As she sat there trying to focus on Ichigo over the sound of her thundering heart, Rukia's mind traced the journey that had led to her sitting across from him at that moment. This was it, the first time she'd seen him up and about since the Quincy light had lanced down from the sky, and she was determined to answer the question she'd been asking herself for longer than she cared to register: was she actually in love with her best friend?
In the beginning, she had been content to admit to herself that she had, at some point, developed a bit of a schoolgirl crush on him, and that was fine. She could allow herself that, at least. It was a safe little corner that she had partitioned within her mind, away from everything real and dangerous, wherein she could retreat in privacy to harmlessly indulge the idea that her friend managing somehow to sneak himself into her errant thoughts, and sometimes dreams, had a logical reason behind it. One that was more than she had originally wanted to believe, but still, thankfully, less than what she was most afraid of it being.
Later, she would come to realize that, by allowing herself to hold onto that truth—that it was something, but not something worse—she had unintentionally been nurturing the feeling instead of tossing it aside like she now wished she had done, sitting there as she was, becoming warmer with every second spent under his gaze. Her eyes tried to find escape in the tatami mats or the dent Isshin's kicked body had previously made in the wall before he'd left to speak with her brother, needing desperately to avoid looking squarely at a face that she was now frighteningly sure had become dangerously more handsome since she'd last seen it.
The face that was so much like Kaien's that she'd had to hide her initial shock upon seeing it, though she thought she'd done so quite well. She had never considered her former Vice-Captain especially attractive—and, in fact, had considered herself to simply not be the kind of person who paid attention to such aspects of a others—but she realized later that their shared family resemblance had done Ichigo the favour of giving her first impression of him a then-unnoticed positive undertone despite their introduction involving him kicking her in the rear. Then again, her first meeting with Kaien had involved him yelling in her face, so that was a little concerning...
The important element, she reminded herself, was that both had treated her distinctly unlike something by which to be awed. Kaien had won her undying devotion by simply treating her like any other officer—with his own brand of tough love, which, she now saw, he shared with his cousin, Isshin—blissfully reminding her of her days growing up in Rukongai with her friends or palling around with her mostly male Shin'o Academy schoolmates. Up until her sudden adoption into the noble Kuchiki family, Rukia had always been a person who'd been treated, and seen herself, as just another one of her friends, and though she adored her adopted brother, the pedestal on which merely being associated with him had forced her to stand was something uncomfortable for her. Kaien had helped her down from there, even if he'd had to kick the pedestal to do it.
Ichigo, too, had responded to her in a manner uncharacteristic of those select few who could see into the spiritual world. Shinigami were something ominous, often something to be feared, by those unlucky enough to see them. Though they were a positive force in the world, their mysteriousness and folkloric connotations often made normal people just as afraid of them as they'd be of seeing the monsters they hunted. But not Ichigo Kurosaki, who'd immediately cut through the tension on the night of their first encounter by talking to her in his trademark frank manner. Maybe she'd seen more of Kaien in him than what was obvious on the surface, and perhaps that was why she'd seen fit to trust him enough to share her powers with before they'd known one another for even an hour.
At no point in the following days, which saw her disguised as an ordinary high school student, had Rukia noticed the rise of any feelings towards Ichigo. Though, by the time she'd been led back to Soul Society by Byakuya, she was informed that she had come to feel as if she'd known him for years, even though it had been mere weeks, thanks to the intense sense of loss she felt at leaving him bleeding on the pavement. Then he'd risked his life to rescue her, someone he, by all accounts, barely knew who was on the other side of death's divide, and, though she was grateful, she still hadn't had any inkling of feeling anything for him other than deep admiration and friendly respect.
However, she did eventually come to appreciate, in a way that made her laugh at herself, how he'd pitched her to Renji like a baseball immediately after saving her from the phoenix that had nearly been her doom. She'd find herself laughing gratefully at the fact that, rather than treat her like some precious jewel plucked from a dragon's neck, he'd instead found it fit to send her screaming through the air in direct contrast to how he'd just moments before ensured her safety. He'd returned to his own world after that with her heartfelt thanks, but nothing deeper existing between the two of them. At least, that was how it had felt to Rukia at the time, though it would be only a short time later that she'd begin to notice him cropping up in her mind uninvited, and, only shortly after that, she'd resolve to admit to herself that she kind of, sort of, liked him in a way that was only slightly more than friendly. Back when they were unlikely to meet ever again, that had been just fine.
