Chapter Text
In his dreams, Ichigo sees his mindscape, the one he remembers, towering skyscrapers cutting the heavens in half. Even asleep, his subconscious is straining for what he can no longer reach.
He does not think he would wish this unraveling on anyone–this unknowing of self. The absence of Zangetsu (Shiro and Ossan both) leaves him raw and aching like a gaping wound and there is no one to tell him to take care of it, let alone to help him do it. It’s ironic, in that way. They never do quite teach you how to heal a wound like this when they teach you to fight a war. (You learn how to survive. You learn what it means to die. You don’t learn how to get better. To learn to heal is the after.)
Sometimes, in his dreams, he hears a voice drift over. “Easy, Ichigo,” soothing and reassuring. But it’s always sad.
A different voice goes “What’re you so tense for, King? You won. Unclench your fists.” He almost mistakes it for Shiro–but this voice, too, is sad. And what kind of Shiro does his subconscious dream up that asks him to stop fighting? Stop being ready to bleed?
(Somewhere along the way when it stopped being about the fight, and more about the end, he will think, looking back on this).
He doesn’t dare hope that he is actually hearing Zangetsu’s voices. He doesn’t ask for them to stop either.
He’s desperate enough to hold onto anything.
It goes like this:
Ichigo does not know how to love in any way except fiercely, quickly, and unrelentingly. Steady in the face of all obstacles—even against power. Against time, even against his own wholeness of self.
It is more a question of, then, which one breaks Ichigo over its knee, snapping his spine clean in half and cleaving what’s left of him through:
His love, or the people he loved—loves—loved.
(This will become another holding ground for cliché phrases and why, perhaps, they grow so common in modern day lexicon.
Someone will say something about betrayal and where it comes from.
The worst part will be knowing that most of those responsible do not understand it as betrayal.)
Ichigo was built to weather storms. To be the storm. To face the impossible, only to become it. No one teaches him how to hold himself together when the fighting is done.
No one reteaches him gentleness. No one helps to shoulder his weight.
No tells him how to put down a sword—it is taken from him, and he is expected to fit into new confines; the shell of a body he does not know how to welcome home; the sound of a mind that has forgotten how to echo alone.
What they do not talk about in the aftermath of a battle is the quiet. The noise only comes back in your nightmares. For Ichigo, the silence follows him even into the dark. It is not the shadow he wishes for.
Not the one he dreams of most. (HE IS MISSING SO MUCH OF HIMSELF. SOMETHING IS SCREAMING. IT MIGHT BE HIM. ICHIGOICHIGOICHIGO CANYOUHEARME? ARE YOU OUT THERE? AREYOULISTENING?)
Silence, for him, is only the absence of life.
With nowhere to lean, no home to return to, no world left on his shoulders:
Atlas…kneels.
(And the ground seems to rush up to meet him).
“Ichigo has the chance to live a normal life now! Leave my son alone, and do something good for him for once. Show that you’re grateful,” Isshin declares to everyone—each one of Ichigo’s connections.
“Are you sure?” Urahara Kisuke asks, “You are ripping away his support network.”
“Haven’t you done enough? Can’t you do this one thing for Ichigo?”
Urahara backs down remarkably quickly, filled with his own brand of guilt that blinds him to how bad of an idea this is.
Ichigo is almost embarrassed with his own tenacity. How hard he tries to reconnect with Orihime, Ishida, and Chad.
Maybe it is in his nature to believe in their steadiness, and maybe the proof is in his memories. They step away from him carefully, achingly, almost regretfully.
He tries again, and then Orihime says, “I’m sorry, we have to go.” They leave as a unit.
It happens at school, and he learns to stop trying, bewildered and confused.
He approaches, at school and then only after. He tries individually, in pairs, as a group. They step away reluctantly each time, and he pretends that he isn’t scraped open by this rejection.
I am tired, he decides one day about five weeks in. He gives up, and tries not to feel anything at all when the group looks a bit relieved that he has stop doggedly pursuing them.
He just never imagined that it would end like this. War tends to take all that you expect and twenty times that, and then more again.
Balance is rarely gentle, rarely kind. But it is honest.
Ichigo does not know balance, swinging between two ends of a scale, too strong, too other and too weak, not whole enough. A body that is not a body; just emptied.
This time, there is no part of himself he can give up to fix what is broken. His own perception of martyrdom and self-sacrifice is not a conversation for today, as much as he is self-aware of a problem.
He does not know how to be anything except someone else’s solution, or at least flexible enough to fit into the expectations of a solution.
It’s hard to “find yourself” when you have lost purpose, power, faith, and presence. Presence of your friends, your family, yourself—your own surety of self. Sometimes, Ichigo doesn’t feel like he’s around at all.
