wars, I was kind of content. We weren't fully fixed back to what we once were; it was more that there were areas where we were different now. Not bad different. Good different.

Different where I'd be okay with him being irrationally angry if I spent too much time with Renji. Different where if he went out with his human friends, especially Orihime, he'd always come home and be there with me at the end of the night.

Different where we'd been on a mission, and a hollow had managed to creep up behind me, and he'd beat the living shit out it with his bare fists, even ignoring Zangetsu, after it had scratched me twice across the check. Different where he'd been so angry he didn't talk and just glared heatedly at me for days afterwards.

So, one day, quite a few months after the hollow event, when I was sat in my new office with my new Captain in the room next thinking about all this, and with no idea where we'd be a year from now, I didn't panic. He stepped out, and told me he'd be going to training with interim Captain-Commander Shunsui, and I told him to come home safe, and neither of us panicked when he casually leant down and we kissed briefly. I didn't even realise he'd done it until he'd left. I didn't panic on our first 'this-is-a-date-but-we're-not-actually-going-to-ca ll-it-a-date-but-can-you-pass-the-soy-sauce?', or the day when Karin argued with her father (albeit wrongly) that Ichigo was allowed to have a girlfriend when he was 15.

That really got me thinking about the future, where we really would be: a couple of things seem inevitable, and a few are silly ideas thought up by our friends.

But I'm kind of interested in whether they're right; in what our forever is going to look like.