Then they met again.
Keeping with the trend of Rukia being ambushed by thoughts and feelings she didn't know she had about Ichigo until it was too late, it wasn't until their second farewell that her mind was unexpectedly struck by a positively ludicrous thought from out of nowhere. The thought, which came with unwanted visual aids courtesy of her mind's eye, was that she could so easily take a step up onto the air between the two of them to bring their faces closer together, and kiss Ichigo. It was as if his sadly smiling eyes had hypnotized her into hallucinating this event, which seemed so closely adjacent to the realm of possibility that the chances of them stumbling into it together would be the same as one side of a flipped coin landing face-up instead of the other. Just one step, just one look, just one moment was all it would take. And, she'd thought in the instant after she'd seen it play out in her head, it would also be kind of funny. Their reunion had seen Rukia deliver a flying kick to Ichigo's face as punishment for it looking so uncharacteristically pathetic—or so she'd claimed—so, wouldn't it be an amusing button to put on their time as friends if she reversed his fortunes and gave his face a kiss instead, this time as a consequence of it looking uncharacteristically cute? That was something you could kiss your best friend for, right? Just to end things on a lighter note than never being with them again?
Of course, Rukia had never done anything with the flash of embarrassing inspiration. She had been all at once too confused, too nervous, and too respectful of Ichigo to pull something like that on him, and in the end, their goodbye had ended up being almost painfully simple, in a manner that was very in line with the two of them. And that was fine.
Until it wasn't fine anymore.
For Rukia, someone who'd lived 150 years in Soul Society, the seventeen months following their final goodbye had passed as slowly as her entire life twice over. On the first night they'd met, Rukia had willingly offered Ichigo a fraction of her Shinigami powers, only for him to inadvertently take nearly all of it. By the time their sixteenth month apart had crept glacially past her, Rukia was convinced that, on the occasion of their final separation, Ichigo had managed to pull the same trick again, taking with him much more than Rukia's loving, if simple, goodbye. But that was nonsense, for he couldn't possibly have taken that which had begun to ache so much.
When she'd heard of the plan to return Ichigo's lost powers to him and reinstate him as a Deputy Shinigami from her brother, the beating of Rukia's excited heart felt like the first time in over a year that it had worked to fill her with life instead of pain. She'd immediately requested to be among those members of the Gotei Thirteen who would imbue some of their combined powers into a sword to transfer that power into Ichigo. What was more, she'd even gotten so overexcited as to volunteer to be the one who would plunge the sword into him to facilitate that transfer.
Her brother, Byakuya, fully understood that she and Ichigo had become close, but the only facet of the emotions responsible for her exuberance that he could see was the simple gratitude she felt for someone who had been her rescuer from execution. When he'd explained to her in his usual matter-of-fact way that Ichigo's father was going to be the one initiating the power transfer, Rukia had been so crestfallen that, stammering as she tried to find the right words, she'd actually confessed to her perpetually stoic adoptive brother that she had feelings for the boy, ones that went beyond mere friendship. She'd advocated childishly for herself so that she could be the one to do for him the same thing she'd done before, so that she would be the first face he'd see when his otherworldly sight returned. It was perhaps the most selfish she'd ever been in front of her highly respected brother.
To her surprise, the plan had changed shortly after, with the parties involved agreeing that she, Rukia, would be the one to transfer the collected powers to Ichigo. At this news, Rukia felt such joy as she had only one other time in recent memory: when she'd been promoted to Vice-Captain of her Division by Captain Ukitake.
She'd been thankful for what she presumed to have been the pulling of strings by her brother on her behalf, but would've been all the more thankful, on top of being quite surprised, had she known of Byakuya's actions in the wake of Ichigo's powers returning. On defeating Xcution member Shukuro Tsukishima, Byakuya—whose heart was pained by his need to do so, due to the young man having inserted himself as an important person in Byakuya's own past with his Fullbring ability—had informed his fallen opponent that being an enemy of Ichigo Kurosaki was enough reason to strike the Fullbringer down, despite their retroactive history together. These words had come not from a man whose sister had been rescued by Ichigo, but a man who wanted to protect the cherished feelings she had confided in him. For Byakuya was a man who had loved and lost once, and would do whatever he could to keep his sister from being left alone as he had been.
