"What're you doing here?" Ichigo says, staring at her as if he's not quite convinced she's actually there.

"I didn't realize," Rukia says quietly. "On the plane…"

He lowers his eyes.

"I didn't realize," she says again. "I'm so sorry."

He nods at the stone bench a few feet away, the rough surface still damp from the earlier rain. They walk over together, heads bowed, the mournful sound of an organ starting up inside the church. Just as she's about to sit, Ichigo motions for her to wait, then whips his jacket off and lays it on the bench.

"Your dress," he says by way of explanation, and Rukia glances down at herself, frowning at the purple silk as if she's never seen it before.

Something about the gesture cracks her heart open further, the idea that he'd think of something so trivial at a time like this; doesn't he know she couldn't care less about the stupid dress? That she'd gladly curl up on the grass for him, make a bed out of the dirt?

Unable to find the words to refuse him, she sits down, brushing her fingers along the soft folds of his jacket. Ichigo stands above her, rolling up first one sleeve and then the other, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the garden.

"Do you need to get back?" she asks, and he shrugs, leaving a few inches between them as he joins her on the bench.

"Probably," he says, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

But he doesn't move, and after a moment Rukia finds herself pitched forward as well, both of them studying the grass at their feet with unnatural intensity. She feels she probably owes him some sort of explanation for showing up here, but he doesn't ask for one, so they just remain there like that, the silence stretching between them.

Back home in Karakura, there's a bird bath just outside her kitchen window, which Rukia used to look out at while doing the dishes. The most frequent visitors were a pair of sparrows who used to fight for their turn, one hopping around the edge and chirping loudly as the other bathed, and then vice versa. Occasionally one would dart at the other, and both would flap their wings and lurch backward again, making ripples in the water. But although they generally spent the entire time squabbling, they always arrived together, and they always left together.

One morning she was surprised to see only one of the birds. It landed lightly on the stone lip of the bath and danced around the edge without touching the water, rotating its rounded head this way and that with a sense of bewilderment so pitiful that Rukia had leaned to the window and peered up at the sky, though she knew it would be empty.

There's something of that in Ichigo now, a reckless confusion that makes him seem more lost than sad. Rukia's never been this close to death before. The only three missing branches of her own family tree belong to grandparents who died before she was born, or when she was too little to mark their absence. Somehow, she'd always expected this sort of grief to resemble something from a movie, all streaming tears and choking sobs. But here in this garden, there's no shaking of fists at the sky; nobody has fallen to their knees, and nobody is cursing the heavens.

Instead, Ichigo looks like he might throw up. There's a grayish tinge to his face, a lack of color that's all the more startling against his dark suit, and he blinks at her without expression. His eyes have a wounded look, like he's been hurt somewhere but can't quite locate the source of the pain, and he pulls in a ragged breath.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you," he says eventually.

"No," Rukia says, shaking her head. "I'm sorry I just assumed…."

They fall quiet again.

After a moment, Ichigo sighs. "This is a little weird, right?"

"Which part?"

"I don't know," he says with a small smile. "You showing up at my father's funeral?"

"Oh," she says. "That."

He reaches down and yanks a few blades of grass from the ground, tearing at them absently.

"Really, though, it's the whole thing. I think maybe they had it right, turning it into a celebration. Because this kind of thing"—he jerks his chin in the direction of the church—"this kind of thing is completely mad."

Beside him, Rukia picks at the hem of her dress, unsure what to say.

"Not that there'd be much to celebrate anyway," he says bitterly, letting the pieces of grass flutter back to the ground. "He was a complete arse. No use pretending otherwise now."

Rukia looks up in surprise, but Ichigo seems relieved.

"I've been thinking that all morning," he says. "For the last eighteen years, really." He looks at her and smiles. "You're sort of dangerous, you know?"

She stares at him. "Me?"

"Yeah," he says, sitting back. "I'm way too honest with you."

"How did it happen?" She asks quietly, but Ichigo doesn't answer; he doesn't even look at her.

After a moment he clears his throat. "How was the wedding?"

"What?"

"The wedding. How did it go?"

She shrugs. "Fine."

"Come on," he says with a pleading look, and Rukia sighs.

"Turns out, She's nice," she offers, folding her hands in her lap. "Annoyingly nice."

Ichigo grins, looking more like the version of himself she met on the plane. "What about your dad?"

"He seems happy," she tells him, her voice thick. She remembers the book, and reaches for the bag beside her. "I didn't return it."

He glances over, his eyes coming to rest on the cover.

"I read a little on the way over," she says. "It's actually kind of good."

Ichigo reaches for it, thumbing the pages as he'd done on the plane. "How'd you find me, anyway?"

