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Summer rolls into autumn and it’s almost like there’s an undertow of something there, just beneath talk of graduation, and cram school and college. They return at the tail end of the final semester in a blaze of quiet victory, and like always – the world is a little tilted off axis than when they’d left it.
Senior year is quiet, spare the occasional study date or two, the roundtrips to Orihime’s bakery, her apartment, and back. Her presence by his side has somewhat been cemented, underclassmen no longer surprised when they exchange greetings in the hallway, when greetings turn to walking to class together, each moment lingering, spilling into the next. Something integral has shifted, fallen into place in a quiet way, subtle – as it usually is with them.
Sometimes, he notices the way her eyes hold his a lot longer than they used to. Sometimes, he teases her a little bolder than he’d usually allow himself, just to see the crackle of warmth in her eyes when she laughs.
Or at least, that’s what he thinks it is. When acceptance letters arrive and he hears from Tatsuki that she’s decided to go to Nagoya, he’s a little more than surprised he didn’t hear it directly from her. He’s happy for her nonetheless, because the farther away from him she goes, the safer she will be – and he cradles this thought like a knife wedged between his ribs, pretends his heart doesn’t bleed a little every time he pushes it further.
They meet a few times soon after that, but it’s all brief because she’s always got somewhere to be and he’s always got somewhere to return to and soon enough, they’re at the train station and Tatsuki’s cordoning off everyone else until the air is quiet between them – them alone, like they haven’t been for weeks, and he doesn’t quite know what to say. His throat feels thick.
“Thanks for being my friend, Kurosaki-kun,” she whispers, when eventually one of them – Orihime – gathers the courage to press their bodies into an awkward hug. It sounds an awful lot like good-bye, an awful lot like déjà vu, but it’s sincere in the way that only Orihime knows how.
He’s still unsure of how much he’s allowed to touch her before it borders on disrespectful, but the stiffness of his body probably sends a different signal to her. When his hands are just barely about to touch her shoulders, she draws back with a misty smile.
“Write to me, if you’re not too busy,” he manages, around the block in his throat. He doesn’t want to take too much of her time; there are other people who are going to miss her – Orihime is a missable person.
She pauses, like there’s something else she wants to say, but she’s shaken out of it by a sobbing Chizuru, a distraught Keigo, some person or the other who needs her warmth a lot more than he does at the moment.
So he steps away, watches in reverence as she irradiates the room for one last time.
Orihime leaves on a train headed north and Ichigo feels like he stares after its smoky silhouette long after it departs.
❅ ❅ ❅ ❅ ❅ ❅ ❅ ❅
Winter arrives, and it’s as bleak as the last – perhaps bleaker. There are unsent letters crumpled in Ichigo’s waste basket, drafted emails in his inbox, half-written sonnets in a journal he keeps tucked in a far corner where Yuzu doesn’t think to clean in fear of finding something that will taint her image of her older brother.
It’s something, alright – just…not what she’s probably expecting.
He goes on dates with shy, doe-eyed girls and he’s so consumed with guilt that, when he starts to count down the minutes until he can get home and call her, he stops going on them entirely.
When he hears from Tatsuki that ‘there’s a guy...,’ though, he debates booking the next train to Nagoya to go scope him out.
(out of concern, he tells himself, and not at all that he’s a little envious of a guy that managed to capture her heart before he did).
And that's the thing. He feels lovelorn and stupid, all the unspoken words dying on his tongue when they talk over the phone, the distance bridged with stories of new cats she befriended, new professors that don’t mind the colour of his hair as much as they do his opinions on Shakespeare.
She laughs, all quiet and hushed, around two days before Christmas and he can see it – the way she’s probably folding laundry or making dinner and he realizes with horribly embarrassing clarity that he misses her.
“Are you coming home anytime soon?” he asks, cutting her right through her narration of how she nearly set her kitchen on fire trying to follow Chad’s frittata recipe. It’s a good story – funny in a way that only she knows how – but his heart hurts and he doesn’t know how many more phone calls he can take before going a little stir crazy.
There’s a pause, and he feels color fill his cheeks at just how blunt and forward his words sound. He’s about to apologize, to take it all back, when she speaks very slowly into the phone.
“…Who told you?” she asks, almost reprimanding. “Was it Tatsuki-chan? ‘Cause she’s always telling me I can’t keep a secret, so it’s a teensy bit ridiculous that – “
His head spins. “Wait, Inoue, hold on,” he interrupts, squeezing his eyes shut. When they open again, his heartbeat flares. “What?”
