Notes:
After 3 months of hibernation... I'm BACK!
I hope you guys have not given up on me!
And Happy Lunar New Year to all the Chinese out there! Which explains why I have time to finally just sit down and write since it's the new year's holiday.
And yes, due to recent changes in policy in FanfictionDOTnet that a kind soul has informed me of, I have removed all "Thanks to Reviewers" Section. I apologise.
Anyway, please please please, read and enjoy!
Encounter :: Doubt :: Revelation
"Yo."
"Renji." Neither Ichigo's face nor voice revealed any sign of surprise.
Renji's arms remained crossed as he continued leaning against the tree, secretly disappointed that Ichigo had failed to give a more energized response. In fact, he looked disinterested in Renji altogether.
"What ya doing here?" His voice was still that of lassitude.
"Rukia."
"Did something happen to her?"
A sudden spark of life.
"No," Renji said. "She's fine."
"Then what do you want?" The spark died instantly, as Ichigo's face immediately reverted back to impassivity. He turned away from Renji and kicked a stray stone out of the way as he continued walking.
Renji's face twitched, slightly put off by Ichigo's unresponsive behavior. But he reminded himself that he was not here to pick a fight with the kid. "Do you want her back?"
He froze momentarily, apparently caught off guard by his question. Renji smirked inwardly, pleased at the impact his question had on him, but was quickly annoyed when Ichigo stuck both his hands into his pockets and continued on his way in a blatant display of unconcern. But the stiffness in Ichigo's arms was evidence enough that it was just a poorly disguised act of nonchalance.
Renji grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him back by a rough jerk. "Do you want Rukia back?"
"Why would I?" There was a forced tone of mockery in his voice as he brushed Renji's hand away from his shoulder. However, the scorn was directed, not at Renji, but at himself. It was a painful bitterness that Renji could not stand seeing in this man.
"I was watching you today."
There was a flash of anger, but it quickly dissolved.
"Che. Whatever."
Avoidance.
"Do you want her to come back?" Renji was not a patient man and his patience was starting to wear thin.
"She doesn't want to come back." His voice was hard, nearly angry, but mostly sad. Renji would not claim to know him very well, but he knew him enough to know that the Kurosaki Ichigo he knew did not speak with such a fatalistic tone in his voice.
"I'm asking what you want."
"Leave me alone."
Renji grabbed Ichigo by his collar, slamming him against the bark of the tree. "DO. YOU. WANT. HER. BACK!"
"Let go."
Renji hated that resigned look in his eyes. He wanted that annoying contempt, that unwavering determination, that unbridled craziness to come back into his eyes. Those eyes that Renji saw, those passionate eyes that swore to save Rukia even if it meant losing his own life. Somewhere along those few weeks, that fire in his eyes had totally vanished. He now barely resembled the shell of the person that Renji had lost so completely to.
"Do you…"
Suddenly, a punch connected with the sides of Renji's face and sent him staggering a few steps back. Renji grinned, brushing the blood away from the corner of his mouth with his thumb.
"You're losing your touch, Kurosaki."
"And look who's talking."
Renji continued grinning. Perhaps he was not talking to a zombie after all. "I'll ask again. Do you want Kuchiki Rukia to come back?"
"No." There was a slight hesitation in his voice.
"No? After all the shit you've gone through for her?" Renji was not about to let Ichigo off with just some kind of lousy act.
"I owe her."
"You owe her?"
"Yes."
"Yes?"
"It was the least I could do, to… protect her."
"Protection. That's all? A bloody obligation to protect her?"
"YES! STOP REPEATING WHAT I SAID! I owe her okay! I'm not going to let her die because of me! I'm not that huge a bastard! I had to… I had to protect her… that's all there is to it."
Renji scoffed. "You're a damn horrible liar, do you know that?"
"What the hell do you want?"
Renji grabbed Ichigo's shirt, pulling him in and closing the distance till Renji was practically yelling right into his face. "I just want the bloody truth from you! Do you want her back?"
"She doesn't want to come back." It was that same annoying fatalistic tone again.
"Do you want her back?" He repeated.
"She wants to stay in Soul Society."
"Stop telling me what she wants."
"SHE WANTS TO STAY!" Ichigo shoved him away. "Everything she has is over there! Byakuya's there. Her life's there. Her memories' there…"
"Shut up Kurosaki!" Renji knocked Ichigo to the ground and kneeling over him, he shook him violently by the collar. "What do you want? I'm asking what the hell YOU want, WHAT YOU WANT!"
Ichigo threw his hand up, catching Renji by the jaw with the heel of his hand. And grabbing his belt simultaneously, Ichigo threw Renji off and pinned him firmly on the ground with a hand pressed against his neck, their positions now exchanged.
"WHAT THE BLOODY HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM!" With a growl of agitation, Ichigo released Renji and stood back up. "Stop asking me this kind of stupid questions! She's belongs there okay? Her life's there! She's happy there!"
"What if I tell you she's not?"
"WHAT!" Ichigo responded in apparent irritation, obviously not hearing what Renji had just said as he bent over to pick up his school bag.
"I said," Renji's voice was oddly quiet and it caught Ichigo's attention. "What if," He calmly got up and brushed his clothes clean, "I tell you she's not?"
"What?" Ichigo's voice softened and his frown deepened. It seemed that this time, he heard Renji fine. "She's not…"
"I'll be at Urahara's tonight." He knew that Ichigo understood what he meant. That was enough. And it was not even like he was particularly good with words anyway.