"Someone was talking about a funeral in Shinjuku," she says, and Ichigo flinches at the word funeral. "And I don't know. I just had a feeling."

He nods, gently shutting the book again. "My father had a first edition of this one," he says, his mouth twisting into a frown. "He kept it on a high shelf in his study, and I remember always staring up at it as a kid, knowing it was worth a lot"

He hands the book back to Rukia, who hugs it to her chest, waiting for him to continue.

"I always thought it was only worth something to him for the wrong reasons," he says, his voice softer now. "I never saw him reading anything but legal briefs. But every once in a while, completely out of the blue, he'd quote some passage." He laughs, a humorless sound. "It was so out of character. Like a singing butcher or something. A tap-dancing accountant."

"Maybe he wasn't what you thought…."

Ichigo looks at her sharply. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"I don't want to talk about him," he says, his eyes flashing. He rubs at his forehead, then rakes a hand through his hair. A breeze bends the grass at their feet, lifting the heavy air from their shoulders. From inside the church, the music from the organ endsabruptly, as if it's been interrupted.

"You say you can be honest with me?" Rukia asks after a moment, he twists to look at her. "Fine. Then talk to me. Be honest."

"About what?"

"Anything you want."

To her surprise, he kisses her then. Not like the kiss at the airport, which was soft and sweet and full of farewell. This kiss is something more urgent, something more desperate; he presses his lips hard against hers, and she closes her eyes and leans in, kissing him back until, just as suddenly, he breaks away again, and they sit there, staring at each other.

"That's not what I meant," Rukia says, pulling away and Ichigo gives her a crooked smile.

"You said to be honest. That was the most honest thing I've done all day."

"I meant about your dad," she says, though in spite of herself, she can feel the color rising to her cheeks. "Maybe it'll help to talk about it. If you just—"

"What? Say that I miss him? That this is the worst day of my life?" He stands abruptly and, for a brief and frightening moment, Rukia thinks he's going to walk away. But instead, he begins pacing back and forth in front of the bench, tall and lean and handsome in his shirtsleeves. He pauses, spinning to face her, and she can see the anger scrawled across his face.

"Look, today? This week? Everything about it has been fake. You think your dad is so awful for what he did? At least your dad was honest. Your dad had the guts not to stick around. And I know that feeling, too, but from what it sounds like, he's happy and your mom's happy, and so you're all better off in the end anyway."

All except me, she thinks, but she remains quiet . Ichigo begins to walk again, and her eyes follow his back and forth and back and forth.

"But my dad? He cheated on my mom for years. Your dad had one affair, and that turned into love, right? It turned into marriage. It was out in the open, and it set you all free. Mine had about a dozen affairs, maybe more, and the worst part is, we all knew. And nobody talked about it. Somewhere along the line, someone made the decision that we'd all just be quietly miserable, and so that's what we did. But we knew," he says, his shoulders sagging. "We knew."

"Ichigo," she stands and walks towards him, but he shakes his head.

"So no," he says with a little shrug. "I don't want to talk about my dad. He was a jerk, not just because of the affairs, but in a million other ways, too. And I've spent my whole life pretending it's fine, for my mother's sake. But now he's gone, and I'm done pretending." His hands are balled into fists at his sides, and his mouth is pressed into a thin line.

Above them the sky has gone flat and gray again and droplets of rain starts to fall.

"Is that honest enough for you?"

''Ichigo," she says again,

"It's fine," he says. "I'm fine."

From a distance comes the sound of his name being called, and a moment later a girl with long orange hair appears at the gate. She can't be much older than Rukia, but there's a confidence to her, a sense of ease that makes Rukia feel immediately disheveled by comparison.

The girl stops short when sees them, clearly surprised.

"It's almost time, Kurosaki-kun," she says. "The procession's about ready to leave."

Ichigo's eyes are still on Rukia. "One minute," he says without looking away, and the girl hesitates, like she might be about to say something more, but then turns around again with a small shrug.

When she's gone, Rukia forces herself to meet Ichigo's eyes again. Something about the girl's arrival has broken the spell of the garden, and now she's aware of the voices beyond the hedge, of the car doors slamming, of a dog barking in the distance.

Still, he doesn't move.

"I'm sorry," Rukia says softly. "I shouldn't have come."

"No," Ichigo says, and she blinks at him, straining to hear the words inside that word, beneath it or around it: Don't go or Please stay or I'm sorry, too.

But all he says is: "It's okay."

She shifts from one foot to the other, her heels sinking into the soft dirt. "I should go," she says, but her eyes say I'm trying, and her hands, trembling in an effort not to reach out, say Please.

"Right," he says. "Me, too."

Neither of them moves, and Rukia realizes she's holding her breath.

''Ask me to stay.''