Rukia, for her part, had berated Ichigo immediately upon his powers returning, unable to resist slamming a kick into his tear-stained face in typical fashion with some excuse about him once again looking pathetic, in order to cover her feelings at seeing him again that had threatened to bubble over. The truth was that she might have kissed his face if she hadn't interrupted the urge by kicking it away from her instead. And he hadn't looked pathetic, but so forlorn that she was lucky to have had her hands full with the re-energizing sword so that they hadn't been free to wrap around him. She had thankfully avoided being able to fall to the temptation to do any of that and had come away from one of the happiest days of her life feeling validated in her emotions. However, now that her feelings had been satiated upon her seeing him again—and, most joyously, him her again—so that they weren't chewing her up from the inside out anymore, Rukia decided that she could accept them as they'd been before their separation, no matter how much they felt like romantic attraction.
Then the Quincy light had come down on him, throwing Rukia back into the cresting wave of her suppressed feelings as it threw Ichigo's life into uncertainty. What crashed down on her then was everything she'd imagined or wished she'd done with him but hadn't ever since the battle with Aizen had ended. And, upon gathering the courage to visit him as he lay in bed fighting for his life, Rukia, watching him, had wished selfishly that she'd kissed him when she'd had the chance. She'd lost her friend once before, and the thought of doing so again had been a knife of pure agony into a heart that had only recently been overstuffed with reclaimed joy.
Which brought Rukia back to the present, with Ichigo sitting across from her in the spot his father had recently vacated in order to talk to Byakuya, looking dazed as he said something she hadn't caught about Aizen as she swam the mental distance back from her reverie. Even if she had been able to pay full attention without feelings screaming in her head, she was pretty sure she'd still have misheard him thanks to the dangerously rapid beating of her heart.
"Oi, what's wrong with you?" he asked before she could request that he repeat himself. "Do you have a fever or something? What did my old man say to you?"
Rukia blinked. "O-oh, it's nothing," she said, brushing aside his concerns energetically enough to surreptitiously fan her reddened face. He cocked an eyebrow at her, so she pushed past it. "What was it that Aizen said to you?"
"He...told me that we're related. He said he's part of the Shiba Clan," said Ichigo in disbelief.
"H-he's...he's lying..." said Rukia to both Ichigo and herself. Ichigo's words felt like they'd knocked Rukia out of her body as easily as if she'd swallowed a Gikongan in her gigai. But the mantra she was repeating as if to ground her jostled soul through meditation had to be true. Aizen was a master of deception, and bereft of his zanpakuto with its masterfully deceitful ability, he could only fall back on words to spread his lies, as talking was all he was now free to do. He'd clearly taken any opportunity afforded him to inflict pain upon poor Ichigo using the only weapon he had remaining in his bound state.
"I don't know," said Ichigo, looking perplexed. He'd crossed his arms and was staring down at his lap. "He told me to meet him again on a certain day and to bring my dad with me this time."
"When?"
"Not for a while."
"Will you tell me before you go?"
Ichigo turned his look of puzzlement on her. "Sure, I guess. Why? You wanna come too?"
"What?" asked Rukia incredulously. "No way! I have enough to deal with thanks to your dad being my new Captain. I don't need to add Aizen to my list of things to worry about," she said with a vehement shake of her head.
As she'd hoped, Ichigo smiled at that, albeit tiredly. Whatever this business with Aizen was, Rukia wanted to be confident that it would blow over without incident once he'd spewed his nonsense to Isshin and been told by him to cram it somewhere unpleasant, as her Captain was likely to do. Right then, she just wanted to put it out of Ichigo's mind and get his face back to looking normal.
Rukia's heart smiled when she saw his tense posture relax a little. "Oh yeah, that's right, my dad's your Captain now," said Ichigo thoughtfully to the ceiling. "I wonder if that means you'll listen to me from now on," he pondered, loud enough for Rukia to hear, but to no one in particular.
Rukia huffed theatrically. "Why would I? You're not even a member of the Gotei Thirteen, so you have zero authority," she argued, unable to suppress a grin.
