Chapter Five: Surprisingly At Peace
Ichigo
"... Dad… can I help work in your hospital?"
Ichigo winced and said the whole thing rather gruffly, staring at the ground, hands in his pockets. It was after school on Friday and he was standing in the entryway between family room and hospital. The other three - Karin and Yuzu in nurse's uniforms, Isshin in doctor's uniform - turned to look at him in surprise.
Ichigo knew his father would be embarrassing. He was right.
"SON OF MINE, YOU HAVE FINALLY DECIDED TO CONNECT MORE DEEPLY WITH YOUR FATHER!" Isshin threw his arms in the air and then put his hands on Ichigo's shoulders. "... But no," he said matter of factly, and he walked off.
"Hey! Why not?!" Ichigo turned to look at him indignantly.
"Oh, you were serious?" His Dad turned to look at him in surprise. "I thought you were just being polite."
"Yes," said Ichigo, trying to hold onto his patience. "I was serious."
"I already told you, I don't want you to become a doctor." Isshin frowned.
"I'm not going to! But, well, I want to focus on art therapy. So knowing how to be in a medical environment might help me. Besides, Karin and Yuzu help you. Isn't it just, like, a family thing?"
"You'd be no good," said his father bluntly, nonplussed.
"Well… not at first… but couldn't I… learn?" Ichigo's face was very red by this point.
"Come on, Dad, give him a chance," Yuzu pleaded.
"Yeah, stop treating him like he's defective," Karin said, crossing her arms.
Isshin pretended to visibly hold back emotion. "MY CHILDREN, STANDING UP FOR ONE ANOTHER! ALRIGHT, MY SON, COME INTO THE FOLD AND -!"
"If you hug me," said Ichigo, "I will kill you. This is already awkward enough."
"Then why are you doing it?" Karin asked curiously as the four of them entered the cool, sterile, white main hallway of the tiny hospital together.
"Yoruichi is trying to show me I can do more than beat people up. She's convinced this is a family experience and I need a wider repertoire of skills," said Ichigo.
"She's changing a lot for you, isn't she?" Karin asked curiously. "Is that where the whole… Mom conversation came from?"
"Yeah," Ichigo admitted. "She and my other high school friends are convinced I'm a Buddhist. They've gotten me into astrology. They have such an iron-solid image of me that I think I've actually been starting to believe in it myself."
"Wow. I didn't think anyone could make you believe in something besides what you can see and the cold, hard hand of science," said Karin, impressed. "High school changes everyone, I guess."
"So, art therapy?" said Yuzu curiously.
"Yeah. Supposedly there are therapists and social workers out in the field, 'on the ground' who help real-time people on the outs with their troubles through these kinds of artistic therapy," said Ichigo.
"So it's sort of like the way you help ghosts find peace," interpreted Yuzu.
"Well… yeah, I guess," said Ichigo thoughtfully.
"Wow!" There were stars in Yuzu's eyes. "That's so cool!"
"Yeah, actually, it is, Ichi-nii," said Karin, sounding surprised.
Ichigo gave a slight smile.
"Alright! Enough chit-chat!" Isshin turned to them and clapped his hands, serious, and they all stood to attention. "Ichigo needs to get on a male nurse's uniform. He'll be helping Karin and Yuzu with nursing duties for today. But first, he needs to learn how to keep himself clean and sterilized, and he'll need latex gloves.
"Karin and Yuzu, can you show him the ropes?"
"Yes, sir!"
"The day after that will be your first day in our hospice. The day after that will be your first day as a Japanese-style mortician - in other words, as an assistant to me. Every day after school. Got it?" Isshin eyed Ichigo somewhat suspiciously. "You'll have two weeks of trial and learning. Then, if you prove teachable, you'll start doing shifts regularly like your sisters."
"You'll be fine," said Yuzu helpfully. "And it will be good to have an extra worker around here."
"Do try to be tougher on him," said Dad, moving past them. When he wasn't looking, Karin rolled her eyes.
Ichigo got dressed in the male nurse's uniform in the tiny provided bathroom. He straightened the uniform and looked in the mirror, frowning, pulling at the neckline. He'd been half afraid they'd give him a nurse's skirt, but this was just a loose male outfit in light blue.
It still felt strange. Thinking of himself as a nurse. Gender roles were weird, he was starting to realize.