Time tap, tap, taps away around him, and Ichigo finds himself wondering if he’ll wake up in Seireitei when he dies.
Ichigo, afterwards, finds himself searching up, “How to kill a shinigami?”
It’s only a joke. But Ichigo wonders about what it means to be a little death. A grim reaper or a death god or a spirit. But nonetheless, not a God of Death. If it means you’ve touched death instead of becoming it, Ichigo longs for an “other side.” For something else than Seireitei.
It’s almost a relief to know that death could be something else. If living like one-third of a whole might grant him peace.
The shining numbers on his digital clock flip again.
He did not know he could feel like too much, when he is barely one-third of himself. He feels like he is asking for too much, when he can’t bear to be anything except “around”—on the days that living only comes sometimes, and he cannot meet even the eyes of his own sisters—asking to be held is too much. It is too much to be something other than a shield or a sword.
There might be some kind of neediness or desperation in him, when he is left alone by someone he thought would look after him.
He wants to be less, when he meets the eyes of someone else who expects to see the version of Ichigo that can balance realms on his shoulders. They are disappointed that he isn’t that.
He is disappointed too.
(And mostly wonders if he would like to be even less than what is he now.
If he would rather be nothing at all.
If his namesake is lost, when he thinks this.)
Tenderness is learnt. Shiro thinks, that one time, he was on his way to learning.
That Ichigo, gruff and still so sentimental, was giving him new ways to shape expression.
Shiro is a raw, uncut imitation of a person. A hollow does not know love. The closest thing he was born knowing how to do is consume.
At least, you keep some part of them close.
Shiro figures out love only after grief; grief is the evidence that you loved, once.
When he is torn from Ichigo, there is some wild part of him that insists, See. You should have consumed him at the start, when he was weak. Before his training. He would be safe with you then. He would be held close and tucked close to your heart. He would be a part of you. They would never have been able to take you from him. You should have eaten him when you could have had him.
He has this inkling, that if he had told Ichigo, before the end—Ichigo would have scowled and shouldered at him, and they would have fought under their skyscrapers, but Ichigo would have smiled, the wild one that is just for Shiro, and looked like freedom, and Shiro would’ve breathed that freedom through his bones too.
They would be together without Shiro ever having eaten, and Shiro would feel satiated without spilling blood, and it would be sunny inside, the joy that Ichigo hides in his gums sometimes when he sheathes his teeth; when he’s scared he’ll make someone afraid from being too other, too much. The kind of wild joy he only shares with his zanpakuto.
The parts of him that only Shiro and Ossan were privy too.
And then Ichigo would push at him, but not really mean it, and they would gripe with each other, and not really mean it, and Shiro would feel whole, in the way that other hollows never got to. He would not be hungry.
(And he’s always known that’s some kind of love.)
Watching unseen, he looks at this Ichigo, post-Final Getsuga Tensho. Post-ending. This is an After. This is his grief, embodied.
This Ichigo, he thinks, would not push me. This Ichigo would welcome my teeth. This Ichigo would lie down, to be consumed, and he might call it safe too. He might even thank me after.
This Ichigo, he thinks, is one I would need to learn tenderness for.
This Ichigo is one I would need to hide away. To don the role of protector for.
He doesn’t want to say it, but it is true: Ichigo is fragile. Ichigo, most days, does not really want to be alive at all.
Worst of all, Ichigo does not know that they are still there. That they are far, unreachable as it is, but longing for him too.
He doesn’t know that he’s still wanted.
(So Ichigo’s soul just bleeds…and bleeds…and bleeds.)
For all that Ichigo was wielded like a gun, he wonders if Seiretei would have known what to do with a bullet hole. Would have known what to do with the impact in the aftermath.
Existence seems to rend Ichigo apart. He does not think he fits well in his body. In fact, he’s starting to think he was never really meant to live after the Final Getsuga Tensho–maybe it would have been better, to die thinking he was loved.
Certainly, it would have been easier.
He’s acutely aware that the stiffness in his joints is real—the inflammation of his lymph nodes abnormal, the irregular heartbeat, the constant cold, the heaviness of his chest.
It is all real. It hurts. But yet–
He does not feel real.
He does not want to tell anyone.
This sickness, then, is his.
The failure of his lungs is not a failure at all; it is peace so loud that the listening means you stop breathing altogether.
Horribly, terribly, achingly so, Ichigo thinks that this is one thing of his he’ll keep for himself.
Just this one thing.
(At night, in his dreams, a voice says, “You’re being stupid, King,” but it almost sounds like a wail and makes Ichigo want to cry too. “Wait for us,” another voice says. He hears a whispered conversation and there is a hand on his shoulder and then there is nothing at all.)
