A/N: Part of a mass migration of selected fics from my tumblr. This was written for last year's ichirukimonth, for day two: episode tag/missing scene. This takes place shortly before Rukia books it and is arrested by Byakuya and the red pineapple, and the 'love, companionship...' quote is directly from the chapter.
Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach, Tite Kubo does.
She thinks she might love him.
Not in the conventional way, with a pounding heart and fluttering stomach and visions of him holding up the world on his barely-visible back muscles. Rukia has lived too many lifetimes since Kaien to ever let herself be blinded by that kind of adoration.
Love, companionship, and friendship…it's nothing but trouble.
She closes her eyes and breathes.
Whatever stars may have existed in her eyes for him died long before he was even born.
So when she looks at him, she really looks. She doesn't see someone who can save the whole world and escape unscathed; she sees a man with too much power for his lanky frame and unsure hands, whose dreams of saving a mountain-load of people are as unreachable as a drop of water in a barren canyon. But there's a fire in his eyes that burns the iron core left in hers and she thinks maybe, just maybe, one day he might be able to do just that.
She looks down at the blank piece of paper tucked beneath the math sheet she's supposed to be working on and sighs.
Love, companionship, and friendship…it's nothing but trouble.
Dear Ichigo.
She can't figure out how to say goodbye.
Regards, Rukia seems too formal. She's seen him be built up and broken down like a house of cards and she owes him something more.
Sincerely, Rukia is a cop out. There's nothing overtly sincere about what she's doing, abandoning him with more questions than answers and leaving him and his family in danger because if Soul Society can't find her, their next stop is him. Maybe he'll never understand why she did it and maybe he'll hate her for the rest of his life but so long as he's safe, that's okay.
Love, Rukia. Her pen traces the kanji in the air, just centimeters above the paper. Love, Rukia. Every pen stroke is an invisible petal being ripped off a flower. I love you, I love you not. I love you, I love you not. I love you, I love you not. I love you…
Love for them isn't kisses and hugs and dates and flowers. It isn't soft smiles and adoring eyes and making love at midnight. Love for them means only having time to hope the other isn't dead after a battle and awkward are you okays right before bed and making sure their medicine drawer is replenished after one finishes the gauze, and Rukia can handle that because this is all she knows. Ichigo deserves more. He deserves a normal life and normal love and it's unfair to keep him balanced between two worlds, no matter how much she hurts just thinking about leaving him forever.
Rukia steels her eyes and presses the pen to the paper forcefully, threading every attachment she has to him and this world into the ink.
Your friend, Rukia.
Love, companionship, and friendship…it's nothing but trouble.
If there's one thing normal about their love, she thinks. It's that sacrifices must be made. So she kisses the letter and places it on his table, and promises herself that once her foot is out the window, she won't look back.
Love, companionship, and friendship…it's troublesome. It's really…nothing but a saddening emotion.
Rukia runs.
A/N: This was a bitch to write at the time, jysk.
-Eien