When she sees him for the first time, it is inside the white polished halls of the hospital, and she pretends she is looking for the washroom when the girl at the front desk asks what she needs.

If he saw her she wasn't sure, but she waits, unsure and indecisive as to what action she should take now that she has found him, until he disappears behind a door.

Why she goes after him she isn't sure. She just feels like she needs to.

By the time she gets home she is shaking, though she can't understand why.


There are more days when she goes back to the hospital. Always she keeps her distance, waiting, waiting, and watching.

He has never taken any interest in her and probably hasn't even noticed her. He is too busy in his work, in his clipboard, in the turning of the knob to enter another sickly person's room.

By the second day she decides that he's handsome. On the third day she notices he pushes his glasses onto his nose just like Ishida used to do. And on the fourth day she witnesses him refuse a patient away without a single expression crossing his stoic face.

He is everything and nothing like Ishida.


On the fifth day, Orihime gets tired of waiting.


It is raining when she gets to his door. It occurs to her briefly that when it rains it is generally a precursor for trouble. She can only hope so.

When he answers the door, he doesn't open it all the way but rather glares at her through the slit. After a moment, he says, "I know you. You're that girl that's been hanging around the hospital for the last few days."

Orihime is surprised by this. She wrings her hands in her skirt.

"What do you want?"

"I don't know," she confesses. "But I think you're the one that can give it to me."

There are several tense seconds that tick by as he stares at her. She is soaked through but he still hasn't moved the door an inch.

"Who are you?" he asks finally.

"I'm your son's murderer."

He slams the door in her face.


She doesn't go back until the next day. It isn't raining this time but the day is cloudy and gray. There is a melancholy weight in the air, but maybe that was just the weight Orihime felt.

When he opens the door, he glares then steps back. He doesn't invite her in but the open door is as good an invitation as she's ever going to get. She closes the door softly behind her.

He is already settled into a chair when she enters the room. He wastes no time in getting to the point, which reminds her so strongly of how Ishida used to be. "What do you want?"

His tone is sharp, dangerous, not like Ishida at all. Orihime wonders vaguely what sort of people would ever want to be treated by a doctor such as he.

She looks at the window shades, a deep red, like blood. She swallows. "My name is-"

"I know who you are. You're that girl Uryuu went after. Inoue Orihime is it?"

She stares at him. "How do you know that?"

He is lighting a cigarette and through the flame and smoke he glances at her. "He wrote me a letter."

"…Ah."

"So he went to save you in Hueco Mundo did he?" He grins in an unfriendly way, a simple curve of the corner of his mouth, a grin half finished.

"Yes."

"And this is the end result." He gestures towards her, as if she is on display. "You get to come home and Uryuu got the so-called honorable warrior's death he always wanted. Tell me…how did he die?"

"He was incinerated," Orihime answers.

He breathes in the smoke. "Did he kill anybody?" he says quite suddenly.

She answers truthfully because she can not recall Ishida ever killing anyone outside of Hollows. And to her, Hollows weren't really people. "I don't know."

"He never was any good at having killing instincts," Ryuuken comments. "That was his downfall. He was much better at sacrificing himself to save others rather than sacrifice anybody else for it. Don't you think that's funny?"

"He died for my sake," says Orihime uselessly.

He grins again, that unfriendly grin, and it reminds her, strangely, of Ichigo's mask. "Is that right?"

When he leans toward her in the chair, she doesn't move, and in his glare Orihime finds hate, incrimination, resentment. Orihime finds exactly what she's been looking for.

"If you've come for forgiveness," he says, "forget it. I won't forgive you."

"…Thank you."


There are more days and she comes back. He never invites her in but he never turns her away either and in his cold allurement Orihime finds herself the most comfortable. He gives her exactly what she needs.

Sometimes they talk and when they do, he asks all the questions and she just answers. Sometimes it is about school or Soul Society. Sometimes it is about his work. But most of the time – most of the time it is abut Ishida.

He asks her about all of Ishida's grand adventures and all the foes he fought and when she tells him this, his face is distant and he listens without comment. Afterwards, he will push his glasses further onto his nose, reminding her so much of Ishida, and say, "I see." Then he will light a cigarette and he is not Ishida at all but a poor substitute.

There are other times when they will say nothing at all to each other. He will be at his desk working or in his chair reading charts and forms. At these times, Orihime is quiet and content to stare into the fire or at her lap. If she moves, his eyes follow her and into her back and calf she feels the burn of his gaze.


Why he allows her to come back everyday she isn't sure. She doesn't ask. He has never asked her why she comes either so she never offers an answer.

In their talks Ryuuken never reveals anything about himself. It is always about her or Ishida.

