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*
Later, once the Ryoka have left and they begin to rebuild the frayed ties of their community, most Shinigami who were there will say Rukia barely left Byukuya-san’s side as he recuperated. It is a level of loyalty equal to the actual family members who find each other by the luck of the draw in the afterlife; much less is expected from a poor adopted relation. It lifts the admiration for her in the community, lifts her past her supposed crimes and back into a state of respect once more; if anything, it does more for her than the revelation of Aizen’s treachery.
Of course, they don’t know what she knows now, that the wife of her adopted brother had been her elder sister. She still hasn’t processed it completely. She keeps it in a separate compartment in her mind, only turning over it when she is alone, fingers plucking at the wound over her heart.
So they will say she stayed at Byukuya’s side nearly non-stop. They will be correct, most of the time.
There is one night that is not accounted for.
*
“Kuchiki-san.”
Rukia sits at the window of Byukuya’s recovery room, staring out across the sky. It is purple with dusk. In the distance, she can see the remains of the execution stand, where she had hung just days ago. She keeps her hands latched in her lap, fingers locked together. She spent so long in this same position, staring at the cracks of light through the bars of her cell or up towards the high window, with her fingers intertwined. She wonders if she has anything else left in her, still.
Behind her, Nanao clears her throat. “Kuchiki-san.”
It takes a moment, but Rukia turns her face to the other woman. In the shadows Nanao looks younger than usual, her hair pulled back at the nape of her neck; perhaps they all seem young to her now, after staring into the face of oblivion. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” she says quietly. She parses her words carefully. She cannot escape the sensation that the next one could be her last. “Am I needed?”
Face still as stone, Nanao bows her head just the slightest. “Captain Kyoraku wished you to know that the Ryoka has awakened.”
It has been so long since she has felt the sensation of a flush on her throat. Yet the warmth curls and stretches towards the line of her jaw and her cheeks. She is struck by a memory, of a gigai that colored easily around Ichigo, with the feel of his hand on her skin. That life seems so beyond her, even now.
Rukia bows her head for a moment, to hide the flush. But Nanao is not a lieutenant for nothing, she knows. “Do his companions know?” she asks after a moment. There is an ache for the camaraderie she felt before with Orihime, and Chad, even Ishida—but there is no room for that here, in this place.
“They have been with him all afternoon, but have now retired to their own rooms. He is alone,” Nanoa says, just a hint of curiosity in her voice.
“I see,” Rukia murmurs, glancing at Byakuya. He sleeps, breathing slow and steady. He will heal quickly, and well enough. Of course, Ichigo would awaken before one of the strongest captains in Soul Society; he’s just that stubborn. “Please thank Captain Kyoraku for me, Ise-san.”
There is a strange softness in Nanao’s gaze that Rukia has never seen before. It doesn’t touch the rest of her placid face, but Rukia sees it. It burns a hole right through her. What has she become, if they look at her with such eyes?
“Good night,” Nanao says quietly, bowing at the waist before slipping from the room. She slides the door shut with a soft click.
Rukia tightens her fingers in her lap and looks back out to the sky, to the quieting compounds of Soul Society. She knows even now, with healing and apologies and the reclamation of her former self still ahead of her, that she will stay here. Ichigo will leave; she knows this as well.
It takes her just another moment to slide on her shoes and slip out of the quiet room.
*
She tries to be as quiet as possible as she slides open his door. It doesn’t matter whatsoever.
“I think visiting hours are over,” Ichigo drawls from his bed. He sits up, his legs swung over the edge.
Rukia slides the door shut behind her with a loud clatter, just to spite him. “This isn’t a hospital, Ichigo,” she says flatly.
He grins faintly, and it is so familiar that her knees nearly shake with it. In the dusky light he is pale and bare-chested except for the bandages that crisscross his torso. More scars to carry home to the human body he will live out the rest of his days in, she thinks. Her fingers fall to her sternum, rubbing the scrap of bandage there under her robes.
“I was wondering when you’d get over here. How’s brother dearest?” he asks, feet planted flat on the cool wooden floor. “Awake yet?”
“He is doing well. And no, he’s not,” she says, edging further into the room.
Ichigo rises, straight and tall and unwavering in the purple-orange light. He is so much more serious around the mouth and eyes now than she remembers from school and even his mother’s grave. She has done this, she thinks. Her mouth curls sadly.
“So I beat him in that too, then,” he says with a faint smirk. “Nice.”
“It wasn’t a contest,” she says sharply.
He grins. “No, it wasn’t. Because I won.”
“You’re such an idiot,” she retorts, and it feels so right to fight with him again, without the specter of death hanging over them.
“An idiot who kept you alive,” he says, and the lightness in the air is washed away.
She presses her joined hands into her middle, trying to keep what’s left of her soul from flying out to him. Her chest throbs. The flush creeps up her throat. “I didn’t ask you to come,” she says at last. “I told you not to.”
