Chapter Text
“Let me braid your hair,” Ichigo insists to Yuzu.
“It’s too short,” she laughs.
“That just means I don’t have as much hair to mess up on,” he jokes, as if he hasn’t been practicing since he was old enough to realize Isshin’s helpfulness only went so far.
Ichigo begins to insist on braiding her hair everyday, and she puts up only a short facade of annoyance before giving in. She is confused, but unwilling to question a good thing, this burst of new energy she has labeled as healing. Carefully, Ichigo does not shatter this illusion, even though he knows that she still sees the bags under his eyes and the unchanging hollow of his cheeks. There is very little left that he can give her, and he would not take this last bit of warmth.
Braiding her hair is both a final strain for connection and a false hope that he can build up a stockpile for the time he won’t be here. Like he could make up for a future that hasn’t come to pass, although it barrels at him. The most human part of it all is that he adjusts. Building his lifestyle around his decreased lung capacity and declining energy, he convinces Yuzu that he’s reading more–a hobby as harmless as escapism. He buys books that he does not read, and skates by on skimming a chapter once in a while in case she asks questions. More and more, sleep throws a veil over living. Escapism is not a text, no biblical reference even if he still had faith to give. Escapism is spontaneous fission: radioactive decay that is slow and probabilistic, nothing more than a universe running towards its end as his days grow shorter so he can play at normal for barely a few hours at a time.
It is less that he gives up on testing his tenuous connections, and more that he is incapable of holding them. The names Orihime, Chad, and Uryuu slip through his fingers, his head porous and leaking. There is no time to spend, wistful and nostalgic when he has to focus so hard to even feel inside his own body. Karin haunts the house when she can bear to be home. Shinji is barely a candlelight flickering, and Kisuke is better lost to a splitting of nuclei.
He would never tell Yuzu, but in lieu of a letter, he hopes she remembers the feeling of his hands in her hair. His care as too big to put into words. His love, overflowing, and still not enough to keep him anchored. There are no words for his regret, his absence. A departure has also always been a making of a fault line, and he is eager, in some ways, to reach his mother where grief is not an earthquake. Not some seismic slippage.
Yuzu is happy with this new morning routine, a mere five to ten minutes she bears with patience each day. Ichigo pretends he doesn’t see the concern in her eyes as he starts to struggle with the dexterity of his fingers, the way he is slower and all the more reverent.
Karin is busier, less patient, so brash and bold and entirely too much like her older brother. He’s glad that she’s not around to notice as much as Yuzu. They are both sharp and observant, and he wishes he could spare them for these last few months.
Wishes his decay was invisible.
Wishes that Yuzu, too, would tell him to leave this house and Ichigo would finally have the last piece of permission to go ask Mom if she would like to eat pomelo with him again.
Ichigo stays inside more, and doesn’t know if he should feel smug that it drives Isshin out the house.
Yuzu is here, and he can only chip very little pieces of himself off to give away when he is this small. It is easier to be inside this house of home-not-home than to be anywhere else.
“You grow up so fast,” Ichigo says, quietly even as his smile is so fond. He ruffles Karin’s hair, making an absolute mess.
She scowls and rolls her eyes, fixing the part so she can see again. “You sound like an old man.”
Yuzu laughs at her.
“You didn’t think you were safe, did you?” Ichigo questions just as he lunges towards her, aiming to mess up her hair too.
Instinctively, she moves to dodge.
Ichigo misses. Stumbles once as he swipes past her. Yuzu is shocked, jarred because Ichigo doesn’t miss.
Karin jokes about him merging into an old man. Ichigo smiles, small and enigmatic and a wave of relief sweeps over Yuzu, that this healing is happening.
It hits her, briefly, that when Ichigo had said you grow up so fast that he hadn’t said it with wistfulness or nostalgia.
Hadn’t it said it in that exasperated tenderness, but with relief.
As if there had to be an after. As if he was waiting for an after.
(As if he wanted them to be ready for some life without him in it.)
As if he was waiting to get out of here. To leave.
