A/N: Okay, this is an extra long chapter seeing that I probably won't have time to update in a long while.

I feel utterly drained after writing this chapter that I can't supply much of an author's note. Though I assure you, the next chapter would be the far more interesting.

Please enjoy.

Senna once told Ichigo that when sleeping beside someone, if you match your breath to theirs, you could feel their deepest loneliness, and the exhaustion that they themselves do not even know.

Waking up beside him in the depth of the night, she once said, was as if holding her breath under water that was bone-chillingly cold. She would float in that solid darkness without a single idea of who or were she was. Calling up a frantic flurry of memories to prove to herself that she truly had existed, Senna could clearly see all that had happened that day. The sight of the first light of morning on the wall when she woke up, a hilarious scene on T.V., and Ichigo's face as she bid him good night, the images would run before he eyes like a meaningless movie, her mind incapable of deciphering how one led to the other.

Perhaps it was then that she understood that the darkness was only big enough for one person.

It was only when Rukia was safely on the other side of her apartment door, she leaned limply against the foyer wall. After a harsh sigh came the reaction that was long overdue.

Woodenly, she got up to put a kettle of water on the stove in the vain attempt to regain some composure. It was utterly humiliating. Everything she had worked for to be sure that she rose above such foolishness, all fell away at a single glance. What had she been doing all these years? Going through school and working for as long as she could remember, Rukia managed to eliminate all concern of past or future and kept herself a convenient distance away. But just like a kite that had been allowed to fly too high, she had finally lost sight of herself.

Renji's heart hammered at the sound of the kettle's whistle, piercing even from where he stood outside the apartment. He knocked again, harder, on the cold door, as the sound grew even sharper. But there was no answer. Deciding that the situation warranted it, he gingerly inserted the key that Rukia had given him a few days earlier as an act of propriety.

Everything was in its proper place other than the air that was swirling with steam, Renji's hanging apprehensive loosened slightly at the fact. Nevertheless, there was an eerie silence amidst the shrilling whistle that was threatening dangerously. Perhaps it was the distraction brought on by the noise, he expected to turn the corner and find Rukia in a bloody mess somewhere.

Instead, he only found her on the kitchen floor, crumpled like a bird that remembered her broken wings in mid flight.

I hope that we never cross paths again, Rukia, it is time for you to find your share in life.

Ichigo mused as he stepped onto the familiar path home, even it could no longer be quite said so. It was only seeing her through the shop window he realized that there was really no way back to the past. Far too many people and far too much time had come between them, to the point where neither could recognize the other. Better to never meet again than to see each other in adulthood and its ugliness.

At this point in his thoughts, he convinced himself to stop pursuing the matter. It really was as simple as that.

The first thing that caught his eye as Ichigo walked near the Kurosaki clinic and home was a spot of white flapping in the wind. It, apparently, was a sign haphazardly taped to the clinic door, announcing Dr. Kurosaki and wife's impromptu trip to Osaka. The silly doodle at the corner of the page made it without a doubt by Isshin's hand. Maybe it was the best, for the moment he was not capable of the sentimentalities of seeing them again.

Ichigo was surprised that his keys still fitted to the front door. The pair of keys somehow found their way to his sole luggage from ten years ago, and remained there until he found them when scouring through his flat before departure. Memory and reality seemed to overlap into the simple act of turning the key and hearing the familiar click. Standing on the doorstep at that moment made his time away seem like a mere detour, and he was coming back home at the end of the day.

His footsteps rang loudly in the empty space, feeling as he was intruding on a family not his own. The tips of his fingers grazed the walls as he walked down the corridor, could not help but smile at the familiar sensation. It had been quite a while since his heart had been jarred so by the quiet nostalgia. Ichigo's smile widened as he found the pencil markings by the kitchen door. He traced each line to the names written beside it, remembering his excitement and Rukia's scowl every time Isshin called up the children to see how much they had grown. His lines took up most of the wall, each separated by at least several inches, compared to which Rukia's were pitifully bunched in a small cluster below.

He was glad to be home. Yes, he sincerely thought so.

Suddenly the phone rang, the sound alien to the intimacy of his thoughts. Ichigo turned around and was about to pick up the receiver before he remembered that he was no longer in his London flat. Awkwardly he let his arm drop, admitting that he was no more than a stranger now.

As the phone sounded relentlessly, he would only stand in the middle of the kitchen wondering who it might be. When the voice message came on with a click, he was glad that he did not answer the call as Renji's hurried voice flooded the room.

"Rukia's in the hospital--" His words bursted out at the first opportunity.

Ichigo's head snapped up and stared at the phone as if at Renji himself, but from his voice it was not hard to see the man's anxious face. He took a step closer to the answering machine, waiting for his words.