"Hey, I'm a Deputy Shinigami, remember?" Ichigo retorted, whipping out his badge from the folds of his shihakusho to thrust across the table. "That means I'm officially an officer."
"Please," dismissed Rukia, pushing aside the proffered badge as she mirrored him so that both of them were hunched over the table like overzealous shogi opponents. "At most, that badge makes you the lowest seat," she teased. "You don't even belong to a Division."
"What?" snapped Ichigo. "I'm at least the same rank as you! I have a Bankai and everything!" He'd leaned closer, but Rukia didn't retreat.
"Then where's your Vice-Captain's badge, then?" Rukia asked haughtily, ripping her own from her arm to display in front of him.
"I told you, my badge is right here!" He clacked his large, pentagonal badge against hers with a clink.
"Looks like a fake Shinigami badge to me!" Now their foreheads were nearly touching.
"Mine's bigger! If anything, yours looks like the fake one!"
For a tense moment, Ichigo and Rukia's locked eyes seem to send sparks flying between them, but Rukia wasn't sure if they were only out of anger. Then, simultaneously, both of them broke into genuine smiles, and Rukia wondered if she was giving Ichigo the same look he was giving her just then. Her face warmed at the thought. As they both rocked back from one another, Rukia tried to get a read on Ichigo, but couldn't tell if the red that was colouring his face was due to his bout of yelling or something closer to what was colouring her own.
"Thanks, Rukia," said Ichigo genuinely, hitting her in the heart with a disarmingly relieved smile. Then he went to wipe his forehead, then stopped with his arm still resting above his eyebrows, as if the action had triggered a memory. "Oh yeah..."
"Hm?"
"Did you...visit me at all while I was recovering?"
Then Rukia realized what Ichigo was imagining, and she could feel the cool cloth in her hand again. She wished it was real an instant later when her face started burning.
"I'd try not to smoke so much in this one," suggested Urahara unhelpfully as he hefted the wrapped gigai to Isshin like it was a sack of rice. The newly reinstated Captain grunted.
"What the hell, Kisuke?! There's no way I weigh this much! And I can smoke all I want, it makes me look cool," Isshin growled through a grimace of effort.
"It's dead weight, so of course it feels a bit off right now," said Kisuke Urahara with a grin. "And your too old to smoke just to get girls."
"I didn't say I was doing it to get girls, I said it makes me look cool," argued the man as he took a few bent-legged sumo steps with the gigai across his shoulders. "And what's with this wrapping? It looks like I'm carrying a corpse," he complained irritably.
It was then that Captain Byakuya Kuchiki stepped through a sliding paper door that had supernaturally appeared in the middle of the grounds of the Urahara Shoten. He stared at the similarly-dressed young man straining under the large encumbrance on his back with marked disinterest as if from on high.
"That's your gigai, I take it," he said. "If it's too heavy for you, why not simply wear it home?"
There was an uncomfortably long pause. Then, Isshin turned to shoot a scowl at Urahara for not suggesting such a thing first—wilfully ignoring his own failure to see the same obvious solution—before he dropped into a low squat and sucked in a few breaths in rapid succession. When he popped back up, it was with a mighty yell as he hurled the package skywardto rise in an arc end over end ridiculously. As it continued its parabolic journey, the mummy-like wrapping around it unravelled like a morbid streamer. Once the unconscious form of an older Isshin was open to the night air, the Shinigami that had thrown it took a running start and leaped, his trajectory causing both forms to collide precisely in the air. The older body of Isshin, so enlivened, proceeded then to make its graceful landing on the grounds of the Shoten after a couple of showy rolls in the air. Isshin's flashy landing was punctuated by a loud crack!
"Agh! My back!" cried the spirit who'd just rocketed into a living body, clutching his lower lumbar.
"Hey! I worked hard on that!" protested Urahara scornfully.
Byakuya Kuchiki had watched this entire ludicrous spectacle with unflappable coolness. "Why did you ask me here?" he directed at the pained man. Isshin, looking in his new body like the noble Shinigami Captain's elder rather than his peer, straightened up.
"Ah, sorry, it's just that I had to pick up my gigai anyway. Plus, I figured you didn't want me coming over to that house of yours, what with the position my family's in right now," explained Isshin.