"Good to see you again," he says stiffly, and to her dismay, he holds out a hand. She takes it, and they hover there like that, halfway between a grip and a shake, their knotted palms swaying between them until Ichigo finally lets go.

"Good luck," she says, though with what, she's not entirely sure.

"Thanks," he says with a nod. He reaches for his jacket and slings it over his shoulder without bothering to brush it off. As he turns to cross the garden, Rukia's stomach churns. She closes her eyes against the flood of words that never reached her, all those things left unsaid.

And when she opens them again, he's gone.

Her purse is still on the bench, and as she moves to pick it up again she finds herself sinking down onto the damp stone. She shouldn't have come. That much is clear to her now.

She reaches beside her for the copy of Our Mutual Friend and leafs through it absently. When it opens to one of the dog-eared pages, she notices that the corner of the fold reaches halfway down the page like an arrow, its point landing at the top of a line of dialogue: "No one is useless in this world," it reads, "who lightens the burden of it for any one else."

A few minutes later, when she makes her way back past the church, she can see the family still huddled in the open doorway. Ichigo's back is to her, his jacket still resting on his shoulder, and the girl, the one who discovered them, stands just beside him. There's something protective about the way her hand rests on his elbow, and the sight of it makes Rukia walk a bit faster, her cheeks reddening without her quite understanding why. She hurries snd past them.

At the last moment, almost as an afterthought, she places the book on the hood of the car in front. And then, before anyone can stop her, she takes off down the road again.

-x-

Rukia realizes she left the wedding invitation inside the book, and though she knows the hotel is near the church and therefore somewhere in the neighborhood, she can't for the life of her remember the name. But when she flips open her phone to call her dad, she notices there's a message, and even before punching in her password she knows it must be from Mom. She doesn't even bother listening, dialing her back right away instead, not wanting to risk missing her yet again.

But she does.

Once more it goes to voice mail, and she sighs. All she wants is to talk to Mom, to tell her about Dad, about Ichigo and his father, about how this whole trip has been one big mistake.

All she wants is to pretend the last couple of hours never happened. There's a lump in her throat as big as a fist when she thinks of the way Ichigo left her there in the garden, the way those eyes of his—which had studied her so intently on the plane—had been focused on the ground instead.

And that girl. She's absolutely certain it was his ex-girlfriend—the casual way she'd sought him out, the comforting hand on his arm. The only thing she's not certain about is the ex part. There was something so possessive about the way she looked at him, like she was laying claim to him even from a distance.

Rukia slumps against the side of a telephone booth, cringing at how silly she must have seemed, seeking him out in the garden like that. She tries not to imagine what they must be saying about her now, but the possibilities seep into her thoughts anyway: Ichigo shrugging in answer to the girl's question, identifying Rukia as some girl he met on the plane.

All morning she'd been carrying with her the memory of the previous night, the thought of Ichigo acting as a shield against the day, but now it's all been ruined. Even the memory of that last kiss isn't enough to comfort her. Because she'll probably never see him again, and the way they parted is enough to make her want to curl up in a little ball right here on the street corner.

The phone begins to ring in her hand, and she looks down to see Dad's number on the screen.

"Where are you?" he asks when she picks up, and she looks left and then right down the street.

"I'm almost there," she says, not entirely sure where exactly there is.

"Where you have been?" he asks, and the way he says it, his voice tight, Rukia can tell he's furious. For the millionth time today she wishes she could just go home, but she still has the reception to get through, and a dance with her angry father, everyone staring at them; she still has to wish the couple well and suffer through the cake and then spend seven hours traveling back beside someone who will not draw her a Rabbit on a napkin, who will not try to tease her, who will not try to kiss her by the bathrooms.

"I had to go see a friend," she explains, and He sighs.

"Your timing could have been better, Rukia."

"I know."

"I was worried," he admits, and she can hear the harshness in his voice beginning to subside.

Somehow, she'd been so focused on getting to Ichigo that it hadn't really occurred to her that Dad might be concerned. Angry, yes; but worried? It's been so long since he played the role of anxious parent, and besides, he's in the middle of his own wedding. But now she can see how her leaving might have frightened him, and she finds herself softening, too.

"I wasn't thinking," she says. "I'm sorry."

"How long till you get here?"

"Not long," she says. "Not long at all."

He sighs again. "Good."

"But Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you remind me where I'm going?"

Ten minutes later, with the help of his directions, Rukia finds herself in the lobby of the Hotel. When she catches sight of herself in one of the mirrors hanging behind the front desk, Rukia quickly lowers her eyes again. Her fellow bridesmaids will be disappointed when they see that their hard work from earlier has been ruined; her dress is so wrinkled it looks like she's been carrying it around in her purse all day, and her hair—which had been so perfectly styled—is now coming undone, stray wisps falling across her face, the bun in the back sagging badly.