Part of her is screaming, and she wants nothing but the three of them to be crouched together, close and still trying to be closer. Even when Ichigo looks like he’s waiting for someone to tell him that he’s allowed to disappear, and even when Karin is longer limbed and feeling stifled with the growing pains of an unforgiving Kurosaki household, barely held together by a brother that was a shield that was a sword that looks mostly like a boy. Brave and protective so that Yuzu can afford to be soft.
There is no softness in this living. Yuzu wants this thing in her chest, scoring pits with clay carving tools, to stop. She wants to scream that she is not something to shape. She wants to believe that her brother will wake up every morning.
Yuzu wonders if Ichigo is growing skin over an infection. If underneath this joy is all sickness. She knocks on the door of the Shoten, the place that she had always thought of as Ichigo’s, though now it’s Karin that seems to haunt the building.
Ichigo does not leave the house much, that she knows of.
“Urahara-san,” she says, “What is wrong with my brother?” Her voice is steady, because like all of the Kurosaki siblings, she has grown up in pieces. In making do. In loving without alternative, but always without peace. She tries her best to embody peace when the three of them have never had the privilege to call it theirs.
Her voice is steady but her hand on the handle of the bag hanging over her shoulder is white-knuckled, shoulders wound so tight with tension that you might be able to crack it.
Ichigo, knowing, always knowing, had watched her grab and pack her bag with these sad eyes.
Stop looking at me, she had wanted to scream, and couldn’t bring herself to. More accurately, she wanted to cry and yell at him, Why aren’t you scared? Angrily, why aren’t you acting like you care?
He had seen her urgency, jamming feet into shoes, and known where she was going. He cannot blame her for her concern, though he puts up a cursory protest.
I’m fine, he had said, like she hadn’t found him vomiting up blood. Yuzu, it’s okay.
There was no surprise on his face. Just this awful knowing.
I saw Ishida-sensei. It’s okay, Yuzu.
She isn’t stupid. He didn’t say “I will be okay,” he said, “It’s okay.” Ichigo isn’t a liar, but he is willing to hide the truth, refusing to answer her when she asks, “What’s happening? Ichigo, what’s wrong with you?”
It’s all the same. It’s fine, is how he had responded.
She pretends it’s anger in her chest. Not this looming fear because she doesn’t like any of the possible answers to: Ichigo, why aren’t you scared?
“What do you mean?” Urahara-san tilts his head down at her.
The hole sitting in her chest gains gravity. “What’s wrong with my brother? He won’t tell me.” There’s this creeping sensation that Urahara-san doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
“Hmm,” he ushers her into the Shoten and sits her down. He pushes tea at her and she takes the cup to hold something, to have at least one object that isn’t falling to pieces.”Tell me what you mean.”
Yuzu breathes and starts to list the symptoms she’s noticed. Ichigo sleeps more than ever and is never more rested for it. He pauses to hold his chest, short of breath, shallow and rapid when he thinks she is not looking. When he hugs her, his pulse is jackrabbit and it hasn’t slowed down in weeks. His skin is pale, favoring a bluish tone. He moves slower and his reactions lag. He’s falling apart and still smiling and this morning was enough. She found him hunched over a toilet vomiting part mucus part blood, face somehow calm even as his fingers were white from how hard he was gripping the toilet bowl.
“Urahara-san,” she finishes quietly, tracing circles around the rim of her cup, “I don’t think Ichigo-nii cares that he is sick.” She doesn’t say dying because he can’t be. He wouldn’t.
The shopkeeper is silent. Yuzu doesn’t see it but he lifts his eyes over her shoulder and makes eye contact with a white figure, eyes yellow and glowing and so, so silent.
Kisuke doesn’t know when he started seeing Ichigo’s hollow, but it must have been about three weeks ago. The visage had sent him into a mad scramble, half hope, half self-deprecation as he partly thought that he had begun to hallucinate. The discreet tests he manages when Ichigo finally leaves the Kurosaki household prove a miracle: his reikoryu is replenishing. Impossibly, Ichigo is healing. The hollow is a manifestation, so faint that only Kisuke can see him so far.
