Epilogue

Part 1.

Memories That Were Lost

After she disappeared, she landed by the sea. She couldn't see it then, there was only darkness all around, but she caught that whiff of salty waters and that feel of the coarse, humid touch of the sea wind brushing against her face. She heard the waves lapping loudly against the shore and crashing against ragged rocks that she couldn't see. She felt it too, the air that was damp, and the feeling of malice hanging heavily in the pitch blackness that surrounded her.

The only light came into her line of sight just seconds after. The small purple firefly shined even more brightly in this world than in the one she had left behind. No larger than a pea, the tiny lump of silver fluttered to a stop on her now invisible palm, and whispered something to her.

"I'm still here Yana..."

It's voice adopted the form of shudders, tiny, timed pulses transmitted into her flesh, and the purple light shone brighter and dimmed rapidly like a candle caught in the wind as the words passed through her flesh and entered straight into her ears.

They were mostly comforting words. Compared to many of her comrades whose closest comrade-in-arms taunted them to make them stronger, Yanagi was lucky in her Zanpaktou, strapped to her side 24/7, was her best friend. On the other hand though, her bullying tutor was Ikkaku. Asleep for most of the days while Ikkaku berated her, but awake when she needed her most, Kuritonbo treated Yanagi like a little sister, comforting her, spoiling her, calling her names; and, most importantly, keeping her out of harm's way.

"Kuritonbo? I'm glad you're still here..."

"Ikkaku missed his chance, didn't he?" This time Yanagi snapped back, her eyes were present and awake again. she even managed a small smile.

"I always thought he'd be the end of me."

"I thought so too."

"All those years..."

Yanagi looked around her. The view of the fireworks still lingered stubbornly before her in the darkness, as though they were burned to her eyes. And no matter how hard she tried to forget, she could not shake away that pained look in her husband's eyes, and the way he looked at her the moment he reached out and tried to take a hold of her hand...

But it had been too late. His hand had barely brushed past her fingers before they were gone, vanished into a mist of purple. For a few short seconds the mist stayed. A sudden, fierce wind scattered the mist away and the glowing bits and pieces dispersed like the hairs on a dandelion, disappearing beyond the edge of the cliff.

"All those years just gone..."

Then she was here. Fully aware of what had passed. Not at all sure how she got here, or how to get out of this world of impenetrable night. This void was not cold, but she was alone. For the first time in her life she was entirely alone. His voice still rang in her ears. Though they did little to ease her of her loneliness, the last things he said still echoed in her mind. On and onthey kept repeating again and again in her head like a broken record. At times she enjoyed listening to his soft several times she found herself covering her ears and clawing her face, a scream at the tip of her tongue. The endless repetition was like a million bugs invading her ears, snapping her spine, and tearingher into pieces from the inside. She pleaded Kuritonbo, crying for her to make him stop talking, but the puff of purple light rose 10 mm from the centre of her palm, and dropped back limply into her hand 12 seconds later. The light flickered rapidly like the heartbeat of a tiny mouse for a few minutes. Her heart glowed for exactly the same number of seconds, taking it to mean her friend was coming to her aid.

But not long after, the tiny purple light burned out, and she was instantly thrown back into a world of darkness.

Gradually, like a brewing sandstorm, the void clawed its way out of silence and the darkness began to chatter and hum.

A thousand hell butterflies swarmed in front of her. The sound of their wings became voices when it met the cool air, voices transmitted from all over the different points of her history.

At first only whispers, then cries in the darkness as theybegan to fly faster, their strong wings beating madly. She felt the wind against her neck and winced when the sharp edges of their sleek black wings slashedthrough her socks and sliced the tips of her fingers. Suddenly, her whole life was laid bare before her.

"Hey Kurosawa!"

"Oi Yanagi!"

"Oh, Kurosawa-kun, didn't see you there! So, how's tricks?"

"Yana-chan what's wrong?"

Everything was there although there was no specific orderin which they appeared. They streamed back into her consciousness, reminding her that these things once happened. Whether it was the words someone had hissed in her ear seconds before she killed them, or a blade of grass that had grazed her bare feet in a peaceful meadow, those sounds and those memories all squeezed back into her mind, and she fell to her knees, just as Renji had done before, when she felt her head about to explode with the gravity of every single one of those memories.