"But…"
"Bye…" Renji strutted off, waving the back of his hand to Ichigo, a deliberate refusal to answer him.
"And the rest is up to you now, Kurosaki," Renji said more to himself than to anyone else, as he listened to Ichigo walk off in the other direction. Now, he could only hope that Ichigo was a little more honest to his own feelings than that other pint-sized woman was, because in the end, there was only so much he could do for them.
He sighed.
Dealing with those two people was way too draining.
-
- - -
-
"I'm home." Ichigo wearily took off his shoes and placed them at the shoe rack, neatly alongside the rest of his family's footwear.
"Welcome home!" Yuzu greeted him cheerily, popping her head out from the kitchen door. She briefly surveyed him with a tiny frown. "Onii-chan, your uniform's dirty. Did you get into a fight?"
Ichigo waved a dismissive hand which Yuzu had long learned to accept without question. As he watched Yuzu disappear back to the kitchen, he noticed that his idiotic father was once again enthusiastically changing his wife's portrait on the wall. It was a routine thing that his father did, replacing one flashy poster after another and after another and after another.
He hesitated, but he finally spoke. "Dad."
His father stopped, peering at Ichigo warily through the corner of his eyes and his lips curled downwards in an annoying look of suspicion. Ichigo's eye twitched involuntarily as he resisted the urge replace his pending question with a kick into his father's infuriating face.
"How was it…" A momentary hiatus. "…with Mom?"
Isshin smirked and a low, cackle-like sound escaped from him. "Ah, you're finally interested in our love story?"
"NO!" His eyes widened, afraid that his father was going to switch into his nonsensical babbling mode again, in which there would be no stopping him once he began. More like interested in how you handled Mom's death…but… It had been so many years and it just seemed wrong to dig up the past now.
Isshin bounced right into his hyperactive self and plastered himself to the poster and began yelling at the top of his whiney voice. "OH MASAKI! Our son's all concerned about Daddy! What should I tell him, Masaki? Should I tell him the time I caused a blackout in a departmental center? Or the time I set fire to your friend's house? Or the time…"
Ichigo rolled his eyes and shutting out his father's voice, he proceeded to head upstairs. He started to wonder what had possessed him to ask his father a question in such seriousness.
"You know, Ichigo…"
There was an unexpected change in tone and Ichigo stopped.
"All those years with her, my feet had never touched the ground."
There was such an affectionate tone to the way he spoke, and yet it held such ruefulness, such a deep sense of sadness that Ichigo would have never believed would come out from his own father's voice if he had not heard it himself. Slowly, he took two steps down back to the ground floor.
His father continued securing the poster on the wall carefully, pressing his fingers firmly along the sides of the picture to smooth out any creases. His fingers lingered at the corner of the poster, with a tender look in his eyes and an invisible smile on his face.At that moment, Ichigo saw the sides of his father that he had never before been allowed to see, or perhaps had just never stopped long enough to observe. It was the uncloaked vulnerability that he had never bared. It was the unnoticed depths of unwavering love for his wife. And it was the quiet mourning for a love long lost. Ichigo felt the pangs of guilt, partly the guilt for being so blind, but mostly for the part that all these pain was caused by him, even if his father had told him otherwise.
Six years. No, it was nearly six and a half years now. For six and a half years, his father had hidden his suffering by playing the fool.
And it took Ichigo six and a half years to realize that. Because he had chosen to forget, to ignore and to pretend.
Perhaps he was the real fool here.
"Do you miss Mom?"
"Everyday son, everyday…"
Such stark veracity. Unnerving in its simplicity yet exalting in its beauty.
Silence fell between the father and son.It was not the sort of uncomfortable silence in any way, but it was immensely heavy, as Ichigo watched how his fathercontinued to gaze at his late wife's picture quietly.
"Remember, Ichigo. Don't be wishy-washy. Sorrow's a pretty cool thing to shoulder, but you're still too young for it."
It was those words again, those words he had said so coolly on that rainy day, his back facing him, with a cigarette in his hand, in front of the grave of the woman he loved. Those strong words that put Ichigo's heart at ease in a strange way.
"Dad…" Whenever his father spoke to him the way a father probably should, he would never look at him in the eye. Ichigo used to believe that it was because his father blamed him a little but he finally understood. His father just wanted to hide that little bit of softness to himself, that little bit of sadness that he did not want others to see, that little bit of love that would never die.
"Dinner's at seven. Don't make me yell for you to come down."
Staring at the back of his father as he vanished into the kitchen, Ichigo became aware, consciously for the first time, how broad and how dependable his father's shoulders were. His father was the one who was carrying the burdens of the family, carrying the past that he could never change and carrying the unspoken sorrow that ran so deep. He shouldered it all.
Ichigo realized that he was really such a child at times.
Entering his room, Ichigo threw his bag against the wall and lay down on his bed, staring blankly into the ceiling of his unlit room. His lids closed, and suddenly, all he wanted to do for that moment, was to just cry like he was nine again.
But his eyes remained dry.
And his heart had never felt heavier.
- YL -
Post-Chapter Notes:
Sentimental Isshin here! I saw the change in poster in chapter 199, so I had to write it in. I wonder if sentimental Isshin would ever appear in the manga... I LOVE ISSHIN!