Kisuke cannot get over this itch, this absence of Ichigo that constantly makes itself known. Ichigo had seen him, and hadn’t flinched or looked away. In Ichigo’s eyes, Kisuke was just Kisuke, and he is an addict in withdrawal. Even living as a deity where time is flexible, the past few months have felt so long.
The relief Kisuke had discovered mere days ago was pure and light, so unlike himself, the one who had turned a boy into a martyr. Yuzu shatters this bubble, this dream of reunion. Why is Ichigo still falling apart if Kisuke had seen evidence of his soul stitching itself back together?
Long after Yuzu leaves, with more questions than answers, Kisuke sits at the table, staring blankly down at his tea, still untouched.
Suddenly, the hollow speaks. Kisuke jerks his head up in shock.
Shiro lacks the characteristic aggression Urahara has come to associate so prominently with Ichigo’s hollow. Instead, he looks blankly at Urahara–almost through him–and comments candidly, “You hurt him. You are good at that.” There is no tone to the comment. “Will you keep hurting him?” Shiro asks. Urahara can’t help but feel this sinking feeling of dread, mind already working overtime to try to explain the change in demeanor that isn’t just his separation from Ichigo.
Shiro doesn’t seem like he’s actually expecting an answer, despite the response Urahara has already begun to draft in his head. Shiro has already turned his head, dismissive. He watches through the window protectively, reaching out as if he could see and touch Ichigo.
But he is not by Ichigo’s side, and Ichigo cannot see him, although it’s all that Shiro would ask for in this moment.
At his next check up, Ishida-sensei is largely silent. The test results say that Ichigo is steadily declining. Maybe he is not living in half-lives anymore, just entropy. Tendency towards disorder. Not that that would be constant.
The doctor starts, "I am surprised...that you are not angrier. At me, at your father, at your friends."
"What is the point?" Ichigo asks, "Would I go back on the soul I sacrificed for this version of reality? Wouldn't it be worthless then?"
“You are a good man,” Ishida-sensei says.
Ichigo replies, “Do not call me a man. They will face their sins as they are.”
Because he is still a boy.
Too young, and all empty.
Picking at the reikoryu threads that prove that Ichigo is healing, Shiro starts to unravel the end, trying not to feel like this is letting them win. But he is reminded again, of Ichigo, looking small in ways the larger than life teen should never be. Used and left behind. Alone. The idea of someone using Ichigo again solidifies his choice, especially since he doesn’t think Central 46 would ever allow Ichigo to exist as anything except weakened and half of his potential.
Quietly, Shiro also doesn’t really think that Ichigo could survive another betrayal.
Really, Shiro and Ossan are greedy. To have Ichigo whole in any way they can. To be reunited, to be one soul they ache to be. Wherever they have to find it.
(There’s this saying. You’ve heard it a million times, in so many cliché plot lines: a man with nothing to lose is a dangerous, dangerous man.
We superimpose this onto three pieces of a soul, and pretend tragedy is not written in the spaces between their words.)
There is no space for regret; no time to mourn when they have wasted so much of Ichigo’s being unknown, in conflict, or torn apart.
Shiro sharpens his blade on the glowing connection that connects Ichigo to the outside world and tries not to hear the shearing sound as the knell of something worse.
It would be remarkably easy to cut. Shiro wonders if Ichigo would ever forgive him for trapping him in his own mind. He thinks about Ichigo, alone, and wonders if Ichigo would be upset at all.
Wonders if he would be grateful instead. Knowing he wouldn’t be angry is almost worse.
A king should never be content in a gilded cage.
Ichigo, these days, is just a thread.
I want to wake up, Ichigo thinks.
He corrects himself.
I want to wake up and remember how to want to keep doing it,
When Urahara-san calls him for the first time in seven months, inviting him to the Shoten, as if half a year was a blink and bygone, Ichigo goes. Follows the near-normal casual tone. Still a good listener, a good soldier, belly up and vulnerable for a stranger that he used to trust and left him behind. At least, he is nothing if not predictable.