Shortly though the pain subsided. Somehow, as though the voices knew now that they had caught her attention, they stopped crowding around her all at once, and quieted down considerably. They still came around in twos and threes, but she could hear each one of them clearly.

One voice stood out among the rest. And she closed her eyes to hear it better. In that moment, hearing the voice she hadn't heard in centuries, it seemed to her that nothing else was more important. In the noisy air, she forgot to listen to any other sound.

"Yana-chan, what's that boy doing there? He must be cold out there in the snow. Look at him, he's shivering, he's pale as a sheet!"

The voice stopped. It had happened a long time ago so she couldn't remember what made him stop talking. Meanwhile the other voices broke forth like light shedding through a crack in the curtain.

"You can come in if you like!" It was her grandfather's voice again. Raspy and tired, yet loud and tough when he needed it to be. "Spend anymore time out there you'll catch a cold!" he had yelled across the snow-covered yard.

Then, along came a voice she also hadn't heard in nearly one hundred years. Still high-pitched and childish, coarse but prone to unexpected squeals at inconvenient times, it was his voice from the day they met, not long after the dried yellow sasanquas petals drifted down from the low branches and the snow buried deep the brown, fallen leaves.

"You're f'om the odd'r dith-tic…"

Somehow she had forgotten he had a lisp when he was a kid. Hearing it again was almost a comical experience. Back then he would frown and tremble with irritation when she couldn't understand what he said. She would tilt her head to a side, so many questions glimmering in her eyes, as she tried to comprehend what he was telling her.

"I know you…but there'th that old geezer wif you. What'chu doin' her by yourself?"

Sooner or later, usually when ten minutes sped past and she still hadn't figured out what his words were, he'd storm away, fuming. Sometimes he wouldn't return to her house for days and she'd spend those days worrying if she had lost her only friend. Fortunately he was never gone for long, and once his lisp disappeared for good, he came to see every other day. She would rush out to greet him and they would sit on the front steps until the sun rose to its summit, and shone hotly down on their little heads. Around noon, they'd grudgingly give in to her grandfather's persuasion and retreat inside a cool and dark room where her guardian already set two bamboo mats for them to lay on, and half a watermelon cut to the size of sugar cubes for them to cool off from the heat. This was so they could consume them without getting their chins wet and sticky, and also to keep their clothes and the tatami mats free from pink, watery stains. She'd heard from Hinamori that that was also how she and 'Shiro-chan' spent their summers. Although because Hinamori's grandmother suffered from arthritis that had attacked her hands, they cut up the watermelon themselves, and they could never be patient enough to do it properly, only waiting long enough to cut it in fourths before they dug their teeth into the sweet and icy treat. Her grandmother scolded them and chased them outdoors where the sugary water could not drip onto the tatami and send for an army of ants to invade the house.

Sometimes Renji's friends, Tombo, Morita, and the others, dropped by. It was odd at first and it took Yanagi a long time to understand why, but when they were around Renji's mouth would clamp shut, or his lisp would return briefly and he blushed whenever they tried to talk to him in front of Yanagi.

Around autumn time, Grampa would bring out trays full of chestnut-filled sweets for them to munch on. Winter was the time for steaming bowls of sweet red bean soup. The kid's eyes stared at the massive shiratama dango hiding in plain sight, half-buried like an iceberg hiding in the sticky red bean porridge. They stared at it for minutes without blinking as if it were a giant lump of gold.

The first snowfall was the overture to the long, drawn-out winter months where renji and the other children stayed over at Yanagi's place. For them, the coldest months were literally the coolest. Those endless snow-drenched months where the days and the nights melted into one continuous, never-ending weekend of fun and games. Several times a year, in this house, with Yanagi and her grandfather, these children who originally came from Inuzuri, experienced warmth, kindness and love in a way they had never known before. They had a roof above their heads to shelter from the frost, two meals a day to keep them going, and a sincere old man to dote on them, who would grumble every time he saw their skinny frames, who was happiest when they asked for second-helpings during meals, and who, at least twice a day, would stare into their innocent eyes sternly, and gesture commandingly towards the bathroom at the end of the hall.

