A prompt for Anon

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To be alone

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The furrow between his brows grows deeper, and there's a certain glint of light that hit his eyes like he was straining to see, like he was frustrated that he couldn't; it clung to his lashes, it tinged his gaze red. That's when Rukia knew.

"I should go," she murmurs just as Ichigo exhales a breath and turns abruptly away; his head bowed, his fringe shadowing his eyes.

Maddeningly, Uryuu hides his reaction to Ichigo's departure with a flick of his glasses up the bridge of his nose, but Chad looks determinedly away as if that isn't answer enough for the pain Rukia has unduly caused. For the pain Ichigo is going through at having one half of the life he's known ripped from him.

Quietly, Inoue says, "We'll take care of him, Kuchiki-san."

And Rukia has to smile and tell the girl that she knows they will, even if she has her doubts. Selfish as they are.

Rukia doesn't tell them that she'll visit. There's no point. Ichigo said so himself, he won't see her anyway.

But she can see him. And that matters.

Rukia accepts the post at Karakura Town, and as the sun sets and the sleepy mist of evening rolls in, Byakuya tells her, "It won't hurt any less." He would know. Hisana-neesama's sickness had made her delirious and forgetful, and even when she had no idea who he was, the stories went that Byakuya had stayed by her side. Hisana-neesama had faded before his eyes. Ichigo would too, in Rukia's.

"Would you take it back?" Rukia ventures to ask, "If nothing changed, would you have keep your distance?"

With no hesitation, Byakuya replies, "One day with her was better than a lifetime without." Then, "It doesn't mean it won't hurt." And, haltingly, guiltily, he adds, "You've hurt enough, Rukia."

She squeezes his hand, an acknowledgment, an acceptance, and smiles, soft and apologetic. "Thank you, Nii-sama."

He exhales a breath, squeezes back, and lets her go.

Rukia does her duties as expected of her: she patrols, hunts, purifies souls; rinse and repeat. Day after day, week after week following her brother's departure, and the loss of Ichigo's powers. Sometime during which a school bus carrying the Karakura High School soccer team is attacked.

Rukia does what she must.

Bruised and shaky, Karin demands to be taught. "You can't be in two places at once," is the girl's reasonable argument, "I can help. Let me."

And Rukia thinks, she can't.

But Karin has the same determination and fearlessness as Ichigo, and in the end, even without a sword to wield or official Shinigami powers of her own, Karin is a natural at kido.

Whether by design or intention, Ichigo never finds out, and Karin never mentions him. Rukia resists the urge to ask.

After ensuring Karin has gotten home safely after one of their training sessions, Rukia pauses at the light coming from Ichigo's window and decides it couldn't hurt to check on him while she's there.

She's wrong.

He's lying in bed, the lamp is on but the room is shrouded in darkness, stubborn and cloying; the shadows shaped like smoke to suffocate and smother. At the creak of his bedroom window, he'd made an aborted movement; a nudge of his chin, a roll of his shoulders. As if he was going to get up, as if he was going to turn his head. It's a habit he's trying to stop, Rukia can tell. It's only been two months since he last saw her.

His desk is clean; books neatly stacked, notes filled with annotations, pens in a line, pencils sharp in their holder. There's a planner open in his school diary; there are test dates and scores recorded; he's passed every one with flying colours. Everything is as it should be, even though the very air around him echoes with wrongwrongwrong.

His phone lies on his bedside table, screen blinking with ignored messages, before it's suddenly vibrating, a name lighting it up: Inoue Orihime. He doesn't answer it. When the call finally stops, a little notification pops up indicating that it isn't the first time he's let the call go.

Rukia sighs, "Ichigo."

And frustrated as if he can feel her disappointment, he grunts, tucking his hands behind his head and closing his eyes determinedly. He doesn't even switch the lamp off.

It's something Ichigo does, night after night, and Rukia tries not to notice but how can she not when Ichigo smiles so placid; when his gaze is so flat? When no one seems to notice because he still shows up, still says his lines and smirks at all the right things?

"You're watching him," Karin notes one day, a week or so later, and Rukia freezes, caught. But Karin only meets her gaze, somber and quiet, before her lip upticks in the corner and she's sighing, relieved, "Good."

Rukia doesn't understand how any of it can be, and she can't just watch Ichigo wither like this.

She starts switching the lamp off for him at night, and pulls the blankets over him when he falls asleep. He doesn't notice, and if he does, he dismisses it as something he'd done in a haze, an easy thing for him to do, evidently, when it's clear that's how he's viewing his life at the moment.

When Ichigo steps in to stop a kid from getting bullied, Rukia hopes and hopes, but.

The bullies are dispatched with easy, exacting movements. And he nods stiffly at the kid's thanks before slinking off, shoulders hunched, back straight, expression blank.

It isn't enough, Rukia realizes, and she feels helpless and useless and...angry. God, she's furious with the frustration of it all.

During a visit with Isshin at the house, she overhears Yuzu telling Karin desperately, "Something's wrong with Ichi-nii, and I don't…Karin, I don't know what to do. I'm afraid… I'm afraid he'll do something, I'm afraid he'll –"

All the desperate, squirming feelings that claw and churn in her chest threatens to boil over, ugly and vicious, and it carries Rukia up to his room with a fury of a storm, uncaring for the door she's thrown open and his visible startling at his desk, pen going flying and Ichigo whirling around in his chair to look at her with wide-eyes.

She tells him he's selfish, that he's an asshole, and once she's done, there are tears she has to wipe furiously away as she tells him it's not fair to mourn something that has only taken things from him. "You get to have a family, and a future and a life, Ichigo, you get to be normal. Why can't it be enough? Why can't you…why can't you live enough for the both of us?"