Karin does not know how to deal with a ghost of a brother, and Ichigo is not cruel enough to believe that she should know.
She is still young, and fierce, and brave. She thinks that if she becomes stronger she can fix this, and if she looks away longer he’ll just be better.
He hugs her tighter in the mornings and doesn’t fight when she squirms out of them.
It’s why he’s not surprised as his eyes trace her sneaking to the Shoten, as she opens the door and Geta-boshi welcomes her.
Experimentally, he walks up to the door after she goes in. He knows it won’t open for him. He knocks, and no one answers.
He knocks again.
He can’t help himself as he presses his forehead against the door, something inside of him, lonely and screaming and abandoned. For just a moment, he lets himself ache and pity himself, how he ended up like this, bent over and begging internally for someone to let him in.
The wetness in his eyes doesn’t spill over. He leaves behind a bit of himself at that door when he walks away.
It is not the desire to get better that drives Ichigo to Ishida Ryuuken’s door. It is the desire to have a destination—a timeline to work towards. The time will pass anyways.
Hollow-eyed and all too lanky, Ichigo is distantly aware that he looks the way he feels: empty and sore and simultaneously, too much.
Ishida-sensei pulls open the door, and the indifference on his face shifts to something Ichigo might call grief, but mostly, Ichigo cannot be bothered to decipher. “Ishida-sensei. I am experiencing…side effects.”
Tellingly, there is no shock on his face. Maybe they have been watching him, maybe he guessed, maybe, maybe, maybe.
Ichigo is too tired to keep asking questions. He wants to sleep—but this time will pass anyways, and when Ishida-sensei lets him in, he makes no comment on the echoing silence, the too sharp expression, and the note of uncertainty in the man’s posture.
There is a longing for something more than this, this half-life, being an element already halfway through radioactive decay, only fifty-percent of what you should be.
Not even that, these days. Maybe, Ichigo intends to say that he is more than two half-lives in, exponential decay some scientist coins as natural.
(There is an ache here: not my scientist. Not the one who was mentor-friend-something-something-somethi— and then nothing but silence. Nothing but the space you couldn’t fill and sound you couldn’t help but miss. Are you a scream before an ache? A surface wound before a puncturing?)
Still around when he should have been gone a long time ago.
Ichigo blinks as a light shines in eyes.
“A bit of a delay in the pupillary reflex,” Ishida-sensei comments, as if it’s an icebreaker.
Ichigo hums faintly. “That’s the least of my problems,” he smiles wanly.
The doctor checks his lagging reflexes and sluggish responses, and Ichigo knows that the picture he is beginning to paint is something far more complex than the flu or a cold.
He is sick. This is a fact. Sick enough to feel it heavy through every inch of his body, and over a month in to know that it doesn’t get better. This new reality of his hurts too, just the same as his wasting soul.
The initial check up finishes, and Ichigo only gives himself a moment. Slowly, he starts to list out his symptoms. He knows how bad it’s gotten, how he is also pushing himself to maintain some sense of normal, even as each waking step feels heavier.
Everything is duller, lower, more numb.
“My joints hurt. My lungs hurt, and I’m constantly short of breath. I am tired and fatigued, constantly. The inflammation…”
Ishida-sensei reveals nothing, mouth straight and serious as he carefully writes down what Ichigo says.
“My capacity for everything is lower. To feel, to hurt, to be, to desire, to walk, to move,” Ichigo pauses to take a breath, “To live. I feel like…I am living smaller.”
(I FEEL LIKE I AM DYING. I AM ENDING. I DON’T KNOW IF I WOULD WANT ANYTHING ELSE, PLEASE TELL ME WE DO NOT DIE ALONE. TELL ME IT STOPS WHEN I END.
I AM HUNGRY FOR SOMETHING OTHER THAN THIS HALF-LIFE.)
Ishida-sensei spends hours on tests. At some point, Ichigo watches as the steady hands repeat tests, as if the second time around would change their results. The hands do not shake, but there is urgency, and Ichigo has never known him well enough to say it will be okay.
Doesn’t know why he would be anything except collateral damage.
They start with a pulmonary function test because Ichigo confesses to his shallow, quick breathes and the tint to his lips leans blue. Ishida-sensei asks him to breathe into the spirometer, testing his lungs’ capacity to absorb oxygen. In vain, he attempts to disguise that the test leaves him so lightheaded that spots dot his vision. He doesn’t even need to do an exercise test to understand that something is already wrong.
Ishida-sensei must feel the same, because he checks Ichigo’s blood oxygen as if he could find a different result with a different test. “Your pulse ox is below normal.”
The blink comes slowly. “Okay,” Ichigo says. He has felt his lungs deteriorating, so there is no surprise.
