Requested by Kiharu Lamperouge- thank you. I love this pairing. You should all go and read Dracoqueen22's collection, 'Seireitei Monogatari'. It puts me to shame.
Byakuya x Ichigo
Payment
His loneliness, for all of those years, had been bitter and wearisome, but it was payment, he knew, for everything he had done wrong in his life. Every sin committed in his name; every time he had done wrong by the world and those who lived within his own. There were too many mistakes for him to care to remember: from allowing someone else to be the one to save his sister, to not noticing that his wife was fading in time to save her- too many, too many.
And he had taken the brute of the grief on his own shoulders as a punishment, and all of his actions carried the nature of self-flagellation as just another part of that. He pushed those who should have eased his pain away- after all, was that not what he deserved?
But then Ichigo Kurosaki had burst into his life in a maddening haze of distemperate illogicalities and argumentative arrogance, and had shaken everything up. For the first time in such a long time, heat permeated the coldness of his exterior, the coldness which he had tried to believe was all that was left inside of himself. He should have guessed, from the beginning, that Ichigo was going to prove every lie false- that was simply what he did. He saved, and he glared, and he forged the truth.
The bars of the cage shattered.
The birds flew free.
Ichigo was abrasive, but he cared. His mouth always accommodated his own; his body was always ready and willing. The feeling of the boy's fingers twisting in his hair made him want to scream, the weight of the legs wrapped around his waist made him feel painfully, illogically free. Staring at him in the middle of the night, grey moonlight making him look almost ghostly, Byakuya was struck with a strange ache, every time.
He had suffered, but he deserved his pain.
Ichigo was wonderful, and a while ago he never would have believed that he should have him.
But then, maybe, this was a payment for something he had done right.
After all, no one could have made that many mistakes, could they?