A/N: Wrote this three years ago and realized it's pretty decent. Whoda thunk.
He thinks a lot about time in reverse, now.
He thinks a lot about the what ifs, about butterfly wings and tsunamis or whatever little things can do. About films that have those scenes working backward, where the characters are somersalting back into the restaurant as the glass of the window repairs itself, that have the old couple receding into their youth to the moment they first met. He never really liked thinking about those sort of things that way. It has happened, he used to say to himself as he forgot homework or had a dead mother or ran Death's sword through his chest–it has happened and he can regret and blame himself or wonder at effects but it did happen, damned the little things leading up to it.
But of course. That was all before Rukia.
A woman who has built her life around details, Rukia was able to catch things about him no one else quite could: whether the quirk of his mouth was genuine or ironic, the nick of a scar above his eyebrow from childhood, his emotional hurricanes before he even knew they were coming. He cannot count the number of times she has caught his hands in hers, squeezing the near invisible tremor out of him. He used to get furious at her, babbling that he wasn't some goddamn book she could read before he crumpled like a page and she would scoff idiot but she was there and Ichigo doesn't know much but he knows she is his soul mate or tether or maybe just everything and–
He wishes he could remember what it was like to have her.
To not just have the resounding memory of That Night clog his brain. To remember the the lines of her palms instead of them sliding through his like water–or maybe ice?–too easy to slip and too hard to retrieve back. He wishes he could remember the flex of her shoulder when she turned into him instead of against. And he thinks: would this have changed anything? If he were to ingrain these into his memory, would the rest have added up? If he didn't mistake her wiping away tears in the morning for simply nightmares, or the fact she was so damn quiet that day for extended thoughtfulness, if he had just asked her how she was–could he have proved to the universe or fate or whatever the fuck he likes to blame that he deserved her? Or at least wanted her, or at the most needed her because these days it feels a lot like the latter and Ichigo hasn't seen her in thirty years and he's trying to remember if her smile curved more to the left or the right and whether he can still hear the way she said she loved him without the tragedy, without all the other shit, without the "but I'm getting married" and–
"I cannot love you fully if you can't let her go," Orihime whispers, suitcase in hand.
Ichigo doesn't respond. He hears the door click shut as he continues rewinding the movie on the television, looking for the hints of its ending.