He takes a few steps towards her with his long stride; he is too close very suddenly, and it leaves her a little dizzy. “Since when do I do what I’m told?”
Swallowing, she glares up at him. “I was trying to save you.”
“I didn’t need it,” he says shortly.
“If Renji and Byukuya had wanted to kill you, they could have,” she snaps back.
His hands, warm and broad, settle firmly on her shoulders. She can feel the heat like a shock through her robes. “So little faith in me, Rukia.”
“I will kill you myself,” she mutters.
He bows his head nearer to hers, the angles of his face softened in the shadowy dusk. His fingers curl into the lean muscle of her arms and shoulders. She wants his bare skin to hers, an irrational emotional ache in her middle. “How could you not think I wouldn’t fucking come for you?” he asks, voice dropping low in his throat.
A hard burn rises behind her eyes. Rukia curls her fingers hard together, her nails biting into her palms. “It wasn’t like that, Ichigo,” she says at last. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
This is the conversation they have been circling between aborted rescue attempts and battles of blades and days and night of healing in opposite ends of the compound. She wants to have it, to have the closure; she can move past him and his world and come back to the Rukia she used to be once more. What she fears is that the Rukia from before this, before him, doesn’t exist; and so she doesn’t want the words to tumble out between them. She wants to keep them in this purgatorial space, with the hole in her heart and the scars across his body the only reminders of the other.
“So what was it?” he asks, voice rough.
She wets her lips and meets his eyes. “They were going to kill you. I didn’t want that to happen,” she says at last, the words tripping from her throat.
“Self-sacrifice isn’t the best way to keep friends,” he says sharply.
“You don’t get to be angry with me!” she exclaims, glaring at him.
Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he spreads his arms wide in front of him, staring her down. “I’m not angry!”
She tangles her fingers in the folds of her robes at her stomach. “If anything, I should be angry with you! I was ready to die, and you—you—“
“You took it away from me, Rukia,” he cuts in, his knuckles white. In the shadowy room he is a broad swipe of pale skin and muscle. “Did you think I would just forget everything?”
A faint queasiness settles low in her middle. “I – I don’t know. I wanted you to live,” she says quietly.
He laughs, the sound low and thick and without amusement. “And you’re mad at me for wanting the same damn thing for you? You’re crazy, did you know that?”
She inhales deeply, trying to settle the color rising to her face. “So what now, Ichigo? What’s your plan now?”
Ichigo rubs a hand through his hair, the ends standing up wildly. “Well. I think this is where you say thank you,” he says with a brief grin.
Snorting, she touches her hands to her sternum, fingers curling near the wound there. “Let’s pretend that happens. Then what?” she asks.
The lines of his face settle into something more serious, more thoughtful. Slowly, he reaches out and curls his hand over her upper arm, a gentle hold. “Then I say I’m glad you’re all right,” he says quietly.
A lump forms at the base of her throat. She tilts her face up towards his. In isolation, she had forgotten how tall he really was. “And then?”
“Then you say thank you again and again. You pretty much say thank you once a day for the rest of your life,” he drawls.
The implication of his seeing her every day past the uncertainty of the next few days settles heavily on her shoulders. There’s a certainty deep in her gut, that she cannot go back to the physical world, not yet. But Ichigo – he doesn’t know that. She still doesn’t know how to tell him. It’s on the tip of her tongue to press it out now, but there’s a raw tenderness between them that has yet to settle.
It’s also too hard to say, with him so close.
“Rukia?” he asks after a moment, his voice falling low in her ear.
“Did you do this so I would come back?” she asks after a moment.
His face, his mouth, he is so close to her, she nearly can’t breathe. “No. I did this so you would live,” he grits out through his teeth, jaw set tensely against his skin.
She shuts her eyes against the tears there, the breath leaving her in a silent swoop of an exhale.
His mouth is on hers before she can say another word, warm and insistent and fierce. Broad hands settle at her waist and pull her in. She is engulfed by him as he bends over her, his mouth parting against hers. She opens to him and shuts her eyes, skin flushing vivid warmth across her throat and cheeks. Her fingers, her fingers at last unfurl and reach out for him. She thinks perhaps she’s been waiting for him to be close enough to do so since she knew of his arrival in Soul Society.
“You’re still hurt,” she murmurs as her teeth graze his bottom lip and his hands span her hipbones.
Pulling her back towards his pallet with insistent hands, he sits back and pulls hers down with him. Her knees fall to either side of his hips, the folds of her robes riding up and catching at her ankles. “Nope. All better,” he says with a sharp grin at her mouth.
Her fingers catch at the linen bandages across his chest, feeling for the hard rise of old and new scars on his skin. She feels tangled up and twisted inside and out, her chest burning as his mouth bites at hers. “This is my fault,” she says as her hands trace the lines and jagged edges of his still-healing body.
He huffs sharply against her skin, his hands coming up to frame her face. His thumbs catch at the corners of her mouth, his long fingers twining into her hair. “Since when are you so willing to take responsibility for me fucking shit up?”