He walked out into the hospital to Karin and Yuzu and took a deep breath. "I'm ready," he said, determined.
He ended up shadowing them on his first day, doing what they asked him to practice doing. The Kurosaki Clinic was laid out into three sections. The regular hospital was one side of the long hallway, the permanent care ward on the other, both of them long rows of white hospital beds with curtains. In a vast room in the back was the hall where Isshin performed ritualistic mortician's ceremonies in front of collected friends and family. It had an erected platform where the ritual was performed, and tatami matting down on the floor where people knelt and watched in rows. The other back room was his Dad's office.
Every area dealt with potential death. Not for the first time, Ichigo wondered if that was why he could see ghosts.
On his first day, he mostly watched what Karin and Yuzu did, gaining an increasing amount of respect for the work they performed. They took vitals and set casts, swabbed wounds and offered advice on illness and comforted waiting people. They were always steady emotionally, gentle but firm in their movements, and they always knew just what to do and say to make everything better. There was definitely an art and a science to it; healing was not easy.
Two moments defined his first day.
In the first, Karin asked Ichigo to help her set a cast. She told him what to do, helping him with her fingers, as he slowly and painstakingly set the cast and wrapped it up with gauze. His hands were shaking slightly and his breath came short and he tried to be careful, so careful, do exactly what Karin said.
"See?" said his sisters, smiling, at the end. "You did it."
He had done it - and without hurting anyone. A slow, awed smile filled his features.
The other moment was a bit more harrowing.
A woman was sitting outside the hospital main hall in a spindly little waiting chair by the door, rocking and weeping. Her husband had been in a car accident and was inside in a bed, being tended to by Isshin. Karin turned to Ichigo. "Go comfort her," she said bluntly.
"Me - how - what do I -?" He'd started to say, What do I say? But then he'd looked at Karin's face and realized that was kind of the point. He took a deep breath, and slowly walked over to the woman, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Ma'am?"
She sniffled and looked up from her handkerchief. She was a plump woman with a bun of hair and watery brown eyes, looked almost fifty.
He couldn't tell her that her husband would be totally okay, because it would have been a false promise - he didn't know that for sure. Instead, he said quietly, "The doctor assured me before he went in that your husband is out of the woods. Whatever's going on, it's not life threatening. It doesn't even require surgery. And… well, we can deal with anything except that, can't we? Everything else can be improved upon."
The woman's sniffles lessened and she smiled trembling. "True," she admitted. "It - it could be worse." He hadn't been sure how the words were going to come out, but they seemed to have had an effect.
"You'll be able to see your husband in a little while," said Ichigo. "He's been very lucky. Until then, would you like me to get you a glass of water?"
"Oh - yes - thank you." Ichigo brought back a tiny paper cup of water from the water jug on a far table and some tissues. The woman smiled, good-natured but a little embarrassed, and seemed very grateful.
Both experiences felt… oddly good. He was better at this than he thought he'd be. The fact that he was usually a tough guy didn't seem to interfere with anything at all.
The next day was a weekend, and he spent all weekend working at his Dad's place. Saturday he worked hospice, Sunday he worked mortician with his Dad.
Saturday was… difficult. Karin and Yuzu took him into the hospice ward and gave him very specific instructions on a little piece of paper as to what to do at what time for each patient. Give them their medicine, for example, or change their bedpans.
"Mostly, though," said Karin, "just talk to them. Play games with them. Keep them from leaving the ward - nonviolently, obviously."
"Right," said Ichigo nervously. It was hard concentrating. This ward was constructed the same as the one across the hall, but it felt totally different. It was still and silent and heavy and defeated, most occupants in beds quietly focused on the TV playing in the corner of the room, and it carried the smell Ichigo would come to know as death.
This was where the inevitably dying patients were placed. The most they could do was prolong lifespan. No amount of fighting and no amount of healing could save these people. Ichigo was just as helpless as the rest.
Ichigo learned the physical aspects - how to gently coax someone into taking their medicine even though privately he wasn't sure what good it did. How to gently change a person's bedpan, the disgusting gentleness of cleaning up after a very old person with their wrinkled backside vulnerable to you. He learned how to keep the man with senile dementia from wandering out of the ward by talking gently over his inane ramblings, talking calmly and leading him gently back to his bed.