Once every week or so Grampa would ask the kids to help him with chores around the house. With the increased number of preteens running rampant, more paper doors ended up torn by the end of the day, strong muddy feet thundered up and down the hallways, begrimed the dry wooden boards all hours of the afternoon, and the heap of ripped and smelly clothes grew and grew till no matter how many times a day they washed and hung the clothes out to dry, the pile never dwindled.

Renji had awkward hands and fumbling fingers, and wasn't able to contribute much. The plates flew out of his soapy hands and broke into pieces on the floor. The lightbulbs were always screwed on too loose, shattering seconds after he descended and put away the ladder. Instead their friend Morita, a short sandy-haired boy helped the old man change the lightbulbs and fix the shingles on the roof. An older girl called Fumiko also turned out to be a big help, cooking and cleaning, and sewing when the quilts and the children's clothes needed mending.

Frustrated and bored, Renji loitered on the outskirts of their vision while his friends busied themselves with their sundry occupations, like scrubbing the wooden bathtubs or pasting fresh translucent paper over bamboo frames for the doors and windows. Not wanting to be a bother to anyone, he spent a couple of hours a few times each week sitting, isolated in the lonely, dark room for hours, cross-legged, his arm outstretched, his palm open and facing the ceiling, and as long as he could still fight against fatigue creeping up into his bones and the nerves in his arm, he kept this stance. He had seen Yanagi use the same technique to melt the frost from the veranda in the garden. Even when his friends finished helping Grampa around the house, usually around two in the afternoon, he remained in that room, ignoring them while they shouted for him to join their games, and concentrated all his energy on amassing an even bigger cannon of spiritual energy or boosting his control over his budding powers by levitating it, making it climb higher and higher, and maintaining its height and size for at first one minute, then two, when finally he was able to keep a hold of it for almost 6 minutes. Eventually fatigue caught up with him. He left the room after briskly tidying up, covering the burn stains in the walls by moving around the cabinets and chairs. He managed to hide it from his friends for quite some time, but soon everyone began to figure out that something was amiss. In return for something she had helped him with before Fumiko was the first person Renji demonstrated his powers to. It was a mystery how they got each other to do it, but together, they conspired in a twisty, elaborate scheme to surprise Yanagi with a spectacular and unforgettable show on her thirteenth birthday.

Among Renji's friends Yanagi became closest to Fumiko, a girl about her height, a few years older than her. More than Renji ever was, Fumiko turned out to be a permanent fixture at Yanagi's home even after the snow melted and spring returned. When Yanagi turned thirteen, Fumiko, who was fifteen at the time, was the first to learn that Renji had held Yanagi's hand, and that Renji didn't back away when Yanagi leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek.

"It's in the way you say his name too," Fumiko had told her. That day, she remembered, they were lying on their backs looking up at the wooden ceiling. In some secret way the contemplative silence of dusk and the dying daylight seemed to draw out words people weren't used to saying. So perhaps it was because of this that Fumiko, who made a habit of visiting Yanagi in the late afternoons, became such a close friend and they never kept anything from each other.

"I heard this from a lady in the fruit-and-vegetable market I walk past on my way here. She said that it's always in the way you say the name. Like if I say 'Yanagi' even a stranger can tell that we're best friends because of how I say it."

"Really?"

"Mm hmm," Fumiko nodded, "And it doesn't even need to be a name. I could say 'watermelon' and someone would think I was best friends with a watermelon as I'd just need to be thinking of you..."

"Hm..."

The silence forced her to say something. She didn't like silence at all. Suddenly the air would feel heavy with all the things unsaid, and Fumiko couldn't help blurt out whatever was in her mind… "Well, why don't you give it a shot!" Her voice rang out like a gunshot in the fading light. Name a fruit while thinking of him, and I'll tell you if it works or not!"

"Are you sure..."

"Go on, try it!"

Her face flushed in the sinking sun that cast a bright orange glow over the tatami mat in the room. She felt her heart racing. Staring up at the ceiling she stretched out her arms in front of her, and then dropped her arms back to the floor. But Renji's image was already seared into her mind and she could not stand the thought of letting it go.

Fumiko wondered what she might say.

"Orange..."

