An Unhappy Ending
After it was all done and gone, Ichigo just...changed one day.
He wouldn't let them in his room. He occasionally let Yuzu clean it but otherwise he didn't like them in there at all. It went beyond the need for privacy and there was a certain way that Ichigo always paused in front the door before he pushed it open slowly, as if someone else might have been inside the room already.
He started collecting all old things that Karin and Yuzu didn't need or use anymore. Like old dresses, clothes they wouldn't wear, and the extra pair of sandals in Yuzu's closet she never got around to returning. The small box of half-used half-forgotten crayons that Yuzu had pushed off in the corner of the living room, the old stuffed animals going from Yuzu's closet to his, the rarely used extra blanket that they saved for when a guest slept over and the...
... absolute - broken - look in his eyes.
They couldn't do anything about it. He walked through the day normally, smiled, laughed, got angry, but there was always the sense he was -missing- something. Some part of him that used to be there but was gone now, and it left him feeling indefinitely lonely.
Karin knew, Yuzu knew, their father knew – it washed off him in waves. But they couldn't fix him because they didn't know what was wrong and he wasn't willing to talk about it. None of his friends would explain it to them either.
His friends knew. Chad, Inoue, Ishida...they knew because they carried the same sense of loss with them, just to not as much as a degree as Ichigo.
They asked them once, but they just shook their heads and pretended that they didn't know what they were asking about. When Karin tried to pursue it further by asking about maybe it had something to do with the visions she used to see of Ichigo in a black robe – Chad didn't answer, Inoue looked away, and Ishida became very silently angry.
Ichigo was broken but what he needed wasn't anything they could give him. That was all they could get out of the three teenagers before they left. There was nothing they could do for him, all they could do was wait and hope that all wounds did heal with time.
They asked how long would it take for him to get better.
Chad walked out the door after putting on his shoes, Ishida turned away and left sharply, and Inoue stood on their doorstep to look at them, and gave them a deep bow with a sad, sad smile.
Forever was a long time.
. : end : .