But many other patients were more lucid. He talked to a woman with cancer about her family and her kids. He played games of Go with a sharp old woman with an incredibly lucid mind. He changed the TV channel when they wanted him to.
And over time, he finally started to see the point of hospice. These people's lives were precious; every single terrible moment they had was a sort of gift.
At the end of his shift, he sat down against the wall outside the ward and breathed hard for a while, arms on his knees. He felt gentle, quiet, sad, and strangely like he wanted to cry again.
Yuzu sat down next to him. "You okay?" she asked.
Ichigo took a deep breath and nodded.
"Dad and Karin always say that it's one thing to fight on behalf of a ghost or a living person. It's totally different to take care of a dying person and know you can do nothing to save them."
Then, finally, came the end of the line for any person - the mortician's death ritual.
The person involved had become a ghost, which made it harder, because Ichigo could see them standing weeping in a corner of the room even as he saw their body in front of him. It added more meaning to the peaceful ritual that was the final thing their body would go through. His Dad dressed him in a nice black suit, dressed in one himself, and Ichigo knelt silently off to the side of the platform. Everyone filed in and knelt on the tatami, somberly in black, and the whole room, silently weeping ghost included, watched his father work on the body kneeling on the top center of the platform.
The body was covered with a blanket and treated very gently, Isshin only doing various expert things in parts from underneath the cloth in sure, graceful movements. Silently and respectfully, an almost holy hush in the room, with ritualistic movements, he dressed the young woman's body in a white robe, cleaned it with damp clothes, put pieces of cotton in each orifice. He did up the young woman's makeup, laid her hands just so, this all in preparation for the coffin she would be cremated in, the entire thing set ablaze.
This should have made the ritual in a way meaningless, but somehow it didn't. The ritual itself, the respect and care involved, felt very cleansing, both for the living and for the dead. Everything was finally prepared just so, and both the dead and the living could move on. Ichigo watched with increasing awe, a gentle and almost healing light filling him, as his Dad softly, gently, silently, and respectfully did each ritualistic movement until she was totally ready. Then he bowed from where he was knelt, and several people stood and carefully placed the body in the coffin in preparation for cremation.
Ichigo and his father sat on the front steps of the hospital in total silence for a while after the ceremony was over. Dad seemed contemplative, at peace, not in a hurry to talk.
"The feeling in the room - it's pretty intense, isn't it?" he said at last, smiling. "Back when I first started, I always used to need a smoke after a difficult ceremony. Not that I'm recommending that or anything. I mean… I've had stressful jobs, but nothing beats a family placing the corpse of their much-beloved member and their fate totally in your hands.
"It has at least as much meaning as someone placing their life in your hands. I can tell you that as a doctor, for one thing. Some people find working with dead bodies unclean - I think it's one of the most important things a person can do for any family."
For the next two weeks, it was like that. Ichigo would go to school, do his schoolwork, have lunch and breaks with his friends, chat like a normal teenager - then he would immediately hurry home every afternoon to work in the clinic. Even Yoruichi seemed content to leave Ichigo be for a while and let him learn.
He alternated between nursing, hospice, and mortician's work. Slowly, he was allowed to do more as a nurse, got better at talking calmly to people as he worked with gentle and sure fingers at whatever he needed to check and whatever ailed them. Talking to families never got easy, but he learned how to be compassionate and realistic and work through that.
He even got used to keeping clean, wearing his gloves, wearing his uniform. And he got better at spotting what various ailments and injuries looked like.
In hospice, he got better at talking people back into their beds and into taking their meds, yet again being gentle, and at changing people's bedpans with surety. He even learned how to feed people who had trouble keeping food down and holding utensils, an incredibly intimate and mostly silent practice. It was scary, realizing a person was completely in your hands.
More than that, he got better at talking with the people in hospice, or playing games with them.
He helped with his first mortician's ceremony a week and a half after starting. His Dad had told him what to do, so he patiently and quietly did the assisting movements assigned to him as his father did the main part. This person hadn't become a ghost - in true Buddhist tradition, some of them didn't and passed on into the afterlife without trouble - but he still took special care, looking tenderly and sympathetically down at the dead person with their eyes closed and their face chalky pale lying in front of him.