Rukia swallows hard at the memories that trickle in: of half-hearted arguments over juice boxes during lunch on the rooftop, of taunting and goading and teasing during training sessions before school, of shared complaints over the mundane and supernatural as they walked home, of quiet conversations shared in the shadow of the moon during hunts or on their rare nights off, of sneaking around the house so his family wouldn't know about her, of secrets and histories traded in the humdrum of a life she'd gotten to have with him.

She knows that Ichigo is capable of a life, a good life, but for some reason he can't-he can't do it now.

"I don't understand," she continues, to his unseeing eyes even as he stands before her, staring just off her left shoulder because, Rukia thinks hysterically, he doesn't actually know she's there. "I don't…I don't know how to fix this. I don't know what you want Ichigo, I don't know how to help you," her voice cracks, and then she's entreating, "Tell me what you want, and I'll figure out how to give it to you."

After a beat, Ichigo replies, "Dad."

And it's Rukia's turn to startle, surprised when Isshin says, "She's here, kid. She's here and…" Isshin chuckles, low and serious. "She's mad at you, Ichigo."

The surprised, vacant look is gone in an instant, and there's a flash of the old him, in his eyes and his scowl and his growl as he whirls towards nothing. "Well, I'm mad at you too!"

"What do you have to be mad about?" Rukia demands, indignant. "You're not the one that's had to watch you feel sorry for yourself for the past ten months!"

And then he whirls around again as if he's going to walk away except he's opening his mouth to keep on yelling, like he'd heard her, before Karin interjects from the doorframe, sounding bored but amused, "Turn back around, more to your left…now look down a little, there you go." And it's strange to have Ichigo look at her right in the face and not see her. There's a moment of hesitation in his expression, fingers twitching at his sides like he's physically stopping himself from reaching out, and then, Ichigo huffs out a breath and says lowly, like he doesn't want his family to hear, "You're not here."

"Yes, I am."

And Rukia knows he can't hear her, but then he's sighing, shaking his head, and saying, "It's not…it's not the same. You're not here."

Rukia stares at him uncomprehending because...none of it - this doesn't - it doesn't make sense. Rukia can't be that important. She's never been this important to anyone.

When she and Renji had been granted entry into Soul Society, he'd forgotten her easy enough. And after literal decades of silence between them, he seemed to do just fine on his own. Renji - Rukia has known Renji almost her whole life, and he'd moved on. But Ichigo. How could he care about her so much?

Perhaps seeing the blind panic and confusion in her eyes, and possibly hearing the way the wheels in her head are turning and turning and turning - Isshin interrupts her thoughts to say her name softly - and finally her attention snaps, and she realizes there's only one answer that makes sense.

"Ichigo," she breathes. You don't love me, you can't.

At that, Ichigo huffs, contrary to her even when he can't hear her. He looks away from her even though he can't feel her gaze. With his fringe shadowing his eyes to hide from her still, he admits, "I don't know how to be myself without you, so…come visit. Let me…let me see you again."

But Rukia is close enough to touch him, to see the reluctant hope warring with the desperation in the flecks of gold reflected in the gaze he keeps stubbornly to the floor. As if he couldn't stand to look at her and not see her.

How did this happen? How did we get here? She wonders in a daze.

No one talks for a little while and though Rukia doesn't pull her eyes away from him, she says to Isshin, "I'll get him his powers back."

At that, the elder Kurosaki's expression softens and he tells her kindly, "That's not the point, Rukia-chan."

And Rukia doesn't know if she gets it or not, but Ichigo had told her what he wanted.

It takes a month to organize a gigai.

Each day before then crawls, and it seems like Ichigo just. Stops. He stops pretending he's okay. His family is relieved and terrified of the honesty of it, and while his friends are concerned, there's a general consensus that it's probably just "regular teen angst".

Only Keigo asks, "Do you miss her?"

And Ichigo never answers him.

Rukia starts leaving him things then: juice boxes laid in wait on the railing of the roof during lunch, and messages scrawled on post-it notes she pins to him when he finally falls asleep at night. They're small things, but the emptiness he wears like a mask chips and cracks.

When the gigai arrives, Rukia waits for him by the river.

They always used to take it when they walked home. He thinks he's been walking it alone since his powers were taken, unaware of her beside him even as Ishida and Chad would nod at her in acknowledgment when Rukia appeared at the end of every school day.

She isn't waiting there for him this time, but he's not alone either.

Ichigo and Inoue aren't so much walking together as Inoue is following him, but it could be the start of something because this-this is different. Maybe all Ichigo needed was more time. Rukia didn't...she didn't give him enough time when it's literally all she has.

He had been grieving for the powers, his purpose taken from him, the life he'd once known - it wasn't about you, silly girl, Rukia scolds herself.

Just as she shrinks herself down, turns away - smaller, unnoticeable, forgettable - like any other girl that he could've seen but hadn't seen all at once as he'd been doing since he'd lost his powers, he's saying her name.

With a wince and another internal scolding of god, why did you have to look this time? Rukia shifts on her feet to face him.

He'd stopped walking abruptly, Inoue having stumbled to just barely stop herself from walking into his back. But he doesn't notice because he's looking at Rukia like he's seeing his first sunset. There's a little awe, a little disbelief, but there's mostly. Something else.

Ichigo exhales a breath like he's been holding it all this time, his body slumping in something like relief before he's murmuring her name like a prayer, and Rukia.

She thinks she gets it now.

A/n: Hang out or send me a prompt on my tumblr at everything-withered