They lay there just so. With their arms out at their sides and their legs wide apart, they looked like a pair of starfish lazing about on a sandy seabed.

"There you go..." Fumiko teased moments after the sun had set completely and the shadows of the night had crawled up to their knees.

Renji...she mouthed his name. If anyone could have heard it, there was less the secretive, rapturous sigh Fumiko had heard that evening long ago, and more the kind, all-forgiving type of affection, like two friends who had known each other their entire lives.

Her voice was gone, and his name was lost in that other realm. She cried out Renji's name again a dozen times as her memories of all the times they'd spent together replayed in her mind; and then Rangiku's name, and finally that of her sensei. Yet still she couldn't make herself heard. No voices or trickles of movement drifted into her ears; and no smells of anything living or dead floated close to her nose. In a fit of desperation she tried running away from the dark void. In that wide open space, there were no walls or fences. She ran and ran, trying to find a way out until her legs hurt and until her lungs felt like they were being pierced by a thousand needles.

There was no way out. The darkness just seemed to extend endlessly forever. Yanagi fell to the ground and started to weep. As she lay there, in a slump, her breathing heavy and uneven, her body tired and aching, her history continued to sweep past her.

Back in the small private hospital in Ichigo's world, in the hospital's even tinier kitchen, they were alone, and they were talking. She listened carefully to what the two strangers said, trying to see if it was exactly as she remembered. If she could, begin to relive that moment and recapture the things she had forgotten. She wanted to remember her life, recall the important moments, before it was ripped away from her. The time was gone, like the rest of them, they never lasted long. She loved the other times, but nothing could compare with this memory that lasted only a few minutes, and stayed with her for so much longer.

It was the memory was his first confession. It had happened almost five decades ago, yet she still blushed hearing those words again. There they were planning their future in the middle of someone else's kitchen, talking about someone else's little sister, while preparing someone else's tamagoyaki and shabu-shabu...

She smiled as she heard them talk. What sweet things they said. Had they really flirted in such uninhibited ways? The rest of the world seemed to disappear when they were together. With just a few words they quickly settled back into their own little world. A few minutes together and they were children again. They were luckier than most Shinigami in that they never needed to say goodbye to that part of themselves.

She brought her legs closer to her and pressed her cheek to her knees. Soon both her cheek and her knees were wet. The swarm of butterflies and the competing voices slowly dissipated, until only a tightly intertwined pair was left dancing by her ears.

The last two butterflies left echoes of the final words exchanged between her and her husband in Yanagi's ears. The night was dark and the silence was deep. Thoughts crossed their minds in no particular order, buzzing frantically in their minds, fragmented, scattered, like the thoughts of two lost panic-stricken, frightened children. They had forgotten all about Ichigo, who was outside of their bubble, standing not more than a few feet away. Held captive in their own solitary bubble, in their final seconds together, nothing else existed, but each other, their past, the tiny kitchen at the hospital, and the knowledge that this was their last day together, this was it- no later on, no tomorrow-no matter what promises they made before this day, what dreams they initially had, this was where their intertwined paths broke apart. Her path halted here, yet his continued on indefinitely. Beyond the patch of grass just around the bend, the moss-covered boulder beyond the crack in their path, and even their professions of love in the tiniest kitchen in the world, his life carried on and whatever it contained she would no longer share a part in it. Someone else would do that for her, and he would love that person dearly. It wasn't a wish or some self-comforting thought, it was something she already knew, like she knew that the fireworks had died; now, no more than a drifting continent of smoke in the sky. Yet behind her, glowing water rushed up on the shore, illuminated like 'blue-tears' on a beach in all sorts of pretty colours in addition to its classic blue—flamingo pink, gray blue like the back of a whale, red, and white as stars.

And she heard him say: "Remember when we first came to Soul Society…how strange this whole world was…how hard it was that no one cared to take us seriously...yet how much we wanted to stay."

His voice was soft. He brushed her hair aside and stroked cheek and the outline of her ear. He stared at her as though he was trying to memorize her face. His hand trembled, though they pretended not to notice. There was a quiver in her voice that wouldn't go away. It was as though one of them was dying.

