Disclaimer: Bleach, its characters and its settings aren't mine.

My name is Kurosaki Ichigo.

I'm going to graduate somewhere around the middle of my class. I'm going to get some sort of job. Then I'm going to try to marry and live some sort of life.

At least today I am. Other days I swear off every having children because I don't ever want to pass on my Vizard genes. I never had a choice in becoming a Vizard. It was that or die. And let the people I cared for die. Not an option.

I try not to be bitter. This is just politics, I don't believe anyone I know is to blame.

Except maybe old man Yama, I aways thought he had it in for me.

So I get to be a salaryman. Something that never really occurred to me when I was playing hero, that some day the fairy tale would end. It's in the darkness of the night it always hits me, the thing I know that other people don't, the thing that makes this all so damn unfair. A day will come when I die. Because everybody dies. But unlike everyone else when my body dies I'll still be a Vizard. What the hell happens then? There's no place for me in Soul Society or even the Rukongai.

The absolute best I can hope for in the afterlife is that Urahara will show up with a Gigai when I die. I can't go to soul society, remember? A copy of this flesh is going to be my home for all eternity. And I'll be spending that eternity alone.

Lucky me, I've already got a hollow mask.

I sometimes think I should ask him for one of those power draining gigais after I die. A few centuries and maybe I'll be normal enough to pass. Maybe I'll become the new Urahara to pass the time.

There's a laugh. Try doing business with customers who are supposed to kill you on sight.

Kind of makes me wonder why I should bother getting that salaryman job.

I'm a grown man now, my father doesn't feel he has to be there for me all the time and quite frankly I can't ask him to, not when he'd got his life back, his real life. He has friends, has a life in the Seireitei. Who am I to tell him he can't have that, can't be there for Yuzu and Karin?

Myself, I don't have any friends any more. Once a year I get a call from Keigo or Mizuiro, but that's the limit of it. The ex-hero is not so good with living people.

Ichigo the shinigami is no more.

I'm a Vizard now. The last Vizard, so far as I know.

Have I ever become maudlin.

Enough. I have to go to class.