There's an inkling of regret as he sits silent at the table, staring at Rukia and Getabos--Urahara-san uncomprehendingly. The man says that the soul sword is to help him.
The asauchi scrapes his arms as he backs up, skittish and afraid. He does not know Kisuke or Rukia anymore. Doesn’t know anyone at all. “It’s to restore your reikiryou,” Kisuke soothes, “You’ll get your spirits back.”
His vision fades in and out. The small amount he felt transfer in that cut suddenly makes him privy to two presences. He knows them like he knows himself.
“We would hold you,” is the first thing his hollow says, and Ichigo shatters, a little.
“Let us hold you,” his zanpukato beseech, like there was ever another choice, like he would ever pick anyone else.
Ichigo blinks back to awareness and dodges the sword, instinctively. “Good job, Ichigo,” Ossan says, a faded shade stuttering in and out of his field of view as the unstable reikyrou in his system works away. He doesn't have time to question why it is a good thing to avoid this reikiryou, and wonders if it's because the energy isn't truly his or because it's better to be weak right now.
He whips his head across the room, and sees his hollow already moving. His hollow catches him and he feels his vision falter and blink out and only sighs in relief as he gives up his body, trusting.
Black and gold eyes look out from Ichigo’s body. “Kisuke,” he acknowledges and dismisses, turning away.
While Kisuke and Rukia stand, frozen, he casually begins to walk away, towards the door to leave. Kisuke lurches forward, asking, “Where are you going?”
“I’m taking him home.”
“Why did you stop him from healing?”
“Because he gets hurt when he’s strong. And it’s never the kind that heals. Central 46 would never leave him alone. He would rather be alone, these days.”
(There is no Penelope and Odysseyus in this myth. There are no suitors, no romance, and no test. There is still blood, and bodies, and love of some kind, and grief of some kind, weighing heavy. In this myth, there is a boy, at the edge of the world. And his brother-soulmate-sword-something can only unravel his shroud so many days before a general comes calling. The general, once, was something too. Now, giving the shroud back to the boy, and brother-soulmate-sword-something can only say, “I will follow you wherever you go,” and hope he chooses to live.)
Ossan wants to apologize, that he is Quincy, that he knows what he is about to share, that he is desperate enough to stitch the three of them close with divinity.
Sweet as summer rain, the haunting imprint of petrichor, Ichigo looks at him and smiles with a mouth of sharp teeth and the softest eyes of any predator. "It's okay," he says. In the mindscape, he is dripping wet in a way that never dries, and Shiro and Ossan both look away from the wasteland of his soul.
His soul is made of soaring skyscrapers, but they have spread and sprawled, as if they were reaching for occupants. An endless city, but so empty. As if Ichigo kept making homes in the hopes that if he made enough, someone would come live there eventually. Ichigo was a boy of so much hearth, and there was no one home. No one to fill this city, and it just grew and grew, searching, into a root system with no end.
Ossan ignores the tears on his cheeks, oh how his boy had become death, and tells him how to find the Soul King. Tells him to ask the god to disappear.
Ichigo listens because trust is easier than shattering. Shiro grips the fabric at his ribs, settling at his back in a way that almost sends them tripping. They want to crawl into each other and close their eyes, really, but they don’t.
They listen, and Ichigo meets the Soul King and finds divinity lacking.
“In many worlds, you are my successor,” the Soul King tells him, and it is a truth Ichigo feels in his bones. “Only, in some of them, is ascension something you choose,” he continues.
Ichigo feels his teeth start to rattle. Energy blankets his vision, vignetting the edges in power.
“I am tired,” the Soul King says, eyes unfocused and empty. “But in this world, you would not survive ascension.” The words are said tonelessly.
Ichigo does not know if he would have preferred pity or despair. In the Soul King’s eyes, he sees a vision of himself, a crown on his head, blood trickling out the edges. He is crying silently, and his eyes are black and empty and his body is disintegrating.
The feeling of relief does not come. Only the tension from the waiting.