"What I mean is, what have you called on me to discuss?" demanded Byakuya with icy impatience.
"Well, actually, the thing with the family is something I need your help with, but first I wanted to ask you about something from twenty years ago."
"And what would that be?"
Isshin heard the sliding door of the Shoten clap shut and turned his head quickly to see that he and Byakuya had been abandoned by its owner. Isshin's heart sank as he felt he'd already received his answer, and he glowered at the Shoten as if trying to burn a hole in the paper doors through force of will. He turned back to Byakuya with a look of defeat in his dark eyes.
"Did Urahara tell you...about Hisana?"
"What do you mean?" Byakuya's steely expression was unreadable.
"You remember when you called me in to deal with her kido problem, right?"
"Of course."
"Well, that..." Isshin rubbed the back of his head, feeling awkward about what he had to say next. "That wasn't the last time I saw her," he confessed. "So I guess Urahara never said anything after all."
"I was told no such thing," intoned Byakuya neutrally. "Do you have a point?"
Isshin was getting irritated. "I'm saying that I saw her again after I left Soul Society," he said, locking eyes with Byakuya so that the brick wall would get his meaning.
"That's impossible," Byakuya stated, "she had passed long before then."
"You're wrong," said Isshin, his gaze still holding Byakuya's. "You were tricked, everyone was. Hisana was a living human when I saw her, but she didn't reincarnate. That's impossible. No one comes back looking just like they did in Soul Society."
"I don't understand," said Byakuya. That time, it saddened Isshin instead of annoying him.
"Byakuya, there's something else. Hisana was—" Isshin's train of thought was derailed by the black Hell Butterfly Byakuya had brought with him flitting off of the Captain's shoulder that had been its perch to stop at a point between him and the Shoten, some distance to Isshin's right, where another incongruous paper door materialized. From out it stepped a young man in a white dress shirt with shoulder-length black hair and a scar above his left eye. He was carrying a katana with a tsuba shaped like a bookmark.
"Tsukishima," gasped Isshin in shock as the young man walked unerringly toward the Shoten. What were the odds?
"Kisuke Urahara," called Shukuro Tsukishima, formerly of the Fullbringer gang Xcution, who had died at the hands of Byakuya prior to Yhwach's defeat. "Come out so that I can kill you." He spoke loudly but calmly.
"What is the meaning of this?" asked Byakuya authoritatively as he stepped forward, drawing his zanpakuto. "I don't know what business it is that you have with Kisuke Urahara, but this is no place for a wayward spirit such as yours." Isshin noticed Byakuya switch the grip on his sword and knew that he was preparing to perform a simple konso on Tsukishima. The young man rounded on the approaching Captain, his ultra-sharp blade ringing through the air as it came to point at Byakuya's throat.
"This concerns you as well, Byakuya Kuchiki," Tsukishima said to his killer. It was then that Urahara reappeared, standing on the outcropping of the Shoten, looking solemnly downward. Tsukishima turned his head slightly to face Urahara but didn't move his blade, making sure to keep Byakuya in his periphery. "You denied me everything, Kisuke Urahara!" Tsukishima spat, his voice rising in anger this time.
"Tsukishima," implored Isshin, taking a step towards him. As expected, the boy's sword trained on him in turn.
"I didn't get to cut you with this before," he said unsteadily. "If I had, I would've seen that I already existed in your past, so I guess it's fate that you avoided my Book of the End."
"What does he mean?" asked Byakuya, turning to face Isshin as well.
"And you, Byakuya," continued Tsukishima, this time facing the addressed Captain while keeping his sword pointed at Isshin. "When I cut you with my sword, I learned everything about you, but I didn't know that the woman I saw in your past was my mother." There was a disconcerting calmness in his voice as he said those words.
"Byakuya," came Urahara's voice, shattering Tsukishima's barely-maintained composure as he directed both his wild-eyed gaze and weapon at the hatted man.
"You shut your mouth!" roared Tsukishima. "Kukaku-san told me everything! You lied about me! Hisana Kuchiki was my mother and you kept me a secret!"
Byakuya's face was the colour of his haori. "Hisana..."
"That's right, Byakuya," snarled Tsukishima as he glared at Urahara. "It's because of that man...that you killed your own son."
