"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world,
Which I find myself constantly walking around in the day time
And falling into at night.
I miss you like hell."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
There's a hole in the world.
Ichigo skirts around it during the day. He averts his eyes. Holds his breath. Pretends to anyone who looks at him just a second too long, or with an ounce too much of pity, that it doesn't exist. That there is no hole. That his skies are cloudless and blue, that it hasn't rained in years. He pretends Inoue's smile is bright and genuine as ever, that Ishida's shoulders are slumped through mere tiredness, that Chad's unwavering presence at his side is loyalty, and not worry. He pretends that he doesn't wake up some nights at the sound of a certain voice, or that he doesn't linger just a moment longer than necessary when taking a shirt from his closet. That he doesn't absently look for a head of raven hair resting on tiny shoulders in crowds on city streets, or that his throat doesn't clench strangely whenever he opens a juice box.
There is a hole in the world. Ichigo finds himself constantly walking around it in the day time, and falling into it at night. At night, there is no school, college, work, friends or family to distract him. Ichigo can only lie in his bed, with his eyes staring into the dark, and speak to her.
Oh, he knows. He knows it's insane. He knows she can't hear him, and that he can't feel her in this or any other world, anymore, but god, she is here, to him, somehow. And he so badly just needs her to hear him. He tells her about the world of the living, and how is family are doing. What their friends have been up to, what he's been up to. And then the small talk dies in his throat and he sobs.
If he could rip through the fabric of the world and grab her, just for one minute, for one moment, it might be enough. If he could just hold her tiny little face in his hands and breathe her in, just for one minute, and hear her call him a fool just one more time, he would give entire worlds and his whole soul and everything in between.
Where she used to be, where her reiatsu used to ebb and flow against his own like a breeze, even when she was an entire world apart from him - there is nothing. Something terrible and unmentionable has separated them so far that he can't reach her, can't even feel her, no matter how desperately he wants to or how much his soul screams and cries and rages for him to do something.
Ichigo knows he has lived without her once before. When he could see spirits, could touch them, speak with them, but nothing more. When he couldn't protect or save. When it rained all day, every day, and he hid himself behind a guarded scowl and blamed himself for all that he didn't have the power to prevent. That was life before Rukia crashed into it. Destiny was made of gears and Ichigo was the sand in between, torn apart and powerless, until a tiny woman flew through his window and tore into his head, turning the gears the opposite way. Ichigo knows he lived without Rukia once, what feels like lifetimes ago; ignorant of her existence and the experience of how one person can save another so completely, and he wishes he didn't have to again.
For all the nights he has done this, Rukia has never replied. And yet, there's that voice in Ichigo that tells him to keep going. To keep fighting. It calls him a fool when he has been reckless, and gently but firmly tells him this, too, will pass when the rain is particularly heavy. He can't see her, or feel her anymore, or even taste her in the air around him, but he can hear her in the space between his conscience and his common sense. She's curled up in the corners of his soul, dormant, waking in him when he needs her. In a way, she does replies, always.
There is a hole in the world.
Renji stares into it and dares it, curses it, screams at it. Begs it to take him too. It is deep, dark, and all encompassing - a hurricane that started turning sometime after they left the Rukongai and he lost her that first time, he knows, and grows more overwhelming with every rotation. It twists and expands. Looms over him and settles on him like a weight.
Sometimes it feels like arms. He pretends they're hers.
When Renji tears his eyes from it, he sometimes sees her brother looking at him. He knows Byakuya has suffered too, and that this is not the first time he has had to mourn, but Renji never meets his eyes in return. He resents them too much. He resents Byakuya and his cold, slate eyes, and his indifferent stare and hard expressions, because in them he sees Kuchiki Rukia. In the slight frown Byakuya shoots his lieutenant, meant to convey a measure of understanding, Renji only sees the cold, hard eyes of a woman who resolutely accepted her own impending demise without complaint. He sees a lost, lonely girl with Kuchiki nobility and grace thrust haphazardly on her tiny shoulders. He sees the person she became when he lost her to Byakuya Kuchiki, the man he worked like hell to catch up to for forty years just to see his Rukia again.
There is a hole in the world, and Renji wishes it would swallow him. He has never lived in a world where she didn't exist. He can't remember his life before she came into it. Sometimes, when the hole in the world expands, the hurricane getting darker and heavier and sadder, he doesn't think he had one. He sits on a hill in District 78, West Rukongai, where three graves – four – reside, and he knows she was the reason he existed. Renji has always firmly believed he was born the instant Rukia swept under an angry street vendor's feet and told him to run with her, and as a result has never resented the fact that he has built his life entirely around her. Every struggle for food, every fight for survival, every achievement he has ever clawed his way towards, he did it all for her.
And he would do it all again, an infinite number of times over, if he could only just turn back time and stay in Inuzuri with her forever. He would fight tooth and nail for food and water every day, he'd live a life without better spiritual pressure, he'd move whole worlds and swallow fire if it meant he could go back to that damn slum in Inuzuri, where the dirt shifts under his feet and the walls are damp to touch, with her, for just one more day. Because when Renji is honest with himself and the Rukia he clings to in his nightmares, he wishes they had never left. He wishes they had stayed in that crumbling city, because even when Inuzuri was at its' worst, even when the bloodshed was unbearable and when time had taken the rest of their family away from them, they always had each other. He always had her.
He never sees her in Byakuya's Kuchiki stare. Not the real Rukia. Not the one he left behind in Inuzuri. Not the one with a smile too big for her face and a voice too loud for her tiny body. Who took down a street vendor to save some street rats and their jug of clean water. Climbed the tallest trees to pick the best apples. Whose calloused little hands helped him build a makeshift fireplace in the corner of their home, helped him cook the fish he caught himself in the river. The girl who cried when Haru caught a rabbit and refused to eat it. Rukia, whose laugh was the single greatest sound he had ever heard. Who would stand up to her chest in a river full of floating lilies. Rukia, their center. Huddled in the middle of their family, crowded around her at night to keep her warm with their only two blankets. Rukia, shaking and chattering and clinging to him at night, against the air rushing through the cracks in the wall, when all the rest were gone and she was all he had left in the world. Rukia, the one thing he loved about Inuzuri.
Rukia, who crashed into his world like a comet and left him howling after her long after she faded away.
There is a hole in the world.
She doesn't understand it. It's an emptiness that has always existed inside her, unwelcome and illogical, and she can't pinpoint it or understand where it comes from. She was born into a normal family, with all the ups and downs a teenager can expect. She is loved, protected and liked. She hasn't suffered unspeakable tragedy or had her heart broken. And this feeling, this void in her, frustrates her.
There's a hole in the world. It's not crushing or debilitating. It's not overwhelming or distressing, or even heavy. It's just there. It's more a feeling of anticipation than one of despair. It's longing. Waiting. A growing sense that something, somewhere in the ground beneath her feet, is shifting. Something is turning. And, not really understanding how, or why, she has waited for this her whole life.
If destiny is made of gears, she feels like the sand caught between. She knows, inexplicably, that she is waiting for someone to turn the gears the opposite way and change her world. It will happen.
She feels like the dog howling at the moon, and knows without reason or explanation, that she'll reach it.
-end.