“I will send you to reincarnation. You have not lived three lives, but you are unstable. You do not want to live. Your soul would do well to be removed from this life and forget about your experiences.”
Some part of Ichigo protests viciously at the idea of forgetting his sisters, his once-friends, his once-teachers, and all the somebodies in his life. But mostly, he asks, “What about Ossan and Shiro?”
The Soul King exhales a breath that might be a laugh. “You cannot forget your own soul.”
“But will I know them? Will I have them?”
“Hmm,” the deity taps his finger and Ichigo tries not to feel the ripple in power as seismic. “I can do this.”
There are no further questions from Ichigo. He feels Ossan and Shiro wrap around his presence tighter, and slowly, slowly relaxes.
The fight in him had already been barely an ember, walking into the throne room. Now, it is quietly snuffed out.
Sometimes Ichigo wants so badly to not be too much, that he would rather be nothing at all.
Yuzu can’t say she is surprised when she comes home to an empty house, the last traces of Ichigo’s warmth evaporating into dust. He erases himself so completely from the house, and she stumbles in her haste to find some evidence of him in his room. There is nothing personal there, no keepsake to hold onto.
She isn’t surprised but a toneless noise rips out of her, discordant and scraping across her vocal chords. Folding inwards, she grips the edge of the doorway as Karin rushes in, looking for an intruder who is causing her distress.
His bed is covered in flowers. Carnations, sheets dressed in the tears of a mother’s love.
Karin, numb, slides down next to her.
The carnations are in full bloom.
She calls Kisuke, because there is no one else to call.
“Where is he?” Kisuke demands.
“Gone,” the Soul King says, without moving. The echo feels like someone is sandpapering Kisuke’s ears.
“Where?” he insists. His eyes are manic and frantic, fingers twitching with hidden violence.
The Soul King sighs. “You will not find him.”
Benehime starts to hum with violence. Kisuke’s rage, usually paralyzing, is small in the face of a god. “Where have you put him?”
“Into reincarnation. Away from this.” Usually, Kisuke is guilty enough that he would listen and believe this. Post-Isshin, watching Ichigo’s eyes empty, he can’t help but be selfish. Can’t help but need Ichigo to know who he is, to know that he is on the way. When Ichigo still had some type of faith to give.
Being forgotten isn’t tolerable. Not when he hasn’t earned his penance yet.
“Retrieve his soul, then. It is too soon,” he grits out, furious but struggling under the sheer pressure emanating from the deity.
The Soul King tilts his head, and Kisuke tries not to scream, as reality ripples and the pressure shrugs, and his eyes want to bleed.
He recognizes the apathy in the Soul King, and realizes abruptly that he does not have much sway, at all. “Soul King,” the deity starts, “Is a title. Not…a being. Most of all, we, too, are capable of exhaustion.”
He continues, “I, also, desire to move on. In most worlds, Ichigo is my successor.”
Kisuke is not shocked, because he has always known that divinity was much closer to Ichigo than the boy would like to believe. Kisuke is not shocked, because Ichigo was built to weather the collision of galaxies—there is no other, like him.
But he also feels the fury, at the injustice, that there is more burden for Ichigo to shoulder. Still there is more—and they would take everything from Ichigo, even his mortality.
“Then where is he?”
“He came to me, quite shattered, in bits and pieces. In this world, he would not survive ascension. As a mercy, I put him back into the reincarnation cycle—perhaps he will be more suited for ascension, after a cleansing.”
“He could have healed. He was young, and we were working on it. He can still heal—you can bring him back, and maybe he will be ready sooner.” Kisuke attempts negotiation, even though he can feel that it will fail.
“I don’t think I will. I want the best chance to move on. Time is meaningless. My choice is safer.”
Kisuke refuses to accept a reality where he never got to apologize to Ichigo, never got to show him that he was wanted and protected. What he feels is not just guilt, but that type of wild affection that is probably safer tucked away. It’s the kind that insists: You could be no safer than with me.