“Based on the urine test, your glomerular filtration rate indicates mild kidney damage.”
“So my kidneys aren’t cleaning my blood fast enough.” Huh, Ichigo thinks. I hadn’t even noticed.
“In short, yes. And your blood has elevated levels of ALT and AST.”
“So what does that mean?”
“You’re showing signs of liver damage too.”
“I see,” Ichigo says, sighing. He wants to pretend that he is surprised, but maybe the only thing surprising is how quickly it's happening. He’d always imagine having years, but the timeline is shaping up quickly to be a couple of months. He begins to put on his sweater, going to leave with a much clearer understanding of how his body is beginning to fail.
“Ichigo, you are aware that you cannot simply push through this? Your lungs are showing symptoms that they might be on their way to failure, and the implications of kidney and liver damage might indicate that other parts of the body are starting to follow. You are in the middle of organ failure of multiple of your vital organs.”
Sighing again, Ichigo pauses and leans against the wall. “And what would you have me do about it? What treatment would you give me?”
Ichigo meets Ishida-sensei’s gaze unflinchingly, patient even though they both know that there is no physical treatment that works for a hemorrhaging soul. For a brutal removal of that much of yourself.
“I would ask that you go to the shopkeeper. I don’t know how to fix a soul wound, but I would if you did not die.”
The laugh that rips out of Ichigo shears his vocal chords, rough and abrasive, “You think I haven’t tried?”
Ishida-sensei sets down his pen with force. Abruptly, he says, “I’m sorry, Ichigo. I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”
Instead of angering Ichigo, he goes quiet. There is no light in his eyes to go out. He just hums in acknowledgement, like acceptance is all that is left.
“I knew your mother. And your father told me not to tell you. I believe he may be responsible for why everyone else is not speaking to you either, after you gave up your powers.”
Ichigo feels the ground drop from underneath him. He wants his mom. He wants to be in her arms and kissed on the forehead and held like he deserved softness and gentleness and was made of something precious, not powerful.
None of that shows in his face. His hands go limp in shock, and the expression on his face freezes and fall into blankness. “I see,” he says. “How do you know my mother?”
Ishida-sensei pauses. “She was a Quincy.”
Ichigo’s world does not shatter, built it tilts left. He sits and stays for stories of his mother, and wonders if he ever would have found out, had he not been on the brink of dying. If this was an apology or pity.
He is not sure if there is enough left of him to be angry.
Ichigo thinks often of his mother. He slips up, talking to Yuzu.
“Do you think Mom likes pomelo still?”
She looks at him, perplexed. Ichigo brushes over the fact that he talks about her in present tense, and sometimes in future tense, like he is going to meet her. Like she is around the corner.
“I don’t really remember her well, nii-san. But I think she did.”
Ichigo is faded, like newsprint no one reads anymore. Like a sun-blasted photo and a dusty painting. There is some kind of violence there: a neutron in a particle collider. On the cusp of impact.
Something close to natural order until you forced him to be more.
(An unstable isotope, maybe.)
He wonders if this bitter bone science language is a coping mechanism. A reclaiming or some desperate attempt to understand before it all ends.
Some pathetic attempt to try to make things make sense when nothing seems to anymore, to read himself into a world where going to school matters. Where words aren’t another thing lost in translation.
(Where Kisuke still pretends to care. Where there is a happy ending.
Or at least, closure.)
He hums and gets up from the table to give Yuzu a hug. He lingers uncharacteristically, and Yuzu turns into the hug, tightening her grip, as she is distracted from cooking.
Her instincts may not be as sharp as either of her siblings, but they are telling her that something is wrong. Yuzu looks up at her brother as he goes to step away, and he is content. Made of some kind of restless peace that leaves him half out his own body.
A sinking feeling starts in her chest. “You worry too much,” he laughs softly.
Yuzu thinks that they have made some awful mistakes, and has this inkling that she might regret this distance most of all. That she could not give him more than a meal and being around sometimes. That she didn’t know how to support him.
(If to be known is to be loved, what happens afterwards? To be known and then some kind of aftermath where you confess that that is not enough.
That you needed to be held too.
That space was not a gift after you got used to being someone’s someone.)
Just because Ichigo knows that his dad is the one that is most responsible, doesn’t fix how he feels about anyone else.
Doesn’t fix these last few months spent alone, wasting and deteriorating.
He can’t help but blame everyone for his unraveling. Digging through the last parts of him, he can’t find forgiveness. Not when he’s mostly made of liminal space, these days.
It doesn’t change that he is wounded by loneliness and hurt.
There is the quiet, and the numbness, and just himhimhim.
(This is one way we learned to turn a boy into a bomb.)