Neither has he ever once said that he regretted losing Ishida or that he even missed him. He only asks questions about Ishida's past; what he did, what he said, what he possibly felt. Was he powerful?

"Yes," says Orihime. "I think he was."

It's strange to her that he is so interested about this. It's almost as if Ryuuken was asking these things because he was trying to get to know the person his son was.

And maybe, Orihime thinks, that wasn't that far from the truth.


There is a picture buried underneath stacks of paper on Ryuuken's desk. Over the days Orihime has come to notice it more and more, and finally morbid curiosity gets the better of her and she unearths it. She is both disappointed and relieved to find that the picture is not of Ishida but a woman.

She shows the picture to Ryuuken. "Who is this?"

Orihime has never asked him a question before, mostly because she thought he would never answer any question of hers anyway, and he turns to regard her with a chilly apathetic expression.

She doesn't expect him to reply and it surprises her when he does. "My wife."

"Oh." Orihime blinks. She hadn't known he was married. "Where is she? Your wife."

Ryuuken leans against the windowsill across from her, hand in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette. "In another house I own."

"Huh?"

"I'm rich," he answers pointblank, giving her a sidelong glance as if she were pretending to be a simpleton. "I have more than one place of residence."

"But why…why is she there and not here? Why not here with you?"

He straightens and across his face flashes that little half finished grin. "Because she prefers being there."

And he would speak no more of it.


She finds herself staying there later and later. When she goes home, she is alone and it is dark and her mind plays tricks on her. Shadows slip by and in the silence she swears she hears the twang of a bow.

She dreams of his death but whenever he turns around, it is not Ishida but somebody else. Ichigo or her brother or Tatsuki. Once it is even herself.

Exhausted, she sprawls in Ryuuken's favorite chair, not bothering to ask permission. Ryuuken says nothing, only looks at her and she can't see his eyes but only the glare of the fire on his glasses. She gives him a wan smile.

When she wakes up the next morning, Ryuuken is gone but a blanket that was not there when she fell asleep covers her.


Staying at Ryuuken's though brings problems. In the middle of the day, when he is gone at work leaving her alone in the empty shell of a house, she finds herself getting bored and has trouble finding things to do. She tries to read the books surrounding his shelves but most of them she can't understand and the others don't sound even remotely interesting.

She looks around the rest of his home instead, telling herself she is really exploring instead of snooping.

Most of the rooms she finds are completely empty. They are nothing but void shells with white walls. Orihime wonders vaguely if once upon a time they had had his wife's belongings in them and if she had taken them with her wherever she had gone.

There is a locked door among these empty rooms. Peering through the keyhole and under the floor doesn't reveal anything about the inside of the room. She retreats to the front.

Orihime finds she hates being around that side of the house. The empty rooms make her feel as though the house is only half-alive. As if those rooms were completely lifeless.

When Ryuuken gets home, she says nothing to him about the empty rooms nor the locked one. She isn't sure if he would have told her the truth about them if she had had asked, but moreso than that Orihime doesn't want to know what sort of skeletons he hides.


They talk and again it is about Ishida.

"He liked to sew a great deal," she tells him. "He was in the sewing club at school."

Ryuuken snorts belittlingly. "Women's work."

"I don't think so. I think he liked to repair things. I think he liked putting stuff back together, especially broken things."

This seems to disturb Ryuuken the most. His eyes narrow just a little and his mouth becomes firmer than usual.

Orihime knows better than to ask him to explain. Her gut tells her he wouldn't answer and although he had answered her about his wife, she knows better than to think he would ever answer anything about Ishida.


Later, he says abruptly to her, "It's funny you should say that."

Orihime glances up from the book she doesn't understand. "What's that?"

"About him wishing to fix broken things."

The fact he doesn't say Ishida's name is not lost on Orihime. "Is that funny?""He didn't fix anything," Ryuuken responds. "And if he did, it was meaningless things. Clothes, toys…meaningless things. That was always Uryuu's problem, you see. He always missed the big picture."

"What is the big picture?"

Ryuuken stares at her for a long moment. Then he pushes his glasses further onto his nose and walks away without answering.


At night, from down the hall, there is a light. It shines on her face and Orihime, restless with dreams but not nightmares, blinks awake. Groggily she peers at it.

It is coming from the other side of the house. The side that is full of empty lifeless rooms and hidden memories.

She rises out of Ryuuken's chair. Careful not to make a sound, she makes her way down the hallway.

The light, she finds, is coming from the room that had been locked. She pauses a moment nervously at the threshold, wondering if there was a Hollow inside Ryuuken's house or, worse, Ishida's ghost.