“But your choice is not better. You can give him to me, and I could take him away to heal.” He starts to feel unstable, his reasoning slipping away from logical.
“He did not fight me, Kisuke. Ichigo smiled at me when I said I would cleanse him of all this. Why would I take that from him?”
Kisuke feels the insanity grip him, the tightly leashed monster inside of him, and lunges against all the pressure to press Benehime into the chest of the Soul King.
There is no resistance or aborted fight, just a faint blink in surprise by the deity, as Kisuke hisses out, “Then make me a god, and I will take him back myself.”
The Soul King does not bleed, as much as he leaks light.
They do not tell you about the quiet.
When you ascend, it is silence that is so pervasive, it starts to rip you apart, molecule by molecule. The light is faster energy, true. Its speed is unparalleled, but you swear that there is some unknown force in the silence, pushing space between all the atoms of what you are.
You are not sure if you are vibrating or screaming or too full or ripped apart or made of light or made of dust. You are not sure if you are everything or nothing or at least, the dream of a boy you cared for—loved—cradled—held (but never tight enough)—lost—broke—your boy—you youyouyou
You. Are.
Ascension, Kisuke thinks, is not every star reborn or rebroken.
Ascension is a profound grief. A shedding of mortality that is imbued with loss. A desperation—when survival overrides common sense. To hold the sky with the audacity that you can. Kisuke almost hears his own shoulders creak.
It is worth it, he thinks, for Ichigo.
Sanity, perhaps, has never been in the cards.
There is light pouring out of his eyes, stark white and glowing. He’s not sure he can stop it. He is not built to hold this—but he is—and he is changing to hold it—
He is searching for his light—it is made of lovely metal, bright and there he is.
Ichigo?
Kisuke? Getaboshi?
Come home.
I am tired.
I need you.
For what reason?
To have you. To hold you.
You were fine without me. I want to go away.
I can keep you. You can just be Ichigo. I am a realm-wielder now. I am divinity. You will fight for no one.
…did it hurt, Kisuke? Are you alright?
It always does, to become someone. I will be alright when you come back with me.
What if I don’t want it to hurt? What if I stay in this in-between forever?
I will remake this world until you fit into it. Until it harbors you without pain. Until pain is a word and not a memory.
I think I would rather you take my memories. It would be nice to forget.
I am sorry, Ichigo-kun. I cannot give you that. I am selfish. I would want you as you are.
Where were you before?
The black seems to cave in, pressure and shadow and gravity all at once.
I was foolish.
There is a pause, in this in-between. This nowhere in no time. Then, a soft laugh.
Kisuke, you still are. And so stubborn.
This laugh is all he has ever wanted to hear. You can scold me all you want, once you come back.
There is nothing left for me to give. I have already scattered my love like ashes. I should hope that they will keep it.
What about what you had set aside for me? Kisuke is not good enough at personhood to set aside greed. To set aside what he wants, what is his, the affection he had seen in Ichigo and ignored because it’s what he was supposed to do.
You can love me less, Kisuke, Ichigo whispers, not as permission or demand, but as a plea. Edged with grief of do not drag this out any longer. Do not ask this of me. Please, do not keep me here.
Ichigo says, Let this end.
You will not. Kisuke insists, with all the certainty of a deity.
I’m not good for you. This obsession.
You are the only good thing left.
Kisuke, Ichigo says, so fond, you still underestimate me. And say such stubborn things. Even you need to adjust to godhood. I had hoped you would let me go on your own.
Then, terrifyingly, Kisuke feels Ichigo’s presence start to slip. To pull away and tuck itself away, like a star swallowed into the night. Kisuke scrambles to hold on, this frantic sense of gripping tighter.
Yet, a soul is still smoke. And Ichigo, still made of miracles, defies a god.
We will meet again when I am someone else, Ichigo says, full of relief. On the cusp of eternity, the only human option left is to die.
ICHIGO—There is silence. This silence is a vacuum, the condition of space that simultaneously births and kills stars. Completion of decay.
Kisuke has no thoughts left, except, I am going to follow you to the next life.