Never Had She Known

Disclaimer/Notes: The more I read her and write her, the more I love Rukia. I especially love the time of her imprisonment in Soul Society, because there are so many things she could have thought. And I feed on angst. So here are my thoughts on what her thoughts might have been during her imprisonment. LOL, and I promise...as much as this one pretends to be serious, it's really fluff in disguise.

Never had she known how much she loved him until she knew that she would never see him again. Never had she known what she was missing until it had all been given to her when she'd been with him, and taken away when she'd gone. Never had she known that a soul could feel so cold and shattered and desolate, not out of physical pain, but because of a simple lack of another's presence. Of his presence.

Never had she known that her heart had been carved out and filled with him until he was gone and there was only emptiness where he had been torn away from her.

There were so many things she had never known, that he had shown to her. He had revealed what it meant to be family through the way he saw his sisters. He'd shown that selflessness still existed in human hearts, and that it often existed right alongside intense idiocy and recklessness. Another thing he had given her was laughter. It was a thing she thought she had lost somewhere along the way, buried with her smile, a casualty of real life.

He returned both to her without effort.

More quickly than she could process, he presented herself to her. The real her, the one that drew god-awful drawings and spat out words with wry humor, matching any man fist for fist and word for word. That was the her she had been alongside Renji and her other friends in Rukongai. It was the Kuchiki Rukia that had been regretfully laid to rest when she had been adopted into the Kuchiki family. It was the Rukia that was playful and thoughtful, but tough and unyielding.

It was the only way she could be around him, because to be any less than real would kill her inside.

He'd shown her that events in one's past shaped one's life but did not control it. He'd shown her how to let go of one thing so she could hold tightly to another.

Kurosaki Ichigo had revealed everything she had resigned herself never to have, and she hated him, in a way, because she had been so much fuller for those things, so much stronger—but was now that much more empty for knowing the would-haves and could-haves and what-ifs; the life she might have lived if she had been able to live it beside him.

She couldn't say she hated him with a straight face, and if he was right beside her, she couldn't have said it while looking in his eyes, because the truth was that she didn't hate him.

It was true that he'd given her so many things, only to have them taken away. While she remained the same, her soul felt so much more empty than it ever had before.

She couldn't hate him, though, because more than anything, she loved him.

She loved the way he didn't merely talk, but yelled or gesticulated or complained or whispered, as if his soul bled into every word he spoke. She loved how he was so real beneath that mask he put on, so human, perfect and yet imperfect, a boy older than his years whose pretended indifference cradled a heart that wanted to save everyone. She loved that he was so stubborn, that, when he set his eyes on something, neither hell nor high water could divert him from the path he'd chosen.

He'd dared to show her his heart, and she had obliged by entrusting her own to him, allowing him to unknowingly shatter her defenses like glass until reality broke back into her life, forcing her to pull a cover over her exposed heart and run away.

She'd prayed that he would let her slip out of his world as easily as she had come, prayed that, if nothing else, he'd do that...for her, because she wondered if she could let go of him if he held on to her. He had held on, and it had hurt even more to leave. She left, though, because even if leaving meant leaving him behind, it would mean leaving him alive a little longer. The only thing she could not have borne was watching him die.

Live, she murmured in her thoughts, and left so he could.

Live, she urged him in her mind, and in doing so, condemned herself to death.

Logic taunted her. This was what emotion brought. Would it not have been better to have never felt anything at all?

Would it not be better, now, to let go of everything she'd felt? Because being a shinigami was not about being dead in the conventional sense. Being a shinigami was about remaining dead inside. As her soul burned away thinking about things and people she would never see again, she understood why. Emotion really was the surrender of the soul to the body. It killed more effectively than any blade.

Even when she tried to crush down every feeling in her heart, she knew that her feelings for him would remain. Somehow, even if those memories of life would make death more painful, she felt like it would be better to die loving him, in pain, than to die painlessly and in peace, without feeling.

When she thought she had succeeded in feeling nothing, words would whisper to her, or the scent of reiatsu would somehow permeate the thick walls of her prison, giving her hope she didn't need—couldn't feel. But he still remained in her heart, and she hoped even though she hated the feeling, even to the day when her serenity was shattered and rebuilt as she was lifted to the place where she would be executed.

He was the last face she thought of when she thought she would die, and the first face she saw when she didn't. He showed up with that god-awfully perfect timing of his, and there he stood, with the instrument of her death blazing right behind him, dressed to kill and looking like he really thought he could save her. The strange thing was that the more she looked into his eyes, the more she believed it. She wanted to tell him how much of an idiot he was.

Well, she already had. But she wanted to tell him again.

He hadn't listened, and she was happy and sad and pissed off and disbelieving, because how could he even dream of doing something for her when she'd twisted his life so horribly, turning his human existence into a nightmare that brought him into the land of the dead? She couldn't understand him, but there was one thing she did understand. She was glad, so glad, to have seen him again, and so shocked that the carefully buried feelings rose quickly to the surface, thriving in his presence.

Kuchiki Rukia had never known that she could live so fully when she had been at her emptiest only moments before. She had never known that she could love so deeply until the depths were drained in his absence, and refilled by the look in his eyes, by that crazy confidence he radiated.

There were a lot of things she'd never known, but that was okay, because if she had anything at all to say about it, he'd always be there beside her amidst the fists and the insults. He'd always be there to teach her the things she'd never known.

Author's Notes: I love IchiRuki! I've been down a lot lately, while writing, because though I love all the pairings I write, I've been afraid to write them because I'm worried that it'll be something that I've already written, or something that someone else has already written. Though everything really has been written before, I hope that maybe this might have been a little bit different. I hope it was fun to read, as well! Please Review?