"Just a thought…"she watched him in the same way, kneading his arms, tracing the black tattoos on her forehead with her fingers. "But with the way things are progressing, you'll lose all your hair before any one of them turns gray. You'll probably forget I even said that…If there's any way I can find out, I'm curious to know if I'm right."

Again he brushed her hair to a side. He did so repeatedly, the same way he had done on so many earlier occasions. Sometime ago, back when they were kids, before his mind even knew what his hands were doing; yesterday, just that morning, on the rooftop before she came to Sogyoku cliff to see Ichigo.

She saw those words on his lips, in the depths of his brown eyes, and in the way he held her close. She kneaded his arms to tell him that she knew what he was thinking and what he wanted to say, even without him saying a word. But he said it aloud anyway, a sign, perhaps that he was already starting to forget, that precious world where they spent their lives together changing all too soon.

"Don't go okay? Just try. Try to stay. Don't even think about leaving..."

The immense pain he felt and his reluctance to give up squeezed themselves into words, and force their way out of his mouth with such great difficulty that his voice trembled as he tried to speak them aloud. As she heard his voice quiver with the burden of his speech, she noticed that there were tears in his eyes again. She touched her palm to his cheek, proceeded to wipe away one trailing down the left side of his face, just as she remembered it was many, many years ago that she had raised her hand in this same manner with the wish to dry up every speck of sorrow in the world for him.

Responding to the sincere and familiar feel of her hand, he slanted his head so he could kiss her wrist. She smiled, and despite herself felt a warm glow spread in her heart as if someone had lit a small candle somewhere inside of her that neither the rising wind nor the thoughts of what might have been could extinguish.

The gravel seemed to dissolve from beneath her feet as her legs started fading away. The rustle of the nearby trees grew faint and she could no longer feel the comfort of his arms around her body. His face grew hazy, as did the words he said.

Still she couldn't help herself, and when the time arrived, and they were to be separated for good, she held out her arm to him, a gesture he reflected, and she uttered her final words to him (perhaps not the prize choice of words but it didn't matter since he wouldn't even remember).

"I'll see you again..."

After the last two lovebirds faded to black, she gradually stopped crying. She sat up and wiped away all her tears.

"Kuritonbo...?" she inquired into the bleak darkness. There was no response. Hastily she stretched out her arms and began to grope about in the darkness, this time though, not to find an exit, just to find her friend. Carefully she stood up, took three uncertain steps forward. The ocean thrashed its waves on the shore, and she hoped her senses were still alive and keen enough to prevent her from bumping into a rock. Finally when she regained her balance and composure, she inched ahead, slowly at first, then suddenly, she started jogging lightly, her arms still scrabbling about ahead of her, waiting to bump into the source of the sound.

When she finally found Kuritonbo, she wrapped her arms around her shoulders, hugging her tightly against her chest. The front of her clothes were soaked. The shock of Yanagi sneaking up on her caused that final cry to dissolve in Kuritonbo's throat, escaping into the open as a loud and confused hiccup.

"Did I ever tell you about the first time that I met you?"

She felt in her arms Kuritonbo shake her head.

"I felt this incredible wave of inspiration. Like I had just opened a door to a whole new world that was full of all these dreams and possibilities that I still needed to explore.

"Suddenly, I felt we could conquer the whole world! Just the two of us! And I know now that conquering the world is harder than it seems but do you remember all the wonderful things we have accomplished together? Remember the first time I cried out your name in battle? The admiring look in everyone's eyes! Remember how proud Renji was when he saw us? We really had a great run, didn't we!"

Yanagi's voice trailed off. Kuritonbo was so silent Yanagi worried she had already disappeared.

"Any idea where you'll end up?"

Kuri thought for a moment.

"I don't know...The world's a vast place, I'm sure there's some place out there for me."

"Do you feel like you're going to disappear too?" The tingling feeling was spreading to the tips of her fingers.

"Yes…I feel we don't have much time now…"

"You were a tricky one. You made me work so hard to get to know the real you. It was never that hard between Renji and Zabimaru."

Kuritonbo sighed and Yanagi imagined she was smiling in the dark, sifting through the memories.

"Are you okay Yana?"

Yanagi nodded, although on second thought she found she wasn't so sure anymore why her friend had asked this question.