It felt healing for him to finish the ceremony, just as healing as it was for everyone else involved.
More than all this, he learned to his surprise that Yoruichi had been right. He was capable of being gentle, or healing, or compassionate, when he wanted to be. Nursing compassion was quiet and sure, and in its own way it required a great deal of bravery and inner strength. It was… different, when you were the one doing the work.
It was weird, for society to say that work only applied to women - for society to imply it was somehow lesser or more feminine and that was why women worked in it. For the first time, he started to internally question some of the things society said about sex and gender. Nursing in general, dealing with the dying, was one of the most mentally and emotionally taxing things he had ever had to do, and some days it was hard doing it at all.
Ooshima came back to school during that two-week period.
He got all up in Ichigo's face the day he got back, practically pinning him up against a wall on his way out to the courtyard for morning break. His breath reeked. "You better watch your back, Kurosaki. I got it out for you and your stupid little friends," he growled.
Orihime looked worried, Tatsuki like she was ready for a good fight, Chad like he was ready for anything, and Yoruichi as always looked fundamentally unimpressed.
"Leave them alone. Unless you get off on picking on people who haven't fucked you over that aren't widely known as good street fighters? Is that it?" Ichigo challenged. "You get off on hitting people you see as weaker than you?"
"Watch your fucking mouth." Ooshima shoved him, and Ichigo almost lost his shit and punched him right then and there. He was pretty fucking sure he could take Ooshima, too.
"Ooshima. Let it go." Ochi-sensei was there. She pushed Ooshima away by the elbow. "Come on, boys, break it up. Move on. Move on."
Ichigo had come to respect Ochi as his favorite teacher. Tough, easy-going, and perpetually exasperated, she was one of the only teachers he could think of who truly knew how to handle teenagers.
"That lid's eventually gonna blow," Chad warned him after Ochi had left.
Ichigo looked after Ooshima. "... Yeah," he admitted. "Well fuck him. I'm ready."
"Be careful, Ichigo," said Orihime, concerned.
"Yeah," said Tatsuki, having a totally different thread in mind, "if you get your ass kicked by that loser, I think you deserve the beating you're going to get."
"Relax, guys. Ichigo will have far bigger threats to worry about in his lifetime than Ooshima. He can handle himself," said Yoruichi smoothly, walking past, as always somewhat of an enigma, hard to predict and hard to read.
Ichigo was working in the clinic one evening, taking care of a woman who'd come in with a broken nose.
"I slammed into a door," she half laughed in admittance, sitting on the hospital bed while he worked. "I'm so stupid, I -"
But Ichigo had paused, looking inscrutably down at a big bruise on her arm, half covered by her sleeve. "Ma'am, could you hold this cloth to your nose for just a second? Apply gentle pressure. Can I take a look at that?"
And as she began stuttering nervously, he slid her sleeve up to reveal bruises all along her arm.
"... Did the door do that, too?" he asked quietly, as she suddenly became silent.
He looked in her face. She wouldn't meet his eye.
"You know," he said, "I've taken karate." She looked up. "So I'm a fighter as well as a healer. And I can tell you that putting up with a beating when you know you can fight back is brave. But putting up with a beating when you know you can't fight back is even braver.
"But see, the thing they teach you in fighting classes is, never get yourself involved in beatings if you don't have to. If you can, they teach you to get yourself out."
He was winging it. He'd decided not to mention street fighting as it might not exactly be comforting coming from a nurse. Otherwise, he actually had no idea what to do with an abused woman.
Tears had filled the woman's eyes. "He loves me," she managed through her bloody nose. "He needs me."
Maybe Orihime had been right about Ichigo's ability to open people up.
"I bet he does," said Ichigo. "But you have to come first sometimes in your life. It's your life. And in this case, you do have to come first, because he could really hurt you bad."
The woman looked down.
"Now, you can call the police yourself," Ichigo began. "Or, I'm sorry, I'm legally required to do it. But I want to leave the option open for you to call yourself. Because I think it should be your independent decision, if you can manage it."
And so she made the call. He sat and waited with her as she called, as she waited sadly, as the police came and took her away for her own protection.
"I have to get my kids," she told the police.
"Oh, don't worry, ma'am," said the policeman seriously as she got in the car. "We're getting your kids."