"I found her in her apartment. She's fine for the time being," Renji's rapid words were punctuated by an exhausted sigh, "she's at the Ishida hospital. Please, come."

Ichigo was ashamed to admit that he had hesitated for a moment as to whether to go see Rukia. He had grown comfortable with the distance he had kept from the memories all those years ago, to leave himself bare for such a complication now would be foolish at the least. But as he looked around the empty house, with its occupants all gone their separate ways, he chuckled ruefully at such a pathetic thought. The idea of family had grown so distant that it took him a moment to remember.

Rukia was his sister, and he was her brother.

The house was once again left in a stagnant silence with a bang of the front door.

Looking out the window at the darkened sky, Rukia enjoyed the brief moment unburdened by the knowledge of whom or where she was. Gradually the smell of antiseptics seeped into her consciousness and realized that she was in a hospital. Her memories came up blank as to how she arrived there, but the sight of Renji's familiar jacket on a chair beside the bed was reassuring enough at the moment. She stretched out her hand on it, feeling the lingering heat.

Rukia smiled despite her spinning head, picturing the man who once sat beside her. Did he lean over her with a crease between his brow, running his hand over hers? Or did he just sit there, watching her without the least hint of surprise. However he was, she wanted him to be before her now, her hand running down his face and smoothing the lines of fatigue and worry for her.

Her head piped up hopefully when she heard the familiar footsteps by the door, and was surprised by the fact that how something she had not heard in ten years still could be counted as "familiar".

His name hung in her throat as Rukia watched the man at the ward's door, but somehow she could not bring it to sound. She was amused by the thought that it must have been same for him, seeing his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. As if staring right into the sun, Rukia could not help but averted her eyes from his. The sight of him was just too peculiar. The man before her had no connection with any memories of her past, or any visions for the future. His pale face merely hung in mid-air like an unusual puppet without strings, left behind by time in a stagnant present.

She audibly swallowed down his name and decided to keep her silence, clinging pathetically to the last of her crumbling wall that was ten years thick. The man's face gave no reaction as he walked to her bed and bent down at an angle precarious for his height.

"All these years, still no improvement?" Ichigo studied her small frame that was made even more so under the thick covers, she still looked like a teenager if not for the hard lines that etched down between her eyes. Something sickly radiated from her thinning figure, fading in indistinguishably with the sterile air around them.

Rukia dazed for a moment, unsure of how to reply to his endless ridicule of her height. Having heard it almost everyday during her childhood, to hear it again now made it seem like time decided to resume after the mere pause of a decade.

"You cheated." A transparent curve shaped her lips, "you always took the last piece of pork chop at dinner."

And that, was all they had to say. Some things, one really cannot have a choice in.

If Renji had known what he would see when he stepped into the room, he would be awe of his never failing ability to be untimely in all senses of the word. Rukia was always the first to notice the slight change in the air, and found him by the door followed by a nurse.

She smiled lightly at his unease, and imperceptibly pushed Ichigo slightly aside. It was only then he allowed himself to walk up to her and let her held up hand tidy his hair, tousled by the countless times that his fingers ran through anxiously.

"Sorry for all the trouble, Renji." She was grateful, for all the years he had spent with her. But that was the problem, the countless shapes gratitude could take on. So he only laid his hand on hers briefly before letting go to allow room for the nurse to take her vitals. Noticing Ichigo's figure by the window, he gestured for him to follow him out to the corridor.

The two men stood wordlessly in the narrow space between the shelves of beddings and medications, eyes resting on anywhere but each other.

"Are you back for the wedding?" Renji finally said, voice strained.

Ichigo was caught without a reaction. He had no been remotely aware of such a thing until he saw her through the shop window. Why he did not, he could only guess it was Rukia's idea.

"I…Who is she marrying to?"

"Me."

At his age, Ichigo felt that hardly anything could surprise him, and this was no exception.

"Thank you, for taking care of her."

Renji never thought he could hear such a thing from the man before him. But ten years was enough time to change many things, so he only gave a nod and turned around to go back to Rukia's room. The other man suddenly said:

"But tonight, please give it to me."

Ichigo first thought that Renji's bark of a laugh was a mocking denial, who continued walking into the ward. However when he appeared at the door again with his jacket in hand and left without a word, it was obvious that he knew better than anyone that ten years was not enough to change all things.

Among which, matters of the heart, for example.

When Ichigo found his way back to Rukia's bedside, she was already fast asleep under the sedatives given to her by the nurse. He settled himself down on the chair, and leaned forward, slowly letting his breath fall in unison with hers.

Living an empty story, he wondered if that was how Senna had felt beside him.