“I’m coming down to Karakura very soon.” She giggles. “I was going to surprise you, but –“
“When?” he demands, already shuffling through a mess of papers and his laptop to look for his calendar. His university let off on Friday, so that still gave them –
“Uhm, tomorrow…?” She pauses, then weakly laughs her way through a very nervous, “Surprise!”
Ichigo freezes, his heartbeat now thundering loudly in his chest. “Why didn’t you didn’t tell me!”
“That’s the point of a surprise, Kurosaki-kun,” she says softly, almost teasing.
It’s embarrassing how high his heart soars.
He doesn’t ask her how long she’s staying, or when she’s going back or any of the other questions that remind him of this wide gulf between them. Just bullies her into giving him her itinerary, her train ticket details and how many bags she’s bringing with her so he can cajole his dad into letting him borrow his car.
“What are you hoping to achieve exactly?” Karin drawls, eyes narrowed at her brother, who has all of a sudden developed a scary spring in his step.
He doesn’t answer her, just lets Yuzu know he’s heading out –
(–to buy bread, he doesn’t tell her, knowing full well what reaction that would get) –
“A Christmas miracle, probably,” he hears Karin mutter as he slams the door behind him.
❅ ❅ ❅ ❅ ❅ ❅
It’s a little more than obvious that all their friends have resorted to taking a wide berth when she arrives. Ishida mutters something about his residency, Chad tells her he’s running errands, Tatsuki promises a late dinner before she heads back. Ichigo, though. Ichigo shows up at the train station at dawn, a bag of bread in his hands.
(“he misses you so much,” Tatsuki had told her, and it takes every iota of strength to stomp down old butterflies from springing back.)
They’ve taken to walking around town, perhaps nowhere in particular, perhaps to their old haunts – the stairs by the river, her apartment that’s not so much her apartment since she moved out, Karakura High.
There’s an old tunnel by the back where she used to go, and it’s all too instinctual to take him there. Show him this part of herself that existed before him.
Ichigo is tall now – taller – and he’s sharp everywhere, from the edge of his jaw to the tips of his unruly hair. But his eyes are soft, soft as they’ve come to be (maybe always were) when he looks at her.
“Here,” he says, handing out a slice of bread to her as they lean against the wall. “I know it’s not the kind of scrap you’re used to, but I figured you’d like it.”
Orihime smiles, the warmth of an old joke shared with an old friend not lost on her. Their fingers brush and it’s almost like she’s the Orihime of two years ago, all shy smiles and bolts of electricity from even the smallest moment shared. She loves him that much, and the distance has taught her that she isn’t embarrassed about it at all.
When Ichigo’s fingers linger on the back of her hand a little longer, she wonders if he feels it too. If this is something beyond what it used to be when they were all white shirts and grey coats – young and deer-eyed in this world of chaos and war and growing up. If the Ichigo of today has something in his eyes that the Ichigo of two years ago didn’t.
They circle back to town, watch the snow feather down and shower them in gentle, cold prickles. Ichigo has grown quiet, the cadence of their collective footsteps the only sounds on the way back to the clinic. When they arrive at his front porch, he grabs her shoulder before she can venture into the house.
His grip softens, and he smoothens the crinkles on her sweater with his fingertips.
“Sometimes, I have a hard time saying what I feel,” he starts, the nervous bob of his Adam’s apple belying the steady darkness of his eyes. His fingers run warm circles over her clothing and she holds her breath. “I want- I mean I do feel things, I just don’t know how to –” He cuts himself off, makes a frustrated noise, turning his head sideways like he’s too ashamed to face her.
Orihime pauses for one whole second, then drags him by the collar down till their noses touch, hoping to God she hasn’t read this situation wrong. That she isn’t entirely off the mark. Her heart beats so painfully loud and when his lips come down to brush tentatively against hers, it’s all she can do to not squeak. The kiss is clumsy – his lower lip trembles against her upper one – but it radiates warmth all through her chest and the only thing that stops her from pulling him back and kissing him again is the fact that his dad is probably watching from somewhere behind the curtains.
Ichigo’s cheeks turn dark and he coughs into his palm and she can’t help but feel a little bashful herself.
“Was that okay?” he asks softly and she feels herself falling for him all over again, just as head-over-heels as it used to be. Like watching an old favourite movie and finding new favourite parts to love.
“It was more than okay,” she whispers, licking her lips with a small smile. “It was very good.”
His mouth edges up in a warm smile and this time, she doesn’t try to fight back the butterflies.