But Orihime had never been much of a coward. She had never been afraid of fighting, only of hurting others. Bolstering her courage, she forces herself to enter.

The sight that greets her makes her stop in shock.

This room is not like the others. It is not a hollow, barren shell but a room full of light and life.

Around the room there are balls of thread and needles, ribbons rolled into perfect circles, clothes carefully folded with obvious holes in the midst of being mended, stuffed animals with ears and eyes sewn back on all lined up together in a flawless row. And then there are bows and arrows, white gloves, books with strange symbols upon their spines, foreign objects she has never seen before that appear handmade but finely crafted.

Orihime stands very still and inside her breast she feels her heart clench painfully.

From the sewing materials to the broken items made whole, from the belongings befitting a Quincy to the simple orderly fashion everything is put in. It is every piece that Ishida had been. It is Ishida's life laid out before her.

A movement to her left breaks her out of her appraisel. She turns. Her eyes widen.

Ryuuken is sitting on Ishida's bed. And just beyond him, on the nightstand, she can see a picture of an old man.

"I didn't think you would come," Ryuuken doesn't look at her when he speaks, evidently preferring to glare at the wall with that somber gaze of his. "Most wouldn't have."

"This is…"

"Uryuu's room," Ryuuken finishes for her. "Yes."

In his hands she sees there is a necklace with a cross shaped charm and a circle at its crosshatch. The pendant swings from his fingers.

Orihime makes a sidelong glance towards the picture. "Is that…"

"Uryuu's grandfather." He leans back. The swinging stops. "My father."

"Oh…" Forcefully she swallows the jumbled mass of questions in her throat. "He mentioned him a couple times," she says instead. "His grandfather. Err your father that is."

"Uryuu loved him very much."

The swinging starts again. A pendulum next to his knee. Orihime can't help but find her eyes drawn to it. Slowly, as if moving through water, she moves to kneel in front of him. Her eyes never move from the swinging object. Ryuuken never removes his eyes from the wall either.

"Uryuu loved him, but I hated him," he continues. "The old man convinced him that being a Quincy was the most important thing in the world. Uryuu never bothered to consider if being a Quincy would pay the bills, give him the clothes on his back, or keep a roof over his head. He never took into account the big picture. He wanted the useless things in life."

The pendulum stops. Orihime pulls her eyes upward to Ryuuken's face. He isn't looking at her but at the far wall. When he speaks, his mouth barely moves.

"When I was young, we lived in poverty. My father was too busy taking care of the world to take care of us. I had to be the one to work, to make sure we had a house and food and all those others things that are needed to live in today's world. My father told me the same thing he told Uryuu. I too became a Quincy but it didn't make me happy. I thought that it was because I was missing something, and we were missing money. That is why I chose a profession that would make me rich but I also chose it because I would be helping people. My father helped the living by killing the dead. I decided to help the living by keeping them alive. My father told me I was being selfish. I told him he wasn't living in the present."

That half finished grin crosses his face. There is a slight snort of ironic bitter laughter.

"It was then I decided that my son would have everything I didn't have. I gave him a vast amount of wealth. I gave him all the money he could ask for, a roof over his head, clothes, food, every damn thing he wanted. I gave him everything."

Ryuuken falls silent a moment. He glances at the picture.

"I spent my whole life measuring up," he mutters. "It was the way I had been raised. It was the only way I knew. I wanted Uryuu to be like me, I pushed him to be like me, just like my father did to me. I gave everything to Uryuu but everything was too much because he didn't want everything. Money didn't make him happy. Being a Quincy made him happy. He wanted to be like the old man. I despised it and Uryuu despised me for despising it. We could never see eye to eye. He would yell and cry at me when he was a boy. When he became a man, we both became two men in a silent warfare."

His eyes move from the wall to her. He leans towards her. His breath is hot against her face, like a lion's pant down her neck. He is so close she can smell his breath. He smells of smoke and alcohol and shattered things.

Orihime barely manages to stop herself from scooting backwards.

"You came here asking for forgiveness," he says directly into her face, "but I won't give it to you. How can I grant you forgiveness when the same mercy was always denied to me? I won't forgive you because I can't be forgiven. You robbed me of that."

His hand curls into a fist around the necklace. He stands and from her submissive position on the floor, Orihime looks back at him with wide eyes.

Her thighs clench as her heart races and she almost sobs with relief when he leaves without another word.


She knows better than to go after him. She is well aware he is not the type to be coddled and comforted. Chasing him down would suffice in nothing.

Instead she stays in the room, surrounded by Ishida's life, and thinks again and again on what Ryuuken had said.