"I'm fine. What about you?"

Kuritonbo didn't respond though it hurt her to hear Yanagi speak as though they were strangers.

"What were you thinking about?"
"I was just thinking how it's so unfair…Why me? Of everyone in the world, so many other people to choose from, why only me? All my memories…my entire world...They're supposed to just disappear? It's so unfair…"

Suddenly sorrow spilled right out of her heart the way blood unexpectedly gushed out of a healing wound. She felt like screaming, but instead tears gushed out of her eyes.

"I'm sorry, Kuri, I don't know what's come over me...I..."

Kuritonbo held her hand. They spent the next few hours sitting back to back in silence. Each sorting through their own memories, straining under their own fears and burdens.

"Maybe if we tell each other everything that happened,I'll remember you and you'll remember me, and all that we've been through together will not be forgotten no matter where we end up."

It was the same thing Ikkaku said to her, but it took a while for Yanagi to remember. The words carried a familiar ring. Yanagi thought she might have heard them in a dream or when she was very little.

In a few minutes, the pieces came together and she understood how Kuritonbo was there when she went to say goodbye to Ikkaku and thus must have heard him say those words. Perhaps the two of them were privy to secrets Yanagi never knew; among them the one secret to how she might have been allowed to stay. She wished now that she hadn't so impulsively stormed out of the room. Though what good would it do even if she had remained in that room, while Ikkaku sat on the veranda watching the orange light drowning in the unreachable distance and listening to her pull out a fading history from the ashen shadows? Ikkaku would not remember her. She, Yanagi, had entered his life too late to mean anything to him. The way things were, by the time she came around, Ikkaku was already taken, so to speak, that very special place at the core of his heart, at the centre of his being had been taken. It had been occupied for some time already, and nothing could change that.

But Kuritonbo would remember. Yanagi was still the most important person to her. She would remember everything, Yanagi was sure of that though in her urgency and despair, her mind was a blur and she just could not figure out how it worked and what made her so sure.

But she started telling her story anyway. Once she started, it became more and more difficult to hold anything back. It took her all of 99 days to recount the story of her entire life to her best friend. It was a story that should never have been written. Yet she told it as though everything really happened.

Kuritonbo nodded to show she was listening and raised her hand to touch Yanagi's cheek when the latter stopped for catch her breath, to catch up to the days, the stories she still had to tell. Each time she began a new story, or turned the page to reveal an entirely new chapter of her life, Kuritonbo sensed fear in her voice as though she was afraid that the world might write her off before she had time to finish her tale.

Some stories were easier to tell than others. Yanagi remembered some days more clearly while the foggy, obscure ones took her full days to recount. She didn't always go in sequence and she began with her most memorable memory. There were holes here and there that she only remembered to fill in a couple of days or sometimes even weeks later.

"Do you know? He kept it!"

"What do you mean? What did he keep?"

Yanagi blinked twice. Suddenly realizing that it was indeed a valid question. "Hmm…What did he actually keep? What was it again? And what were we talking about just now?" She stared up at Kuritonbo, trying to find an answer in her large purple eyes. But those eyes only gazed back at her with heartbroken tenderness.

But then, like steam, the confusion dissipated and everything that stood behind it slowly came back into focus.

"The stick figurine...The one I made as I waited for him to come meet me..." Yanagi bowed her head and looked down at her empty palms staring back up at her.

Her eyes filled with sadness, but her listener laughed, as if it were a mistake anyone might make. Yet after another blunder, she adopted a much slower pace and grew more cautious of the words that came out of her mouth. She paused more often, stopping to ask Kuritonbo a question to confirm the integrity of her memory.

"Oh, I see..." she would say when her friend reminded her how it really went.

She was silent for days when she finally came to the end. After she uttered her last words, she felt as though someone had tied a wet, warm towel around her mouth, and pressed a glass fishbowl over her head. She couldn't see or speak. Kuritonbo held her hand and occasionally reached out for her fingers to lightly skim over her cheeks. Her eyelids grew heavier, and it got more difficult to breathe.

She knew the time had come when she caught the scent of jasmine petals floating around the air.

She closed her eyes.

Thank you so much for reading~ Next chapter is going to be the last one ^_^