The most horrible part? She was a member of a minority, and a woman. One of the easiest kinds of prey imaginable in closed-door Japan.
Ichigo wasn't going to do it, but some people really fucking deserved to die.
His first hospice death once more blessedly involved no ghosts. Surprising everyone including Ichigo, it was the ghost of the sharp-minded old woman he'd played Go with. She was the first to leave, when she'd seemed the strongest of them all. He walked into hospice one morning and found her cold and unmoving, eyes closed. He checked her pulse and felt his heart stop, felt himself nearly choke.
She'd died in her sleep, passed on to the afterlife peacefully for reincarnation, and left nothing except her heart behind with her family.
Death didn't discriminate.
It was hard, losing someone he'd cared so intimately for. Very hard. And he had to tell the family. That was his job.
They came into the waiting entryway, and what struck him was how resigned they were. How ready, and solemn, and clear-eyed.
"I'm sorry," he said. "She passed. It was peaceful, in her sleep."
Because he wasn't going to offer bullshit. He wasn't going to talk about how she'd fought, or how she'd led a good final life. Who would choose to live in hospice? So he kept it simple, and offered the only honest comfort he could, and tried to seem as compassionate as possible.
As they all filed out, he did say after them, "Hey. Her heart is still with you. I believe that."
Her adult daughter looked back and smiled sadly. Then they all entered out into the sunshine, the glass hospital door closing behind them - at least for now. There were preparations still to be made.
Ichigo was left feeling very small. He had realized that he couldn't save everyone, but he had also realized that not everyone needed to be saved.
His first terrible mortician's ceremony was actually terrible before the ceremony started.
Ichigo and his Dad were preparing on the platform in their suits when they paused, hearing a horrible argument coming from the echoing corridor outside where the family was waiting.
"I'm not going in there!" A woman's voice. "He committed suicide! It's a disgrace!"
"He was your son!" A man's voice.
The corpse of the young, black-haired man below them was twenty-three. He looked innocent and silent and peaceful, lying there, as if not knowing the argument that was going on beyond him. As if his troubles of this life had passed.
Ichigo felt hot anger build inside him and he stepped furiously toward the door where the argument was still raging furiously, family members yelling horrible things at each other -
He wanted to tell them to stop saying such things to each other on such a day. He wanted to tell them to come in here for their son who had died so tragically. He wanted to tell them to shut the hell up.
But his father put a hand on his shoulder. Ichigo looked back. His Dad silently shook his head.
Don't act on your anger. Not this time, his father said without words.
And so Ichigo had to push down his anger. He had to remain calm. He had to peacefully take care of the boy's corpse in front of an only partially there family, because the guy deserved at least that.
No matter how he felt, anger wasn't always useful - anymore than recklessness was.
He stood outside the room silently for a long time after that one.
One night, the abused woman came back into the clinic. Ichigo was ending his nursing shift that evening. He looked up from where he was preparing a freshly-empty bed in the regular ward, and he paused in surprise.
She was standing there, smiling this time, healthy, with her two kids.
"We have an apartment," she said. "He's been arrested. And - well - I just wanted to thank you. For what you said. About being brave but putting myself first. It meant a lot."
Ichigo looked down, and smiled a little. "Sometimes it's useful, I guess," he said, "having a fighter for a healer."
"Yeah. I guess it is," she mused. "Have a nice night." And talking brightly to her two kids, one hand in each of hers, the three left the hospital together in the cool evening air. Ichigo walked outside after them, and just stood there. The sky was a deep blackish-blue.
Everything had been seeming more distinct lately, somehow. Clearer. At school as well as here. He wouldn't trade his recent changes - not for anything.
His Dad had followed him out. "You know," he said, leaning against the doorway, "I didn't know what to expect, but you've been doing well. Helping people. Better than I think either of us gave you credit for."
"... It doesn't feel like I'm doing enough," Ichigo admitted. "Like I'm good enough."
"It never does," Isshin admitted, and Ichigo turned to stare at him in surprise. "Kid, you have to stop thinking in terms of 'enough.' We just do the best we can each day. That's what we do. And you… I'm starting you on regular shifts. Okay? You passed muster.
"Come in when you're ready."
He left Ichigo standing out there lost in thought. Ichigo stood like that for a while - then smiled a little, and went back inside.
He was… surprisingly at peace.