Ryuuken, Orihime now understands, did everything by halves. His grins were always half finished, his house was half empty. He had been half a Quincy, half a doctor, half a husband, half a father and maybe in the end he had become half a man.

She didn't blame him for not forgiving her. How could one give such a thing out of their own hollowness? How could the guilty possibly forgive the guilty?

Orihime fingers the white glove Ishida had worn in her hands. She remembers all the words Ishida had said about his father to her, so few and far between.

She raises her head at last.

Ishida had always weighed consequences before acting. This is why he had been the thinker of their group. He could always fit pieces together no matter how obscure. He had always been able to complete any puzzle.

So maybe he had known what would happen the moment he jumped in front of her. Maybe he knew what she would feel, what she would do, and where she would go. Maybe he knew all these things. Maybe he had planned ahead in that split second before jumping and had decided everything was worth it.

Orihime stands. Softly she folds the glove in her hand. She kisses it and sets it gently down on the bed.

"Thank you," she says, means it. "I'm so sorry."

She takes a moment to collect herself. Wipes away the stray tear that trickles down her cheek.

Then she goes to find Ryuuken.


She finds him where she knew he would be. In front of the fire in his usual chair, the blanket at his feet, with a glass of scotch in his hand.

She stops defiantly in front of him. "I came to tell you," she says without preamble, "what Ishida's last words were before he died."

Ryuuken blinks once slowly and his glare turns accusingly to her. "You never mentioned that before."

"You never asked," says Orihime, as if that explained it all. And to her, it did.

"Very well." Ryuuken's words are slow, measured, like Ishida's had been when he had faced down a foe that might be beyond his power. "Humor me then. What did he say?"

Orihime takes a deep breath. "He said he was sorry."

"Of course he was. Sorry for what?"

"I don't know," Orihime confesses. "I don't know what he was sorry for. But right after that he said father."

Ryuuken stiffens in his chair. He stares into the fire. Across his glasses she can see the shadows race and it is a long moment before he starts breathing again.

He stands slowly. For the third time, he walks away from her but, this time, his steps are shaky.


She waits for him.

The hours crawl by without a sound. He stays in his room, barricading himself away with only his guilt for company. It reminds her of what she had done before she came here. She sees not a flicker of him.

It is only when, exhausted, she slides into his chair and curls there, half-asleep, that he comes for her.

He is a shadow in the darkness that she doesn't recognize. For a stunned incoherent second she thinks he is a Hollow. Then he leans toward her and she smells the smoke and alcohol and knows it is he.

He holds her face in his hands. Against her forehead he leans his own and across her cheeks she feels his breath. It brushes like a murmur across her lips.

"I forgive you," he whispers.

His hands tighten a fraction against her flesh. Then he kisses her, hot and heavy, and from his chair she rises, presses herself against him, needy needy for what he offers.

He gives it to her soundlessly.


Ryuuken had been half a father, half a husband, and half a man.

But to Orihime, he was a full lover.


When she dreams, she dreams of Ishida.

But this time it is not about his death. He stands before her, as whole and bright as the day before he died and, in his hands, he holds something she recognizes very well.

Her own heart.

Once upon a time there had been a splinter inside there. But she had torn so viciously at it that she finally managed to dislodge it, leaving behind a huge gaping wound.

Ishida, very slowly, takes his needle and thread and, very gently, sews her heart back together.

"I love you."

He smiles at her, a full brilliant smile, like he's happy, and inside her breast Orihime feels her heart swell to the point of breaking.


It is late morning by the time she wakes. Orihime stares at the ceiling and knows that he – Ryuuken, not Ishida, she thinks at first but then, in retrospect, both - is gone.

The front door has been left open. She understands what it means. It is his silent invitation for her to leave.

Slowly, she sits up. Against her flesh the air is cold but she doesn't reach for her clothes just yet. She stares into her lap and silently reconstructs the bits and pieces of the past few months of her tumult life. From the day she had discovered her secret abilities to the day she had returned back from hell with a friend lost, she rewinds her life backwards and remembers the simple innocent girl she used to be.

Time froze, and while it stood statuelike before her, carved out of a chilling introspection, she is able to cast away the last of the tattered remains that had been her old life, that innocence of being that had preceded Rukia and her journey through Hueco Muendo, and to don at last the mantle of the woman she had become.

Good-bye Orihime that was.

Quietly, almost melancholy, Orihime rises and prepares to go home at last.


A/N: I have to come clean. The last couple paragraphs were stolen shamelessly from "The Elf Queen of Shannara" by Terry Brooks. It's a great book, everyone should read it. The words fit into this so well I had to steal them. I'm a bad, bad author.