Shutting her eyes for a moment, she has to shake her head. “You’re still the same eloquent Ichigo,” she mutters.
“Yeah, and I’m serious. You tried your best to stop me, and it didn’t work. So this shit, right here? All me,” he says with such fierceness that she has to open her eyes. Tension ripples from his skin against hers.
“You’re an idiot,” she says at last, her fingertips lifting to the sharp thin lines of his face.
One of his hands drags down the line of her throat to her collarbones, the gaping v of her robes. His fingers graze at the linen bandage over her sternum. “I don’t even know what that guy did to you,” he mutters, leaning his brow against hers. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it.”
“It wasn’t your job to stop it,” she says, smoothing her fingertips to the line of his jaw, the soft skin of his throat.
Rolling his eyes, he leans in and presses his mouth to hers, his teeth catching at her bottom lip. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel better, jerk,” she mutters against his mouth. “I’m telling you the facts.”
“Could you try to make me feel better?”
“That’s not what we do,” she murmurs.
His lips quirk against hers; his hollow sort of laugh reverberates against her skin. “You’re right about that,” he says before his mouth opens on hers, his tongue warm at the seam of her lips.
She leans in, throwing her weight towards him. He lays back with a soft groan. She shifts at his hips and leans over him, pressing the heels of her hands to the thin mattress at either side of his head. Instinct drives the press of her hips to his, the curl of her tongue against his. Her hair crests against her cheeks, his hands tucking into the open folds of her robes. His fingers are warm against her bare skin. She remembers her gigai, how cold she always felt inside that body; he was the only one to warm her through. A flush curls across the expanse of her bare skin.
He murmurs her name against her mouth and she pulls back just for a moment, a soft wet sound marking the parting of their lips. She opens her eyes and finds him watching her, his skin flushed and his hair a spiky mess, bright against the pale white pillow.
“What?” she says, a little impatiently. This is the least unsettled she’s felt in a month. She’s alive when she thought she wouldn’t be, and he’s alive after trying his hardest to get killed by every single Shinigami in Soul Society, and the whole intertwining of their lives have come down to hands on skin and mouths on mouths. It’s distinctly human, in a way Rukia never thought she would experience again.
He strokes a hand through her hair, tucking the loose thick strands behind her ear. “This feels like goodbye, a little bit,” he says, voice hoarse.
A hard burn settles behind her eyes. Swallowing hard, she leans over and kisses him again, swallowing his words as he says her name over and over. Her fingers pluck at his chest and his bandages as he slides his hands across her shoulders, peeling her robes down her arms. The evening air is cool on her bare skin.
“Rukia,” he murmurs, his fingers tripping and sliding across the curve of her waist. His touch stutters as his hands fall to her thighs. She looks at him, as her hands settle at his chest, and sees something of the young boy she’d met what feels like ages ago.
“Is it your chest?” she murmurs, breathing stuttering in her chest.
His fingers curl into the cool flesh of her thighs, creeping upwards. “I’m fine,” he says, his teeth digging into his bottom lip. “I’m just fine,” he repeats, rising up to kiss her again.
He’s right about one thing, she thinks as she bites at his mouth with a soft moan, his fingers pressing between her thighs. It is a goodbye.
*
Rukia tries to slip out in the darkness of midnight. But Ichigo is always a light sleeper, no matter which world he is in.
His fingers catch at her wrist as she stands from the bed, her robes belted snugly at her waist. “You don’t get to sneak out in the dark again,” he murmurs thickly. He lays on his back, gaze eerie in the darkness.
She flushes, biting her lip. The skin at her throat and collarbones still burns from the marks of his mouth. “I wasn’t sneaking out.”
“Yes, you were.”
“No, I wasn’t,” she retorts.
Ichigo sits up, rubbing at his bandaged chest with his free hand. Nothing had come apart, but she had dug in rather sharply as he touched her; she’s not surprised if there’s some tenderness there. “Not everything has to be a battle with me,” he says, voice low and quiet.
She turns her wrist in his grasp, sliding her hand out. Their fingers graze and clutch at each other as she pulls free. It sends a shiver through her skin. “That’s rich coming from you.”
He smirks, eyes raking over her. “Going back to your sisterly vigil?”
Glaring at him, she stands with her fingers twined together in front of her. “Yes.”
“Will you visit the outsider ward again?” he teases. But she can feel the weight of the real question between his words, in the breath and space and heaviness in his gaze. Will I see you again, before I leave? Will you come back with me?
She presses her hands to her stomach, a hard lump settling in her throat. “You’ll see me, Ichigo,” she says softly before she turns and slips out of the room, sliding the door shut silently behind her.
It takes no time at all to return to Byukuya’s room. The compound is silent and easy to navigate even in the pitch black darkness. She checks to make sure Byukuya is stable and sleeping before she sits at her usual window. Her fingers settle open and waiting in her lap, palms up as she stares across the sky. There’s still a lingering flush at her throat.
*