The man behind the desk finishes a phone call, replacing the receiver with a practiced flick of his wrist, and then turns to Rukia.

"May I help you, Miss?"

"I'm looking for the Kuchiki wedding," she says, and he glances down at the desk.

"I'm afraid that hasn't yet begun," he tells her "It will be held in the Ballroom at six o'clock sharp."

"Right," Rukia says. "But I'm actually just looking for the groom now."

"Ah, certainly," he says, ringing up to the room and murmuring into the phone before setting it down again and giving Rukia a nod. "Suite two fortyeight. They're expecting you."

"I bet they are," she says, heading toward the elevators.

When she knocks on the door to the suite, she's so busy preparing herself for Dad's disapproving frown that she's a bit surprised to find Rangiku on the other side instead. Not that there's a lack of disapproval there, either.

"What happened to you?" she asks, her eyes traveling all the way down to Hadley's shoes before snapping back up again. "Did you run a marathon or something?"

"It's hot out," Rukia explains, glancing down aher dress helplessly. Rangiku takes a sip of champagne from a glass wreathed in lipstick marks, surveying the damage from over the rim.

"I suppose we'll probably need to sort you out again before the reception," Rangiku says with a sigh, and Rukia nods gratefully as her phone—which she's still clutching in one sweaty hand—begins to ring. When she glances at the name lit up on the screen, she realizes it's Dad, probably wondering what's taking her so long.

Rangiku steps aside like the bouncer at some exclusive club, ushering Rukia inside. "We don't have much time before the reception," she's saying, and Rukia can't help grinning as she closes the door behind her.

"What time does that start again?"

Rangiku rolls her eyes, not even bothering to dignify this with a response, and then retreats back into the room, arranging herself carefully on one of the chairs in her wrinkle-free dress.

-x-

Rukia heads straight for the small sitting room off to one side, which links the bedroom to the rest of the suite. Inside, she finds her dad and a few other people crowded around a laptop computer. His new wife is seated before it, her wedding dress pooled all around her and though Rukia can't see the screen from where she's standing, it's clear that his is a show-and-tell of sorts.

For a moment she considers ducking back out again. She doesn't want to see photos of them , or making funny faces on a train or whatever they've been doing.

She doesn't need pictures to know that she's not part of his life anymore.

But he's the first to notice her standing there, her dad, and though Rukia is ready for any number of reactions—anger that she left, annoyance that she's late, relief that she's okay—what she isn't prepared for is this: something behind his eyes laid bare at the sight of her, a look like recognition, like an apology.

And right then, right there, she wishes for things to be different. Not in the way she's been wishing for months now, not a bitter, twisted sort of wish, but the kind of wish you make with your whole heart. Rukia didn't know it was possible to miss someone who's only a few feet away, but there it is: She misses him so much it nearly flattens her. Because all of a sudden it all seems so horribly senseless, how much time she's spent trying to push him out of her life. Seeing him now, she can't help but think of Ichigo's father, about how there are so many worse ways to lose somebody, things far more permanent, things that can cut so much deeper.

A glass breaks in the adjacent room and Rukia flinches. Everyone in the sitting area is looking at her now, and the floral-patterned walls seem much too close.

This time, when she glances in Dad's direction, something in the look on her face is enough to make him stand.

"You okay,?" he asks, his head tilted to one side.

All she means to do is shake her head; at most, maybe shrug. But to her surprise, a sob rises in her throat, breaking over her like a wave. She can feel her face begin to crumple and the first tears prick the backs of her eyes.

It's not about his new wife or the others in the room; for once, it's not even her dad. It's the day behind her, the whole strange and surprising day. Never has any period of time seemed so unending. And though she knows it's nothing but a collection of minutes, all of them strung together like popcorn on a tree, she can see now how easily they become hours, how quickly the months might have turned to years in just the same way, how close she'd come to losing something so important to the unrelenting movement of time.

"Rukia?" Dad says, setting his glass down as he takes a step in her direction. "What happened?"

She's crying in earnest now, propped up by the doorframe, and when she feels the first tear fall, she thinks—ridiculously—of Rangiku, and how it's one more thing they'll have to worry about when trying to fix her again.

"Hey," Dad says when he's by her side, a strong hand on her shoulder.

"Sorry," she says. "It's just been a really long day."

"Right," he says, and she can almost see the idea occurring to him, the light going on behind his eyes. "Right," he says again. " maybe we should watch Chappy the Rabbit again."

Rukia smiles. "yeah we should,"

A/N:

Okay, Its not Isshin.. I'm absolutely sure! heh..

and two more chaps, left..:D